Free The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers by Kevin D. Mitnick, William L. Simon Page A

militant he claimed to be, or just some faker pulling the chains of the teenagers? Or maybe an FBI operation to probe how far the young hackers were willing to go? At one time or another, each of the hackers who had dealings with Khalid were suspicious that he wasn't really a militant; the idea of providing information to a foreign agent seems to have bothered them a good deal less than the idea the guy might be duping them. Comrade said that he "wondered for the longest time what [Khalid] was. I didn't know if he was a Fed or if he was for real. Talking to ne0h and talking to him, I decided he was pretty legit. But I never took money from him -- that was a barrier I didn't want to cross." (Earlier in the conversation, when he had first mentioned the Chapter 2 When Terrorists Come Calling 33

    offer of $10,000 from Khalid, he had sounded impressed by the sum. Would he really have declined the money if his efforts had been successful and Khalid had actually paid up? Perhaps even Comrade himself doesn't really know the answer to that one.)

    ne0h says that Khalid "sounded absolutely professional" but admits to having had doubts along the way about whether he was really a militant. "The whole time I was talking to him, I thought he was full of shit. But after researching with friends who he's contacted and given other infor- mation to, we actually think he really was who he said he was.

    Another hacker, Savec0re, encountered someone on IRC who said that he had an uncle in the FBI who could arrange immunity for an entire hacker group called Milw0rm. "I thought that this would send a message to the FBI that we weren't hostile," Savec0re told journalist McKay in an email interview. "So I gave him my phone number. The next day I got a call from the so-called FBI agent, but he had an amazingly strong Pakistani accent."

    "He said his name was Michael Gordon and that he was with the FBI in Washington, DC," Savec0re told the journalist. "I realized then that it had been Ibrahim all along." While some people were wondering if the sup- posed terrorist might be an FBI sting, Savec0re was reaching the opposite conclusion: that the guy claiming to be an FBI agent was really the same terrorist, trying to see if the boys were willing to blow the whistle on him.

    The notion that this might have been an FBI operation doesn't seem to stand up. If the federal government wanted to find out what these kids were capable of and willing to do, money would have been flowing. When the FBI thinks a situation is serious enough to run a sting, they put money behind the effort. Promising $1,000 to ne0h and then not pay- ing it wouldn't make any sense.

    Apparently only one hacker actually saw any money from Khalid: Chameleon. "I went to my post-office box one morning, and there was a check for a thousand dollars with a number to call in Boston," Chameleon was quoted as saying in another Wired News story (November 4, 1998). Khalid understood he had maps of government computer networks; the check was payment for the maps. Chameleon cashed the check. Two weeks later he was raided by the FBI and interro- gated about the payment, raising the interesting question of how the government knew about the thousand dollars. This was before 9/11, when the FBI was focused on domestic crime and paying scant attention to the terrorist threat. Chameleon admitted taking the money but insisted to the Wired News journalist that he had not provided any gov- ernment network maps. 34 The Art of Intrusion

    Though he had confessed to accepting money from a foreign terrorist, which could have brought a charge of espionage and the possibility of a very long sentence, no charges were ever filed -- deepening the mystery. Perhaps the government just wanted word to spread in the hacker com- munity that doing business with foreign agents could be risky. Perhaps the check wasn't from Khalid after all, but from the FBI.

    Few people know Chameleon's true identity, and he very much wants to