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I MISS CRIME

hoped for leniency, he’d have to work for them—and writing reports wasn’t going to cut it anymore.

Eager to make amends and determined to salvage his life and career, Max didn’t ask for anything in writing. He took it on faith that if he helped the FBI agents, they would help him.

Two weeks later, Max got his first assignment. A gang of phone phreaks had just hijacked the phone system at the networking company 3Com and were using it as their own private teleconferencing facility. Beeson and Trahon could dial into the illicit chat line, but they doubted their ability to blend in with the hackers and gain any useful intelligence. Max studied up on the latest phone phreaking methods, then dialed into the system from the FBI’s field office while the bureau recorded the call.

Dropping the names of hackers he knew and drawing on his own expertise, Max easily persuaded the phone phreaks that he was one of them. They opened up and revealed that they were an international gang of about thirty-five phone hackers called DarkCYDE, living mostly in Britain and Ireland. DarkCYDE aspired to “unite Phreakers and Hackers all over the world into one big digital army,” according to the group’s blustery manifesto. But at root they were just kids playing with the phone, just as Max had done in high school. After the call, Beeson asked Max to stay close to the gang. Max chatted them up on IRC and turned over the logs to his handlers.

Pleased with Max’s work, the agents summoned him to the federal building in San Francisco a week later to brief him on a new assignment. This time, he’d be going to Vegas.

Max’s eyes moved over the nest of linen-clad card tables in the gaudy exhibit hall of the Plaza Hotel and Casino. Dozens of young men in T-shirts and shorts or jeans—the hacker’s uniform—were at the tables hunkered over a bank of computer workstations or standing on the sidelines, occasionally pointing at something on a screen.