Overview

CIA agent Knuth had been very insistent when he recruited Flir. He needed personal student information, including social security numbers, and, as an agent for a non-domestically focused intelligence agency, didn t have the authority to get such from the US government. He did, on the other hand, have the authority to get Flir complete immunity for any computer crimes that did not kill or physically injure anyone. The letter the agent gave Flir was on genuine CIA letterhead and stated both the terms of the immunity and promised Flir significant jail time if he disclosed any details about this mission.

Flir was a 16-year-old sophomore at one of the nation s best technical colleges, Pacific Tech. A professor had recruited him the previous year to solve some grant-funded physics problems. This was a rare thing to happen to any undergraduate and an extremely rare thing to happen to a 15 year old. You could call him a real genius.

While Flir s mind had a very rare intelligence, as the mind of a 16-year-old genius, it also possessed a gullibility that wasn t rare among 16 year olds or geniuses. So he never even suspected that Knuth wasn t a CIA agent he just asked for a pair of powerful, extremely thin laptops with the top of the line network cards and went to work.

Flir wasn t the kind of hacker depicted in most movies. He wasn t omniscient, but that wasn t really what hacking required. He was...