From: "Takedown: The pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Outlaw -- By the Man Who Did It," by Tsutomu Shimomura, with John Markoff, Hyperion Press, a subsidiary of The Disney Company, 1996, 326 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-7868-6210-6 ---------- Chapter 2 TOAD HALL In keeping with Internet nomenclature, Toad Hall acquired the Internet domain name toad.com, whose gateway to the rest of the world was a Sun SPARCstation computer in the building's basement. This digital domain was run by John and an eclectic band of programmers and hardware gurus, who together had a diverse political outlook, and while privacy was a priority, computer security at Toad was often pretty loose. ... For the past five years, Toad Hall had been Julia [Menapace]'s home -- for John Gilmore was the "other man," with whom her relationship had been souring even before she and I had met. During the Christmas holidays John was away visiting his relatives in Florida, and so Julia and I had Toad Hall to ourselves when we arrived around 4 P.M. on the afternoon of her flight from Nepal. John, now forty, was someone I'd known from hacker circles, and even as a friend, for a number of years. ... Initially he hadn't minded that Julia and I spent time backpacking together while he worked long hours on his new start-up, because hiking didn't interest him. But once Julia and I had become more intimately involved, things grew chilly between him and me. Julia and I sent out for dinner from an Italian place called Bambino's. When it came, we undressed and sank into the indoor hot tub, eating while we soaked. The upstairs bathroom in Toad Hall is an unusual room. It is faced with a white and pink marble floor and wainscoting surrounding a dark green jacuzzi tub and other fixtures. A large asparagus fern sits on the window ledge, centered above the cascading waterfall of the tub's larger faucet. The fronds of the fern tumble down toward the water. Julia had, put on a cassette tape of Karma Moffet playing Himalayan intruments, and then lit candles; the only other light came from four overhead spotlights that dimly illuminated each corner of the tub. "This is just amazing," Julia murmured through the steamy air. She said she had fantasized continually about a long soak in hot water while trekking in the frigid Himalayas, where water is carried by hand from its source and becomes hot only when heated over flames, and where there is never enough to sit in. And at high altitude in the Solu Khumbu region of Nepal, the only heat had come from the sun, the small cooking fire, and the occasional woodstove fueled by wood scraps or dung. While we ate Julia told me stories of her adventures. In the kitchen of a lodge where she stayed she met and befriended a Sherpa guide named Tshering and a mountain guide from Seattle named Rachel DeSilva, who had led a group of 12 women to climb a 6,000-meter trekking peak in the region named Mara. Afterward they had invited her to climb another mountain named Lobuche, which lay to the north toward Everest. She had made it to just below the summit. I sat entranced. "I wish I had been there too," was all I could find to say. Julia had spent her birthday at the Tengboche monastery to celebrate the Mani Rimdu festival. She showed me a red string necklace that she had received when a Tibetan Lama had blessed her on her thirty-fifth birthday. "Near noon that same day, I heard the sound of long horns, cymbals, and drums," she recalled. "Then an avalanche poured in slow motion down the south face of Ama Dablam." Later in the trip she had stopped at one point to watch a sunset over Everest through the gathering mist, and she said it was so stark and beautiful that she cried. "I thought of you," she told me, "and wished you were there to share it with me." As we soaked, I told her about what had happened to me while she was gone. When Julia left I had been waiting for a $500,000 per year research grant from the National Security Agency, the nation's electronic intelligence- gathering organization. The NSA has two missions: one, its foreign spying mission and the other its responsibility for the security of all the governments computers and communications. In the fall an information security division in the agency had told me they would fund a project permitting me to assemble a team of experts to do research in new areas of computer security. I was ready to go and I had commitments from people to start work, but the agency had dragged its feet for months. Finally I had gotten tired of being jerked around, and two of my researchers had been forced to take other jobs. "I thought everything would be ironed out and I'd come back to find you happily at work with your team," she said. "No it wasn't," I answered. "They're amazingly inept, just like any government bureaucracy." We talked for a while about the NSA and how so many people in the civil liberties community fear them as Big Brother as well as anyone associated with them, arguing that they become corrupted by association. But that had never seemed accurate to me. Everything I'd seen indicated they were a largely incompetent organization tied up in endless regulations that could do little good or evil. And people are quite capable of making up their own minds. "I don't want to deal with them," I said. "I'm sorry it didn't work out, Tsutomu," she said quietly. We soaked for a while, both of us lost in thought. Finally I changed the subject. "I want to tell you something I've been thinking about," I said. "I've thought about a lot of things while you were away. I'd really like to try having a committed relationship with you, if you're willing to." Julia smiled. She didn't say anything, but she reached over and held me closely. It seemed like we would now be able to share a lot of time together. I told her I'd taken a leave of absence from the universlty and now I was looking forward to skiing and getting away. I was finally pursuing my long-held plan to spend a winter in the mountains, spending the mornings and late afternoons skiing and the mid-days and evenings thinking and working on my research projects. "Why don't you come with me and live in the mountains?" I suggested. "You can come ski and it will be good to be outside." We woke at about 1 P.M. the next day and Julia -- who grew up on the East Coast and is still learning to deal with mild California winters -- told me that she had seen the first morning light before she fell asleep and thought to herself, *It's Christmas and there is no sign of it here.* She was still jet-lagged and also feeling what she feared was flu coming on. We decided to spend the day inside, catching up on talk and sleep. It was chilly out, so Julia turned up Toad Hall's central heat, still eager to soak up the warmth of civilization after two months in the Himalaya. A bit later, while she rested, I was walking around the house, and several times went past the Sun SPARCstation in the hallway. It was a reminder that I probably had new electronic mail, but I didn't feel like checking it. At just about that moment, however, ominous bits of data were flowing through the Ethernet cable that wound through Toad's rooms and hallways. From somewhere, perhaps thousands of kilometers away, an electronic intruder had taken control of toad.com by remotely commandeering the SPARCstation in the basement. And while the two of us spent the day together two floors above, the electronic hijacker was using toad.com as a staging base to launch an attack on the computers in my own beach house some 800 kilometers south. ----- [pp. 17-21]