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APPROACHING ZERO

Tebbe, drove from Chicago to the realtor's office to interview him. They found a man beset by unwanted intruders.

The company had installed its VM system in the autumn of 1988. The VM box numbers and passwords were personally assigned by the company president; while the 1-800 number to access the system was published, he insisted that the passwords were known only to him and the individual box users.

In November 1988, during an ordinary review of the traffic on the system, he had been startled to discover a number of unexplained messages. He had no idea what they were about or who they were for; he thought they could have been left in error. However, the number of 'errors' had grown throughout November and December. By January 1989 the 'errors' had become so frequent that they overwhelmed the system, taking over almost all the VM computer's memory and wiping out messages for the company's business.

The Secret Service recorded the messages over a period from late February to March. Listening to the tapes, they realized they were dealing with a code line.

The law on access devices prohibits the unauthorized possession of fifteen or more of such codes, or the swapping or sale of the codes 'with an intent to defraud'. (Fraud is defined as a $1,000 loss to the victim or profit to the violator.) On the tapes, the agents could identify 130 devices that were trafficked by the various unknown callers. They also heard the voice of a woman who identified herself alternately as 'Kyrie' or 'long distance information'. It was thought she was running the code line, and it was decided to focus on identifying her.

In March security officials from MCI, the long-distance telephone company, told the Secret Service that Canadian Bell believed 'Kyrie' to be an alias of Leslie Lynne Doucette, a Canadian citizen who had been hacking for six or seven years. In March 1987 Doucette had been convicted of telecommunications fraud in Canada and sentenced to ninety days' imprisonment with two years' probation. She had been charged with running a code line and trafficking stolen access codes. Subsequently, the Canadians reported, Doucette had left the country with her two children.

Later that month an MCI operative, Tom Schutz, told Moore that

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