Kevin Mitnick: How to Troll the FBI | Big Think

When the government was chasing me, I wanted to get a sense of how close they were, and to me, this was a game. It was kind of like I was a little bit insane, and I treated my fugitive status as a big video game. Unfortunately, it had real consequences, and why I did this psychologically is I loved putting myself in dangerous situations and then trying to work my way out of them. I don't know why I liked doing this, but I did.

So what I did is I hacked into the cellular provider in Los Angeles that serviced the FBI cell phone numbers of the agents that were chasing me. To make a long story short, I was able to get the cell phone numbers of the agents, and then by hacking into the cellular provider, I could monitor where they physically were, physically in Los Angeles. I could also monitor who they were calling and who was calling them.

So based on my traffic analysis and my location data, I was able to find out if the feds ever got close, and one time they did. I had an early warning system set up in 1992 when I was working as a private investigator in Los Angeles, and when the warning system was tripped off, I found out that the FBI was actually at my apartment, and I was a mile away in Calabasas. But I just drove in from the apartment to work, so obviously they weren't there to arrest me.

I didn't think if they were still near my apartment, that it was to surveil me, so the only logical thing is that they were there to conduct a search, and that means to get a search warrant. They didn't have a search warrant yet. So in every criminal case, when they have to get a search warrant from a judge, they have to write down the precise description of the premises to be searched. It's the Fourth Amendment stuff, and so I figured out that that was going on.

So the very next day I cleaned up—well, that evening I cleaned up everything from my apartment that the FBI may be interested in. Then the very next day, I went out to Winchell's Donuts and got a big dozen assorted donuts. I labeled the box "FBI donuts," and I put it in the refrigerator. So when they were going to come search, the only thing they would find is I had some donuts for them.

They searched the next day. They didn't find anything. I don't even know if they opened the refrigerator, but if they did, they didn't help themselves to a donut for some reason. I don't know why.