Kevin Poulsen: The Hacker Who Rigged a Porsche Contest, Then Went Straight

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On June 1st, 1990, KIIS-FM in Los Angeles promised a Porsche 944 S2 to its 102nd caller. Kevin Poulsen, known online as Dark Dante, did not dial fast. He took over Pacific Bell's central office switches, seized the station's 25 phone lines, blocked every other caller in the city, and counted his way to number 102. He had been at this since his teens in Pasadena, when he broke into the ARPANET at 17 using a TRS-80.

This episode follows Poulsen from fugitive to reporter. The FBI found his trail after he failed to pay rent on a storage shed full of equipment, and when Unsolved Mysteries profiled him, its tip lines went dead. Arrested in April 1991, he was sentenced to 51 months and then barred from computers for three years. He came back as a journalist at SecurityFocus and Wired, broke the Chelsea Manning chat logs story, and helped design SecureDrop, the tool newsrooms use to protect whistleblowers.

Poulsen never attacked the radio station itself. He controlled the telephone company's switches and dropped every incoming call but his own.
He was the first American released from prison under a court order banning him from computers and the internet, a ban the episode compares to confiscating a burglar's lockpicks.
In October 2006 he wrote a script that cross-referenced MySpace profiles with sex offender registries, finding 744 matches and leading to the arrest of Andrew Lubrano.
SecureDrop, first called DeadDrop, was designed with James Dolan and Aaron Swartz. It routes submissions through Tor and has journalists read them on air-gapped machines.
The first official SecureDrop instance launched at The New Yorker in May 2013, and the project later passed to the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

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