Mike Wilkerson | America's First Hacker: Before It Was Illegal | Part 1 of 2

In 1985, an eighteen-year-old kid in a sleeping bag in a Kirkland, Washington apartment heard a knock at the door and felt something most people never feel when the police show up: <strong>relief</strong>. By that morning, Mike Wilkerson had already been inside over a hundred computer systems without authorization: <strong>Microsoft, Boeing, Pacific Bell's national telephone switching infrastructure</strong>. Not with brute force. Not with malicious code. With a telephone, a voice, and an ability to convince people to give him access they had absolutely no business giving. He was prosecuted under a law written specifically to catch him by the same prosecutor assigned to his case. That law became the blueprint for the 1986 federal <strong>Computer Fraud and Abuse Act</strong>, the foundation of every computer crime prosecution in America that followed. And according to that prosecutor, confirmed in writing, Mike Wilkerson was the <strong>first hacker in the United States to serve actual jail time for computer intrusion</strong>. Not Kevin Mitnick. Not Phiber Optik. Not anyone most people have heard of. Mike came first. <strong>Five years before any of them.</strong> His punishment included two weeks in jail and a trip to Vermont with two hacking friends to build what may have been the nation's first computerized missing children database. He also sat in a room with the <strong>CIA, the FBI, the NSA, and the Secret Service</strong> and taught them what he knew. The government turned his prosecution into a training video, and ran it as a game show. One year after sentencing, the detective who arrested him called and asked for his help cracking his own seized files. And a short time after that, Mike sat down at a university computer lab, tried the default admin password on the Boeing mainframe he had gone to jail for accessing, and was inside in seconds. <strong>They had never changed it.</strong> This is Mike's third appearance on Veritas and the first time the full story comes out. The book is called <em>The Hacker Prince</em>. The preface was written by Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who spent a decade fighting extradition after penetrating NASA and Pentagon systems looking for suppressed technology. Two people who broke in looking for the truth. Both of them ended up in the same book.