 For those who don't know anything about me, my name is Kevin Polson. I'm the news editor at Wired.com. It's the website of Wired magazine. I've been there for about six, seven years. I founded the threat level blog, which has been going about that time, covering computer security and electronic privacy and electronic civil rights. I've been covering cybercrime hacking and the scene for about 13 or 14 years now. If you go back before that, I myself was a hacker in the late 80s and early 90s. I used to hack the phone company quite a bit. It was what the kids today would call an advanced persistent threat. I was like living in their systems for years and I want to get in some trouble for that in part because I used my access to cheat at radio station phone in contests and win prizes like porches and trips to Hawaii. I'm also the author of the cybercrime book Kingpin. One hacker took over the billion dollar cybercrime underground. This is about Max Vision, a one-time white hat hacker who did a lot of work around the snort IDS who went bad, wound up getting into the carding scene and then taking over a huge chunk of the underground. Fighting with feds and Eastern European hackers and making a lot of money. It is for sale at the Def Con bookstore in the vendor room. So if there are, if anybody has come with any questions, go ahead and raise your hand now. If not, I'm going to present a menu of options. I'm going to offer three options. I could talk a bit about my past. I could talk about my book or I could talk about the Bradley Manning case and how we came to break the story of his arrest. So for option number one, my criminal past, show of hands. Always goes this way. I'll go through the motions anyway. My best selling cybercrime book. The Bradley Manning case. Let me see my criminal past again. I want to be fair. My criminal past. Okay. I'll start with that anyway. So I got started in the, when I was a teenager in the early 80s hacking the phone company without a computer. So they called it phone freaking back then. Are there any phone freaks out there in the audience? Keep the fires burning, man. So it's a lot of social engineering and a lot of some electronics. Eventually I got a computer, started hacking and doing some rudimentary hacking into telephone company systems like Cosmos was my first one. And then I got diverted from the whole phone freaking thing when I picked up a dial up on a BBS for what turned out to be a system at UCLA used by graduate students. I guessed a password, which was an easy thing to do back then. And got into a UNIX shell for the first time. And got very excited and learned the man command. And then from there started figuring out what UNIX was and how everything worked. And then I discovered the Telnet command and realized that this computer was on something called the ARPANET. And from there I just went nuts and started hopping all around the ARPANET and doing one university machine after another. I think there were a couple defense contractors. It was a very exciting time. I wound up getting traced in part because I wasn't really doing anything to cover my tracks. I was 17, I think, when they knocked on my door and they did the usual come in, take out all of your computers and sit down with you and give you a tough talking to. But in the end there's never an actual prosecution of me. But I had a buddy that I was working with who was older and he wound up being the first person prosecuted under the California state computer crime laws. So after that I went straight for a while and I wound up dropping out of junior college in order to take a job at a defense contractor in Northern California called SRI International, where I worked as a general systems guy fixing stuff and writing shell scripts and doing backups and system administration stuff. While there my boss at SRI turned out to be a former phone freak himself who had never gotten caught. And he still had some of his old manuals and stuff. So we wound up talking and reminiscing and sharing information. And then with him it was kind of like a couple old alcoholic friends getting together. We naturally kind of gravitated back into it. And I did a lot of, a lot more serious phone hacking, still just fun and games at that point. All recreational. Got caught again. This time because I was collecting old phone equipment, some of it which I took out of central offices. They were decommissioning their old step-by-step equipment and replacing them with ESSs. And so as they decommissioned the old gear and marked it for scrap or tore it out I was salvaging some of it in the middle of the night. And leaving it in the storage locker I got behind on the bill and they cracked it open and they said this doesn't look right and they called the phone company. Anyway, so that got ugly. And what got complicated was the phone company brought in the FBI and said to the FBI, hey this guy, he's been breaking into telephone company computers. He's been breaking into switches. He's been breaking into our buildings in the middle of the night. And he works at a defense contractor and he has a secret level security clearance. We think maybe this is KGB related. So I ended up losing my job not unreasonably under the circumstances. And the feds started coming around and talking to my friends and former co-workers and saying, yeah, we think you may have been working with the Russians. So I freaked out and I went on the lam. I left the Bay Area, went to Los Angeles, ultimately died my hair blonde. And established a fake identity. And basically lived underground for a while. Of course, having now been busted two times, I completely learned my lesson. Raise your hand if you believe that. Now, because I had no job and no ties to the community, basically nothing holding me back, I started looking for ways to use my still ongoing access to the phone company to make a living. So this is the way they did things back then. And I suspect to some degree this is still the way they do things. They put their resources into busts and into helping with the prosecutions. They kind of drafted my first indictment, the phone company did, for the feds. But they don't put as many resources into actually securing the things that they have discovered are owned from top to bottom. So even now that I had been busted and completely exposed and they had everything in my storage locker and they basically knew everything that I had access to. All of these systems and switches and systems that control switches and customer service systems, buildings that were easy to break into with very little effort. Most of that survived even this bust. So when I moved to Los Angeles, I was able to get back into things and then start expanding out again. And I ultimately had control of all of the switches in northern and southern California for Pacific Bell, which at the time was a big deal because they were basically the only phone company, the only major phone company in the state. And we didn't by and large use cell phones. So having control of the land line systems mattered. So I fell in with some of the other people and started doing various scams. And the biggest one, which I mentioned before, was I started rigging radio station phone in contest. So my buddy and I would, we figured out which phone company central office served the mass call in prefix that was used by all of the radio stations in Los Angeles that was 5 2 0. It turned out to be a Hollywood central office. So we rented a cheap office space, a dollar square foot office space in the CD part of Hollywood that was served by that switch. And then used our access to just provision nine or 10 phone lines off the same switch that ran into that building. And then we punched them through to our office on the punch down blocks and ran cable through the ceilings. And then basically the way this worked was we had, we set up one phone line through that would become the main phone number of the radio station we were targeting. So we would change the radio station's phone number through the switch to a random phone number that only we know. We changed this one phone, the control phone in our rented office to the radio station's phone number and then we just used call forward in so that any calls normally that come to our control phone would flow seamlessly to the radio station's lines. Then we take our eight phones that we got from Radio Shack, chosen for their liberal return policy. Each of these phones were set up with a custom calling service that they called Hotline Service, I believe. Basically, you could program this phone, when you pick it up it calls a pre-programmed phone number. Actually it was the speed calling code two. Whatever you had programmed the speed calling code two, it would ring immediately and directly to that number. So all eight of these phones were programmed to ring to the secret number of the radio station that only we knew. Then when the contest began, they say if you're the 101st caller, you win a Porsche 944 S2 Cabriolet convertible. We have the control phone, it starts ringing off the hook as people call in to take a stab at winning the convertible. Every time a call goes through on call forwarding and I have to explain the basics of 80s and 90s era telephony because nobody has lane lines anymore. Every time a call goes through it does a short like half ring. The contest has begun. So we kind of count it out. That's probably about 50 calls, 60 calls, 70 calls, 80 calls. Then we pick it up when we un-forward it. Now nobody is reaching the radio station anymore, they're all just reaching this phone, which is busy now. Then we have these eight phones, so my buddy takes four and might take four and we just pick them up and start cycling through with the switch hook. So now we're flooding all eight of the radio station's phone lines with just with these two guys in this rented office, basically simulating the traffic that they would be getting if they were still getting calls from the rest of Los Angeles. They would start answering and counting it out, oh, you're calling number 90 almost. We'd have to disguise our voices and let out like a dejected note when they said that. They'd say, you're calling 92, better luck next time. Oh, man. You're calling number 93, better luck next time. Oh, no. Same person every time. Then finally we'd be the 101st caller and we would act very excited, which wasn't hard because you just want a poor show or in another case like 20,000 or $30,000 in cash. We talk on the air and everything and go down and present fake ID and collect the prize. So that was basically how I made my living for a while while I was hiding from the FBI and the phone company, which turned out to be, I don't want to mess with the phone company. They're very, very serious. So I did other things. That was probably the biggest. It was definitely the most fun and ultimately the one that got me in the most genuine trouble. So I was doing this and then the feds, while I was doing all of this in L.A., the feds had no idea where I was or what I was doing. They were still working their case in Northern California based on what they had found in that storage locker and in my home. So they finally unsealed an indictment and started actively publicly looking for me. At this point, they put me on a television show called Unsolved Mysteries. I had Robert Stack. They shot Robert Stack in the intro in this segment, like in front of what looked like a PBX at NBC Studios or something. And he called me a computer genius run amuck. Of course he said it as a rubber stack. Imagine a computer genius run amuck. Where was that Richard Nixon? Anyway. And they hired an actor who would like actually portrayed me breaking into phone company computers, breaking into ARPANET. They went back to my old childhood thing, showed him like trying to password and he gets frustrated when it doesn't work and he puts it in again. And breaking into phone company buildings and generally acting nerdy. It wasn't a bad performance. But they didn't have my current picture with my hair dyed a Julian Assange white. They had an old picture with me, you know, with brown hair. Plus I had gone through like a, I'd fill that a little bit. I'd gotten a little bit older. So I was on Unsolved Mysteries and nobody, nobody, even though at this point the feds suspected I was in L.A. and they said so on the show, nobody phoned in any tips on me. I'm sorry? They did have problems with their phones, yeah. Anyway. I didn't do anything to their phones. I don't know what happened to their phones. Apparently they had problems with their phones. But they, they, so, I, where was I? Robert Stack, yeah. Robert Stack, yeah. I don't know, Nixon. So eventually I was caught again. And the way this happened was I was working with some other people. One of them, one of them was this rocker dude who was also a pretty accomplished phone hacker who called himself Agent Steele. He was doing, he was doing some shady stuff with private investigators and tapping phones and stuff. He wound up getting in trouble independently for one of the things he was doing. And he gave the feds enough on me that they were able to figure out where I shopped. And they went to the Hughes market in Van Nuys, which was near not my home, but the office that I rented to work out of at that stage in my hacking. And they showed, they showed my picture and identified me. And then the phone company staked out the grocery store and I was arrested while buying milk or something. So at this point, my case got, got really complicated. I had my Northern California case when it started at all. And now I, and now they had a whole new case to investigate of what I was doing in Los Angeles. Now in the Northern California case, they had charged me with a bunch of like wacky stuff that I didn't do. Their first indictment against me was almost entirely fake or almost entirely false because they didn't really know what I was up to. So they just kind of came up with, with theories. So they, they had me breaking into an army computer that I had never heard of. I was hacking a phone company, not the army. They had me stealing, stealing a classified document. And at the time I had no idea what that was about. So they basically, they came up with a whole very creative indictment that kind of made me look like, yeah, maybe I might be a Russian spy. What made things more challenging was when they, but when they caught me now, they, they got, they got my stuff from the stuff that I, that I'd had in my hacker layer. And they discovered that while I was a fugitive from the FBI, I had been, in addition to all this other stuff, I had been looking into how the government, particularly the FBI does wiretaps. And I, I discovered the identities of some, some targets of, of federal surveillance and how, how the whole system works and everything. So emboldened by that, that I had now officially been sniffing around government secrets, the feds wound up charging me with a new indictment in my original case under the Espionage Act, title 18, section 793, unauthorized possession of classified information. That would have carried, under sentencing guidelines, that would have carried a 15 year minimum. So I wound up spending what amounted to the next five years in pretrial custody fighting basically that charge. They eventually got the rest mostly right. They actually came up with a list of things that I'd actually done. But they, they stuck by this one charge, this very serious charge. And it took us a long time to figure out what their, what their, what their evidence was and what their theory was and what had actually happened. We finally got up almost to the eve of trial when, when the feds agreed to drop that charge. We, we established clearly enough that it was, that it was false. And so I wound up being, I wound up accepting a, I wound up pleading guilty to the things that I'd actually done and accepted what they call an upward departure, which means I accepted extra jail time above what the sentencing guidelines recommend in order to absorb the time I'd spent in pretrial custody or they'd have owed me time. I'd have, I'd have had a free felony when I got out. And so then, so then I got out and I was on a federal supervised release for three years after that. I had a condition where I was not allowed to use computers without the permission of my probation officer who, who, who was not a fan of computers it turned out. So I wound up working for a, I wound up working as a canvasser for a progressive political group in Los Angeles for a year that I segued into writing and journalism. I filed my first story for Wired Magazine I think in 1998 by fax. I was allowed to use fax machines. I was on, it's about Y2K survivalists. And then eventually my supervised release was up and I was allowed to use computers again and I became a journalist full time and that's, that's what I've been doing since then. Long story. That was a short version. Thank you. Thanks, Sadie. Are there any questions? I'm sorry, sir? No. I, I, I actually, I drove the car for a little bit and I sold it on, on consignment because I needed money. They, so they did, they did take all my money for what that's worth. Yes, sir? Okay, this is the question, did I ever consider leaving California altogether and going across the country? I, I did consider that but, and I think this, this might be part of the hacker mindset. I wanted to solve the problem, not run away from it. So I thought staying in the thick of things, I grew up in Los Angeles, I knew it well. I knew all the, all the frequencies that the feds used so I could listen to them on my scanner when they weren't encrypted and they didn't, didn't use a lot of encryption back then. I knew again all about how, how FBI wiretaps work and all about how phone company wiretaps work. I was able to spot them as they went in. That, that actually saved me at one point. So I thought, you know, better, better, better to stay in your own backyard, like stay in the arena where you, where you know, you know the playing field and you can, you can win, win there. I didn't work out that way but, that, that was my feeling. Yeah. So that's why I did not, did not truly go on the lam and I just, just hung around until it was too late. Any other questions? That's a good question. Did everybody hear him? No. Okay. So, so the question was first he correctly used the original name of my blog, 27B stroke six. Thank you. Who, who gets that reference? Oh yeah. And then the question was what, what can, what can you as a community do to help the mainstream media report on, on, on, on hacking and cyber security stuff less breathlessly and more accurately. So the, the real key there is to be very, very, very patient in, in a place like Wired and in, in some other public publications like Forbes, CNET where they have dedicated cyber security reporters where that's their beat. They, you'll, you, you're talking to people who, who, who already know the field well and they'll, they'll generally be, be able to communicate with you without a lot of hand holding maybe. A smart journalist will ask a lot of questions. I mean even I, I have a somewhat technical background as you now know. I still ask a ton of questions and I'm completely shameless about it and I have no pride at all and I will ask, I will deliberately ask stupid questions just to make sure that I, that I, that I actually know the topic that I'm writing about. So you have to be very patient about that. And if you're talking to somebody who from like, you know, to a television network, somebody who maybe doesn't understand what IPv6 is, who doesn't know what an IDS is, who, who thinks that anonymous is a, is a unified gang with a single leader, you, the real key is to just not get frustrated and help them do their jobs and just very calmly lay everything out for them. And a good reporter will be, will be receptive to that. Any other questions? Place big. Yes, sir. Yeah. 1991. Other questions. What year was I arrested? Yeah. No. I hit one, I hit one station twice. With two different hair colors and two different names and they, they didn't recognize me at all. So no, there was never, it's just not something I expected back then. I said the question was whether the radio stations ever got, got suspicious. So no, there was, it wasn't something that was on their radar at all. 2008, 2009. The Tom Cruz video. Did we get a cease and desist? Huh. Okay. Yeah, I don't even remember that. We, okay. I, I hate to say this and I've never said this before, but I think it's possible you've confused Wired with Gawker. Yeah. We, we, we posted stuff that, that, that there's been legal controversy over. The, the, when the EFF sued over the NSA's warrantless surveillance, we posted the, the leaked documents from AT&T that showed what appeared to be a wiretap of AT&T backbones running into a secure room at the Folsom Street Central Office in, in San Francisco. So there was some nation of teeth by AT&T and court documents over that when we published that, that material. So we've, we've been in that situation a bunch of times. We've, we've always been pretty fearless about posting material like that. We posted the Bradley Manning chat logs eventually. But, and the reason, of course, is that we're part of Condé Nast, which is a vast publishing empire with, with lawyers who are standing by and have a good First Amendment ethic. So they've always supported us. They'll, they'll look at it and they'll, they'll support us when they can. And if you send us a cease and desist, we don't get scared. We just send it to our lawyers in New York and let them handle it. Yes, sir. More CIs turning rogue? Okay. So the question is, question was, what drew me into writing about Iceman and do I see more confidential informants going rogue? That's a reference to my bestselling book, Kingpin. How one hacker took over the billion dollar cyber crime underground, just a foot in the supply bestselling. It was the bestselling book in the hacker category on Amazon.com for six, about six months until Metna came around and knocked me off. So thank you for that question. So I, I'd been, the, the book is about, if you haven't read it yet, the, the book is about a white hat hacker named Max Vision, who is very active in this community in, in the 90s. He wrote, he created a free open source repository of intrusion detection signatures called Arachnids, that a lot of people credit with being playing a key role in the growth of Snort. He was a, he, he did a lot, he did a lot of pentesting. He volunteered his time and did pentacity services for free, for, for charities. He was generally a good guy. What, but he had a, an impulsive streak and in, I guess it was 96, 98, he, he, he saw that there was a new vulnerability announced by cert in the bind name server demon that, it was a buffer overflow that people were not taking seriously and they weren't patching. So he wrote a script that scanned a vast swath of the internet's IP space looking for vulnerable bind installations, exploited the whole, went on to the system, a pat, and patched the system in order to secure this, this vulnerability. He thought he was doing, doing, doing a public service. He aimed this script specifically where he thought it, it was most needed, namely the pentagons IP address space. So he, again, there's this, this common thing you, you see a lot with hackers, especially the, the, the old school ones where they don't really think they're, didn't necessarily do anything wrong so they don't cover their tracks. So he was using, he just dialed into, he just dialed into an ISP dial-up and they, they easily traced him back because he put something in his code where it would send an X term pop up to his computer every time he infected a new machine so he could track its progress. When he hit the, the Navy's IP space he got somebody pop up so his computer crashed. It was like a reverse DDoS. Anyway, so they easily traced him. They busted him. They prosecuted him. He tried to, he tried the defense that he was, he was helping out but he had, he had put a back door in his code so he could get back into these systems ever if he wanted to. That undermined the white hat, good Samaritan defense. He went to jail for 18 months which was not a lot by, by modern standards. But it was enough to ruin his white hat career. So he got out around 2002. He couldn't find, he couldn't find legitimate employment and he, he wound up hooking up with, with some people that he had met while in jail. Like white collar criminals, experienced white collar criminals and working with them on credit card fraud schemes to make money that way. And then he discovered the whole organized carding underground which some of you are probably familiar with sites like Carter Planet and Shadow Crew. He started hacking the people that moved in these circles, the, the carters, other, other black hat hackers stealing their stuff and then selling it to, to an ex-con in Los Angeles who would use the stolen credit card numbers to make really good counterfeit credit cards and then pass them out to, to his employees who would go to the mall and buy up stuff that they could resell at eBay. So I, I'd been interested in Max, in Max's story since his original case where he was busted for hacking the, hacking the Pentagon and closing all of these, all of these holes and leaving his back door. It seemed like a really kind of quixotic thing to, to put his whole career and his life on the line to do something that had nothing absolutely no value except hack value. It was just kind of a cool thing to do. It wasn't making any money off of it. He just said, I can do this, so I'm going to. So I covered his case closely at the time and interviewed him when he started serving a sentence. And then I kind of lost track of him and I didn't know that all of this was going on, that he had gotten out of jail and gotten back into cyber crime in a more serious way. In fact, really nobody did until he popped up again in, in 2007, back in the news and it turned out that when he went back into the, into the cyber crime underground, he had not, he wasn't just doing basic fraud like other hackers. He was breaking into the criminal websites where credit card numbers and identity information are bought and sold and then he would steal the entire user database from, from these sites, put them on his own website and then drop the tables, destroy the old websites behind him. So he had staged this massive hostile takeover where there were all these little criminal websites that each had maybe 4,000 users on them. He, he broke into them all, destroyed them and then created a super site where every criminal buying and selling stolen credit card information, thousands and thousands of them now had no choice but to operate on his site. He'd send them out, send them out an email saying, hey, I'm running things now, I'm in charge. What, what tripped him up was that one of the sites that he did this to called Dark Market had an undercover FBI agent on it in a fairly senior position. The undercover FBI agent used this as an opportunity to completely take over Dark Market as an official undercover FBI operation. He went to the guy that was running and said, hey, you can't defend yourself from, from this, this mystery hacker called himself Iceman. When you let me run your service for him, you know me. I'm a, I'm a respectable criminal. I've been, I've been operating, operating spam botnets for years. I can run your service for you. So this guy, this guy basically let, unknowingly let the FBI take over system administration of, of his, of his system Dark Market. And then what, what ensued was this long running battle between Max who ran Carter's Market dot com, which was supposed to be one site to rule them all against Dark Market against the FBI running Dark Market, which was thwarting Max's efforts to create a unified underground by having the audacity to not stay down when he hacked them. So Max eventually found out that Dark Market was an undercover FBI agent operation. He tried to expose the FBI agent that was running it. Nobody believed him because he had hacked them already. So they thought he'd now he's just making up stuff about them. The feds cultivated some informants and made some busts in his, in Max's circle and kind of busted their way up. Did some, some various electronic surveillance methods. And then they eventually, they eventually caught him and discovered, yes, this is, look, this is Max vision who we've busted before. So what when I, so as soon as Max was busted and they announced the indictment, I said, oh my God, this is Max vision. I can't believe he did all this. I didn't even know about it. And I, I started looking into it for a story for, for Wired Magazine. And I eventually turned into a book proposal and wrote the book and talked to everybody that Max worked with, the people I knew in real life, the people that knew and feared him online, the FBI agent that, that eventually took him down. And it just turned out to be a really, really interesting kind of multi-layered story of how a very good guy can go very bad under the wrong, under the wrong circumstances and with a slightly incomplete ethical makeup. So that, that's why you should all read it. And I forgot the second part of your question, but I think that's something to do with confidential informants. Well, thank you for that. I thought I was utterly incoherent. I'm sorry? That's what we like. Okay. Yeah, so the second part was whether a lot of confidential informants are turning. Max had, had helped the FBI back in his White Hat days, but he wasn't really an informant. He was more of a consultant. He, he told them what the latest vulnerabilities were that he basically helped them interpret bug track. But that made them, that made them all the more angry when they, when they caught him hacking the Pentagon systems like they thought, you know, he's supposed to be working with us, not, not hacking us. There are, but to the broader question, we're, we're definitely seeing a lot, almost every case now where the FBI or the Secret Service gets a major hacker busts, there are informants involved. And sometimes it's the, it's the ringleader of the operation who's an informant. And they'll, they'll be, they'll be working for the Feds for a long time under the Feds control while the Feds build cases against everybody in their gang. So we saw this with the TJ Max hacker, Albert Gonzalez, probably the biggest credit card hacker in history, perhaps, perhaps a title he may very well hold forever because the companies have gotten more secure. He, he was busted. He was an informant for the Secret Service. He brought down something like 17 people. And then while on the Secret Service's payroll, he staged all of these break-ins to, to major brick and mortar retailers like Office Max and TJ Max and Dave and Busters. And he stole oodles of credit card numbers. Then when he got busted for that, he became an informant again and turned in everybody that, that, or helped the Feds prosecute everybody that he'd been working with. More recently, of course, we know that the, that the leader of Lulsec, Sabu, was, was a federal informant during, during the latter part of his career while he was still leading Lulsec. So this is, this is a constant, constant tension. The Feds rely heavily on informants in, in the cyberspace because they're still playing catch-up on the technology. But people, as it has always been, have been the weak link in hackers. Relationships and, in loyalty, that's what the Feds go after. And that's still working for them. But then the downside of that is when they, if you're, if you have the moral weakness to turn on your friends and set them up for prison sentences, then you're just as likely to do the same thing to the Feds. And so we see the Feds get betrayed again and again and again by some of the most trusted informants playing both sides of the coin. One of the, one of the informants that helped bring down Max picked up a case while, while doing that he picked up another case for using Max's stolen credit card numbers to make counterfeit credit cards and go out and buy stuff on the side. So he'd go to the secret services office, have incriminating chats with Max. Then when he knocked off the day, he'd take some of Max's credit cards and go to the mall and buy some stuff. So he got a whole new, whole new conviction out of that. So it's a, that's an issue that they'll probably be struggling with forever. Yeah. How I set up money drops? I didn't use Bitcoin. But the question was how I set up money drops. So it was all kind of ad hoc for me. I had some partners that I worked with while I was a, a bad guy who, who would have to get cash to me from time to time. I had, I had one thing that I did that I didn't talk about where in addition to the radio station contest, this was like a side business, I was using my access to the, to the phone company to reactivate disconnected numbers for escort services in the Los Angeles area. And I would forward them into a voicemail network hack of hacked voicemail boxes that would basically funnel, you, you would leave a message for the escort service and the, the message would be distributed to a number of voicemail boxes that were rented by way of a confederate of mine to independent escorts, like workers who didn't want to report to anybody. They just wanted to be their own boss. They could plug into this what might have been a vast network of 30 or 40 well-placed yellow page ad numbers and get the messages and then decide if they want to call back a customer and take the call or whatever. And they would pay like a very small flat fee for every call that they decided to take. They, they paid that to my confederate who would then give a, a cut to me by taking it to a, a mailbox rental place in, in Los Angeles that I'd opened under an alias. I'd given him a, a copy of the key. So he would just open up the key, put in an envelope with the cash and then close it. And then I would show up some time later, go in, I'd have a scanner running in my car. I'd be listening on the FBI frequencies. If it sounded safe, I would, I would go in and I would take the envelope and I would leave. I would, I would do some counter surveillance on the way home to make sure nobody was following me. And that, that was my, that was my rather unsophisticated money transfer method at the time. Cutting edge. Do I write a white paper on that someday? That, that also turned out to be a flawed system. I'm not making myself sound very competent, am I? Anyway, one, one day I went to get, to pick up this envelope and I, I drove away, started heading up into the hills. This one, this was in, in West Hollywood and I lived, I think I lived in the valley at the time. So I started driving up into the hills and I noticed a suspicious car immediately, like an SUV, like back in the day cops always drove SUVs. Like pull, pull up practically right behind me and start following me. And so I'm checking my scanner and it's, you know, all the FBI frequencies, nothing. Like nothing, nothing encrypted, nothing unencrypted. How could I possibly be being tailed here? So I, I, eventually they, eventually they seemed to go away. I got all the way into the valley and then I had kind of the standard route that I used to drive in order to make sure nobody was behind me. They could encounter surveillance, they call this, I later learned dry cleaning. So the idea, you're not actually trying to lose anybody, you're just trying to make sure that there's nobody to lose, that nobody's following you. If somebody is following you, you pretty much can't lose them, but you can at least make sure you don't lead them anywhere you don't want them to know about. So I drove, drove in this residential area and drove around and then turned around, started driving back and sure enough, one of the, one of the cars that I had spotted following me was like right behind me. And so I zoom up to him and I write down his license plate because I don't know who this is, but if I, if I wind up getting out of this, you know, I have DMV access, I'm going to find out and figure out what's going on here. And I, I zoom off and I, I drive around and eventually, once again, I'm completely clear. As nobody behind me, I've done five turns through, through, through streets, residential areas, there's definitely no way that I could be, being followed on the ground. I get on the freeway, I go on off-ramp, I get off again, I pull into a parking lot, fiddle with the scanner again, still nothing on the FBI frequencies. And then, whoops, same SUV comes driving right by. I get out of the car, I look up, and yeah, there's, there's like a helicopter up there. So I, I finally, I drove a little bit more, accidentally drove over a curb, my tire blew out, walked out, walked out onto the street, so now I'm like stranded, stranded in Burbank, just the worst place in Los Angeles to be stranded, not because it's a bad neighborhood, because there's just, you know, nothing there. I figure whoever these guys are, maybe they could help me out. One of them, one of them, one of the cars basically stopped, they're not even trying to be overt now, that they've seen me riding down, they're covert, they're now that they've seen me riding down license plates, one of them stopped in the street right in front of me. I walk up and I say, excuse me, since you guys are following around, following me around, maybe you could give me a hand, I have a flat tire. And the guy kind of smiles, oh yeah, and then like three more cop cars, all directions, just like on Matlock or whatever. They come zooming up and they run out of the cars, one of them points a gun at me and shows me his badge. Interestingly, he'd taken his badge out of the billfold, so it was just the shield, said nothing about who they were, were anything, except that they were LAPD. And they gave me this whole spiel about how they were, they had stopped me because I was driving erratically. Driving erratically because you guys were following me. And they would not, it was the weirdest thing, they would not admit that they'd been following me or tell me anything about where, where in the LAPD they worked or anything. They wound up taking me into custody at Parker Center. They took, took my fake ID, they asked me a bunch of questions, where do you work, what do you do, why were you driving so erratically? They found a, they found a scanner in my car, they asked why I had a scanner in my car, I don't even remember what I answered to that. They fingerprinted me, I was a fugitive from the FBI at this point. But for whatever reason, and I had nothing to do with this, but for whatever reason they didn't get a match, like they, they, they had my prints, the FBI had my prints, but there was no match, so they let me go. And eventually, through, through more, more investigation and some lucky breaks, I, I, I figured out who these guys were. They, they were with the LAPD's administrative vice unit. And they weren't looking for Kevin Polson, they were looking for the guy who was reactivating escort service yellow page numbers. Because it turns out all of these disconnected numbers in, in yellow pages all around LA and Orange County, they were, they had all been disconnected by court order. They, they, these were services that had gotten busted for, for prostitution. And as part of that, there's a court order that disconnects the numbers and leaves the, leaves all this prime yellow page real estate unused. And that's what I had been meddling in, for the sake of these, these independent contractors and myself. And, and so they had, they, they then figured out who I was shortly after I figured out who they were. Because they'd been working with a phone company, they'd been working with a, a phone cop on the question of how these numbers were getting reconnected. The whole, and they, the phone cop just on a hunch said, boy, you know, this guy, he doesn't, doesn't seem to work for us. That was their first theory. It must be, it must be a phone company insider, but after they, after they had me in custody, they decided that wasn't the case. And eventually he just called up to his Northern California office and said, hey, can you send me a picture of Kevin Polson? Just a hunch and they sent him down a picture. He said, that's the guy. We had Kevin Polson. We let him go. He's wanted by the FBI. He's been on Unsolved Mysteries. Anyway, so it was, you know, temporary. And then I, I, so I started spying on the phone cop and spying on the administrative vice guys. I added their, their frequencies to my scanner. So now, you know, I knew everything they were doing. And it, it was just a whole other sequence of fun and games until, of course, you know, you already know how the story ends. I got busted anyway. So I'll take, I'm told, I'm, I'm wrapping it up. I'll take one more question if there is one. Yeah, the guy in the EFF shirt, right? That's 30 people. Yes, sir. Quick question. We got one. Quick question. What could I have done better? There's a lot of context there, but so I'll just, rather than go into it, I'll just give you a quick answer. The, the only thing that I would do differently in there is I, I would have written something from the start explaining the genesis of the story from my point of view. There was some, there was some discussion about doing that at the time, but I found those kind of things to be always kind of egotistical for reporters. You prefer to, to write as a fly on the wall instead of saying how, how did I get this great story? In this case, it probably would have been helpful to subsequent discourse if I had just written like a first person account, maybe a day or two later saying here's how the story unfolded. All right. Thank you, everybody.