Hack (3 page)

3

“Sit down,” ordered the burly guard.

I pulled the gray metal chair from under the table, which was somewhat awkward because of the handcuffs, and sat down, facing two men I had never seen before. They looked like FBI agents. After a while, you get to know the business-casual clothes, and the no-nonsense attitude. It had been three months since the FBI’s previous visit. A woman from the forensics division had come to ask for my help in creating a profile of the computer criminal’s mind. I couldn’t help her, but I had gotten a good idea of the profile of law enforcement psychologists.

Neither of these men looked like shrinks, so I figured that they were from the still-young Cyber Crime Division.

“Guard, those aren’t necessary,” said the first man. The guard unlocked and removed the restraints, and then quietly left the room, leaving me alone with the feds.

“Hello, Karl,” said the first man, in a surprisingly pleasant voice. He might have been greeting Karl, the cheerful boy next door over the garden fence. “I’m Special Agent Philips, and this is Special Agent Garman. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Philips was in his mid-thirties, and had a well-fed look. Despite being a bit heavier than the Surgeon General would recommend, Philips was solidly built and looked like the compulsory FBI fitness test wouldn’t give him any grief. Garman was cut from the same mold, except that he was younger, leaner, and darker, and had a mustache that was probably intended to detract from his receding hairline.

“Hi,” I replied.

“How are you?”

“Fine, thanks,” I said politely. Shortly after my arrest, I had learned the hard way that when the police are being polite to you, they expect you to return the courtesy. In fact, they insist.

Philips nodded, and said, “Good.” He wasn’t smiling, but he seemed optimistic about something.

“So, I guess this is your last week inside. Come Monday, you’ll be on supervised release?”

“Yes.”

“Have you got anything lined up?”

“What do you mean?”

“I guess you’ll need a job to pay the rent.”

“My parole officer has found me a position.”

“That’s good. What are you going to be doing, if you don’t mind me asking?”

I didn’t mind him asking, though the information would have been in my file, which he had probably already read.

“Making pizza.” That was the only job I’d been offered. Making money by writing a book about my ‘exploits’ had occurred to me, but was impossible, since I had been forced to bargain away everything I had just to get out of jail. That included publishing privileges. Anyway, if any publishers had the same idea, they hadn’t mentioned it to me. Being called a terrorist usually has a bad effect on your public appeal.

“I see,” Philips said.

After telling him that the guy who had spent months making his department look bad was going to be making pizzas, I had expected a grin from Philips. But his expression hadn’t changed.

4

“Are you looking forward to starting?” he asked, seriously.

“Yes, I am, now that I’ve got a second chance. I’m going to make something of this opportunity. My hacking days are behind me. I just want to settle down, and stay out of trouble.”

Both men looked at each other, and Philips’s smile became real at last.

Some of his optimism was apparently replaced by the cynical worldliness I had become more familiar with in police officers.

“You can drop the spiel, Karl,” he said. “We’re not with the parole board. You don’t have to convince us of anything. We’re from the Cyber Crime Division. We’ve come to offer you a job.”

“A job?” I echoed. It is not every day that the FBI recruits from the Cedar Creek Corrections Center, which is the Washington State prison in Littlerock.

“Yes, something in your line of work.”

“Pizza?”

“Computers.”

“For the FBI?”

“Yes.”

“You want me to work as a . . . consultant?”

“Right now, we could use your skills.”

I stared at Philips.

After a minute, he said, “What do you think?”

“Do you have a dental plan?” I asked.

Garman frowned, clearly annoyed. But Philips just smiled at the smart-mouth kid who was being a little rude to Mr. Philips.

“No. What we have is a chance for you to wipe some of those black marks off your record, by putting your computer skills and your . . .” he paused, searching for the correct phrase, “social engineering talents to good use.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You see, since your little stunt at the Pentagon six months ago, we’ve been troubled by a series of similar computer break-ins. Young kids, even younger than you, have been targeting sensitive installations.”

“You are a role model to terrorists,” added Garman, finding his voice at last.

There was more than a hint of genuine anger in it. Philips gave him a look, as if to restrain him.

“We haven’t had any major breaches of security,” continued Philips, “but it’s only a matter of time.”

I sat up a little more, and rubbed my forehead, like a guy coming out of a dream in which the most bizarre and unlikely events had unfolded. The FBI offering me a job certainly qualified as bizarre. Philips reached down to a black briefcase on the floor, and pulled out three photographs.

“Our last three arrests have been boys under the age of sixteen.”

He spread on the table photographs of three harmless-looking high school boys. Having been in jail for over six months, I had read and heard nothing about this.

According to one report I read, computer-related crimes cost the government more than fifty billion dollars a year. But I had no idea that people my age were part of it.

High school hackers most often go after trivial targets, just for laughs. I remember a story about some fifteen year old breaking into a well-known take-out food company’s website, and adding Chocodiles and jelly beans to the list of pizza toppings. That was the sort of thing that teens went in for.

5

One of my own crew, Blizzard, claimed to have worked for money, but he never produced any evidence of it. Also, we had all heard that criminal gangs were paying for college students to get educated, in the same way the military sponsored them. But again, that was people at the college level, not high school.

“Although none of these kids has had any major success,” continued Philips,

“we believe it’s only a matter of time before one of them manages to get his hands on serious classified material. You see, unlike you and your group of merry Robin Hoods, looking to score some ego points, these kids are hacking for money—lots of money. You can imagine our alarm when we found a stash of over ten thousand dollars inside one computer.”

You can imagine my alarm, too. I never stole anything.

“What do you think? Are you interested in helping us?”

“It sounds interesting. But I’m sorry I can’t help you. My lawyer has advised against such action. He thinks that I may incriminate myself.”

Philips smiled again. The public defender had been less than computer savvy, and I made an enemy of him by doing my own plea bargaining at the pretrial. At least I had saved my own neck. I had no doubt that Philips had read the negotiation transcripts and knew this.

“The way I heard it, you
were
your own lawyer.”

“As I said, my lawyer has advised me against talking to anybody.”

“At least hear us out?”

I read the time from the upside-down numbers on Garman’s watch—9:47 a.m.

I hadn’t been allowed to have a wristwatch, or any electronic or mechanical gadget, since my arrest. That meant no TV, no radio, no computers, and no telling the time. I forget the official reason for this, but it had to do with me starting World War III, just like in the movies. Anyway, I hoped that I would be back for exercise time, at 10:00

a.m. It was the only time I got out into the fresh air. The other twenty-three and a half hours of the day I spent inside, behind a thick steel door. Without waiting for an answer, Philips produced another photograph.

“This man is Malik,” he said, turning the picture so I could see it.

“We know that he’s one of the main players recruiting and coordinating young hackers out of high schools.”

“A terrorist?” I said.

“Exactly.”

I looked again at the picture. If the man was a killer, it didn’t show. The sharp corners of the table looked more dangerous. He was a nondescript Middle Eastern man in his early forties, who looked a little like Mr. Jarman, a science teacher I once had. Jarman used to liven up his boring classes by sticking too much metallic sodium in a glass of water, and making a good explosion. Rather than terrorizing the class, these mini bombs got a round of applause, and Jarman was considered one of the school’s coolest teachers.

I shrugged. “He looks like a federal informer.”

I had been introduced to federal informers and their role in crime prevention during my arrest. The FBI admitted that this was how they had ‘taken me down.’ I hadn’t got caught because I had been careless, or complacent. On the contrary, I had always been careful. They had found me through Knight, the self-appointed leader of my own hacking crew. The FBI had recruited Knight. I went to jail, while the FBI set Knight up in his own business, as part of their deal. From what little information I had managed to get, I knew that Knight was getting paid to hack into computer networks—in other words, a
white-hat
hacker.

6

“Sadly, he’s not an informant,” continued Philips. “Malik is a charismatic and well-financed fanatic who knows how to connect with lonely young computer-obsessed kids. And that’s where you come in. We want you to get recruited by Malik.”

“Recruited?”

“Yes. We’ll put you in a house with two agents as your parents, and send you to high school. The rest should come naturally.”

The FBI was famous for their ‘sting’ operations. I once read about how they had gone undercover to trap a businessman who was willing to sell firearms to terrorists. They really did that sort of thing for a living.

“Some of the information on military and government networks that you gave up during your plea bargain would be worth not thousands, but millions of dollars to these people. That’s why we want you. We haven’t been able to get anywhere near Malik. Believe me, we’ve tried. But you might be able to do it. And you could still pass for a high schooler.”

There was a minute’s silence, while we eyed one another.

“Your parole officer has already agreed to turn you over to us. He knows the work you’ll be doing. He thinks that you should take this opportunity.”

“It pays more than cooking pizzas,” added Garman.

“I could earn ten times as much as anything you could pay, by working as a security consultant.”

“Not for two years, you can’t,” Garman said, quickly.

“Not legally, anyway,” added Philips.

As well as a no-publishing clause, one other of the no-contest terms of my plea bargain was a twenty-four-month loss of all contact with computers. I wasn’t allowed within one hundred yards of a computer. Never mind that they had them in every shop. Even cell phones come with operating systems you could reprogram, if you didn’t mind straining your eyes looking at the screen.

“What do you think?” Philips said after a minute’s silence.

“You forgot one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s going to take about ten seconds for someone to recognize me. I got my face on the front pages of the newspapers, and on TV. For all I know, they stuck it on milk cartons, too.”

Philips was unperturbed.

“Trust me, we do it all the time,” continued Philips.

He put two photographs on the table. The first was me in the old days, when I had long hair and fuzz on my face. I was so involved in my favorite pursuits that some weeks, I didn’t even bother showering. The other photo had been digitally doctored. It showed me in trendy clothes with short hair and clean shaven. I barely recognized myself all cleaned up.

“The Witness Protection Program?”

“Exactly. Look, you’re yesterday’s news. We’ve had two hurricanes, a White House scandal, and a stock market crisis since your exploits hit the headlines. So, are you interested?”

“No.”

Philips looked surprised. He seemed to have been thinking that I would jump into the air and start cheering for the FBI.

“No? Can I ask you why?”

“I don’t trust you.”

7

Philips opened his palms, a gesture that meant he didn’t know what I was talking about, as if perhaps the FBI was beyond reproach.

“You told all those lies about me. You said that I may have been working for terrorists, and that I cost the government millions of dollars. People believed it. How many lies are you telling today?”

“Hey,” Garman said, “don’t sit there and tell us how innocent you are. You did what you did, and you had fun doing it. When you act like a criminal, people treat you like one.”

“I’m not a criminal.”

“That’s what they all say.”

“I never stole a dime.”

“They say that, too.” Garman’s voice was steadily rising.

“All right,” Philips said. Of the two, Garman was the most intimidating physically, but it was Philips whose personality was most forceful. Garman backed off, and sat back.

“Look, Karl. You hate us. We hate you. That should be the end of it. You go to Pizza Land and instead of chasing girls and going to parties, like other teenagers, you start playing with computers and phones. One day soon we pick you up again when you break your parole by hacking. But we’re trapped in the tar with each other.

I’ll be straight with you, the last time I met Malik, he got the better of me. We need each other’s help.”

“Can I leave now? Guard!”

“I know what you’re planning, Karl. You think that you’re going to get out of here, quietly track down Knight, and even the score. But that’s impossible. We’re giving you a chance here—a chance to put all that behind you, and maybe even start again. You should do something with your potential, instead of—” he gestured at the surroundings, “—instead of this.”