Toad Hall

[John Young <jya@pipeline.com>]

   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.
   
   -----

   From: "Takedown: The pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick,
   America's Most Wanted Outlaw -- By the Man Who Did It," by
   Tsutomu Shimura, with John Markoff, Hyperion Press, a
   subsidiary of The Disney Company, 1996, 326 pp. $24.95. 
   ISBN 0-7868-6210-6

   [pp. 17-21]

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   The author appears on NBC's Dateline tomorrow, January 12.