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3
Data Crime

Pat Riddle has never claimed to be a good citizen. He is proud that he has the distinction of being the first hacker in America to be prosecuted. Even now, as a thirty-four-year-old computer security consultant, he is fond of describing cases he has worked on in which the law, if not actually broken, is overlooked. ‘I’ve never been entirely straight,’ he muses.

As a child growing up in Gladwyne, a suburb of Philadelphia, he was fascinated by technology. He built model rockets and played around with electronics. He liked to watch space launches. When he became a little older his interests turned to telecommunications and computers.

Pat and his friends used to rummage through the garbage tips behind phone company offices for discarded manuals or internal memos that would tell them more about the telephone system — a practice known as dumpster diving. He learned how to make a ‘butt set’, a portable phone of the sort carried by phone repairmen to check the lines, and he first started ‘line tapping’ — literally, listening in on telephone calls — in the early 1970s, when he was fourteen or fifteen.

The butt set Riddle constructed was a simple hand-held instrument with a dial on the back and two alligator clips dangling from one end. All the materials he used were available from hardware and electronics stores. To line tap, he would search out a neighbourhood telephone box where the lines for all the local phones come together. Every three-block area, roughly, has one, either attached to a telephone pole or freestanding. Opening the box with a special wrench — also available from most good hardware stores — he would attach the clips to two terminals and listen in to conversations.

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