Agent Steal aka Justin Tanner Petersen was into hacking for the money. He wrote alot of interesting files on electronic fund transfer, the banking system, how phone switching systems worked etc. He lived in Los Angeles and ran a club on the Strip called `Cathedral' under the alias of Eric Hines. He had long blond hair and looked like your typical LA rocker guy, the kind that hangs at the Whisky or the Rainbow. He had a prosthetic leg from the knee down. He was about as far away from the nerd hacker image as you can get. He even tapped a friend's girlfriend's phone line just to make sure she wasn't cheating on him.

"Pulling scams, social engineering money was his big thing. Any way he could get it he was interested," Omega told me. Supposedly he was good friends with Kevin Poulsen and used to go out and break into Telephone Central Offices with Poulsen and get up to various things. Apparently when Kevin was caught, Justin was as well. Instead of going to jail however, Petersen turned states evidence for the prosecution against Poulsen. The FBI made a deal to protect Agent Steal and give him immunity in exchange for information on Poulsen as well as other hackers.

One young hacker told me that Agent Steal tried to get him to do all kinds of things, including data tapping, breaking into Central Switching offices, credit card fraud, ATM fraud, and various other illegal activities that he would not have thought of doing without Agent Steal's influence. "He narced off Ron Austin, Poulsen, Mitnick, Roscoe, who knows how many others..." Why? I asked. "just so he could stay out of trouble and keep hacking".

While Agent Steal was informing to the FBI he kept on abusing systems. Someone pointed it out to the FBI that their star witness against Kevin Poulsen was doing all kinds of fraud and other illegal activities. The FBI called Agent Steal in for questioning. Agent Steal decided to run instead and went into hiding. Last August 1994, however his luck ran out and he was captured by the FBI. He had been living right around the corner from the FBI building. I thought the LA Times headline was rather ironic: "Hacker caught in FBI footchase".

Most hackers in the underground don't approve of Agent Steal. Not only is he unethical, but more to the point he has no sense of anyone but himself. "Avoid him like the plague" was advice from one hacker. Justin Tanner Petersen last I heard was awaiting trial.

Quotes to Remember: "Malicious hackers in my opinion are not real hackers, people who go out to destroy things, cause trouble for other people and there's no real reason to do that. I can see if there is an individual giving you a hard time. I can see how you might want to go and get revenge but if you take a system down in the process that had nothing to do with it just cause the systems administrator locked you out or called you an asshole just for getting into his system that's stupid, I mean stuff like that is really really pointless. I can understand politically motivated hackers who may do somewhat malicious hacks, but people who go out just to destroy stuff I think is just stupid. There's a small % of hackers who are like that, there are a small % of humans who are like. I myself hack because I love to explore, because its great! I love exploring the networks, networks are generally based on trust, if you destroy the trust of the system then your link is shot and you have to go somewhere else." - Noah - aged 14

For more information see back issues of:
Phrack
The Legion of Doom Technical Files
2600 - The Hacker Quarterly

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