148 DEAR HACKER

148 DEAR HACKER

easy to not only get me this guy’s home address and phone number but also his wife’s name. After a few searches I not only had the informa- tion I wanted but I also had names and addresses of him, his wife, and his mother-in-law. Family tree web pages gave even more details: children’s and parents’ names, birth and marriage dates and locations. Driving by the house gave me the chance to see their cars and license plates. I found www.dmv.org —this website gave me links to my local state’s online pages to see what I could find with the license plates.

Many cities and counties offer websites that allow you to check records to see if someone is an offender or has a criminal record. Some states even have prisoner inmate lists on the Internet. These government sites are free and available for use by the public.

On my wife’s flash drive I found a good-bye letter that was more of a love letter. It gave me more information allowing me to add Google Earth to my toolbox and gave me a picture of where they’d been and where they talked or dreamed about running away to. I was also able to visit websites giving details of each of these locations including some of the available intimate activities for the guests.

There is a ton of information on the Internet and once it’s there you can bet that info will never be erased. If you doubt that, go to www฀ .archive.org . I created a website and removed it over seven years ago and they still have every detail of it. Once someone gains access to the Internet, it’s like installing a new hard drive with all of this information. It’s all right there. You just need lots of patience and to know how to look for it.

During this last year things have improved. What started with the news led to me being severely drunk on a regular basis and my wife living with her family in another state for two months. I’ve also been nearly impossible to live with, but it’s shown me that she’s truly com- mitted in making our marriage work. Things with us are better now but we are still in the process of healing.

A Broken Husband

While it’s understandable to be completely distraught over what happened, you also demonstrate why people should be genuinely afraid with all of this informa- tion about them so readily available. Stalkers, lunatics, and people with overall bad

THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE AS A HACKER

intentions have all sorts of power to inject themselves into your lives and it’s very difficult to escape their intruding eyes unless you have a decent plan to protect your privacy. The vast majority of people do not.

Dear 2600: Thanks for the great publication. I love it. I have been reading it since

I was 12 and really enjoy it. I have had some problems lately that I think you great geeks can figure out or give some advice about. Here is my problem. I have been receiving a bunch of calls from the “Secret Service” lately and it is getting really old. I highly doubt that the Secret Service likes prank calling people, and I would like to know who is behind the problem. It is a private number which is the trouble. And

I can’t block all private calls because some of my friends have blocked Caller ID by default. So how should I go about stopping the calls and/ or figure out who is calling me? I figure they are just from some other more immature 14-year-old not too different from myself. I am getting the calls on my cell phone which is the worst part. They call about six times a day and call between 3 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Beachedwhale Let’s not be so quick to assume that the Secret Service doesn’t like to prank call

people. But you mention that this caller managed to block Caller ID, which right there puts them at a level of sophistication beyond that of the Secret Service. So what you’re dealing with is an entity who is calling you over and over again with- out identifying themselves. Back in the old days, this sort of thing happened all the time. Today it’s so much easier to identify incoming calls even when they’re blocked. There’s no more running to the central office while trying to keep the caller on the line and taking 20 minutes to figure out what part of the country the call is coming from. These days it’s all logged somewhere. If the Caller ID is blocked, then you (the called party) simply aren’t able to see that information. But your phone company can. Those are the people who can help you put a stop to this. There are other more tricky ways such as forwarding your line to a service that reads the ANI data rather than the Caller ID data. A few years ago, a company named Z-Tel inadvertently provided this service to their customers when forward- ing calls to another line. Someone could call your landline with their Caller ID data