# Kevin Poulsen: the man who won a Porsche by owning the phone company > Dark Dante took over every incoming line at a Los Angeles radio station to guarantee he was caller 102, and drove away in a Porsche. He was also a defence contractor by day, the first American charged with espionage for a computer crime, and - after five years in prison - the editor who broke some of the biggest security stories of the 2000s and co-built a leak system for journalists. Source: https://ronutz.com/en/learn/kevin-poulsen-dark-dante Updated: 2026-08-28 --- ## Caller 102 On 1 June 1990, Los Angeles station KIIS-FM ran a contest: the 102nd caller after a song sequence won a Porsche 944 S2. Kevin Poulsen, working as **Dark Dante**, took control of the station's twenty-five incoming telephone lines, blocked every other caller, and placed the winning call himself. It was not his only radio prize - the run included a second Porsche, cash and Hawaiian holidays - and it is the caper the world remembers, because it is the rare computer crime that is instantly legible: a man reached into the phone network and made a promotional lottery return the answer he wanted. The technique was pure telephone-switch mastery. Poulsen had spent years inside Pacific Bell's systems - dialup access to switches, the internal manuals, physical entry to central offices, the wiring closets and the test lines. He could reroute numbers, wiretap, unlist and relist, and reconstruct any line's status at will. He treated a public utility as a private laboratory, which is a phrase that captures both the skill and the offence. ## Two jobs at once The detail that makes him unusual: while doing this he held a **daytime job at SRI International**, a defence research firm, with clearances, testing military computer security. The same person spent business hours hardening systems and evenings owning the network they ran on. That duality is the through-line of his story, and the field has never resolved what to make of it. His most serious charge came from that world. Investigators alleged he had obtained classified material relating to a US Air Force exercise, and he became the **first American charged with espionage arising from a computer crime** - a charge later dropped, but not before it set the tone for how his case was treated. When the FBI closed in, he ran, and lived as a fugitive for seventeen months. That is when the story got strange even by the standards of this history: the television programme *Unsolved Mysteries* profiled him as a wanted fugitive, and - according to the accounts that followed - the show's toll-free tip line stopped working the moment the segment aired. He was recognised and arrested in a supermarket in 1991, and served just over five years, at the time the longest sentence handed down in the United States for computer crime. His release conditions barred him from touching a computer for three years. ## The second career Here is where the file diverges from every legend that preceded it. Poulsen did not resurface as a consultant selling his own myth. He became a **journalist** - at SecurityFocus, then as a senior editor at *Wired*, where his reporting was consistently better than the coverage his own case had received. The work is substantial. He built a program that cross-referenced MySpace profiles against a public sex-offender registry, identifying a registered offender using the site to approach minors, and the resulting arrest was the story. He wrote *Kingpin*, the definitive account of Max Butler and the carding underground. He edited *Wired*'s Threat Level and broke a long run of the era's defining stories - and in 2010, when Adrian Lamo brought him the chat logs of a young army analyst, it was Poulsen's reporting that made the Chelsea Manning story public, a decision the community still argues about with real heat. He later co-created **SecureDrop** with Aaron Swartz, the anonymous submission system now run by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and deployed at news organisations worldwide. ## What the case is good for Poulsen is the field's cleanest proof that the underground's skills are not a phase to be outgrown but a lens that can be re-aimed. The same patience that mapped a telephone switch maps a court docket; the same instinct that found the unlisted test line finds the unasked question in a press release. There is a warning inside the same story. His mastery came from a network that trusted anyone already inside it - Pacific Bell's controls assumed physical access implied authorisation, and the [same in-band, in-building trust](https://ronutz.com/en/learn/phone-phreaking-and-the-blue-box) that made phreaking possible made an insider with a lock pick indistinguishable from an engineer. Two decades of security architecture since have been an argument with that assumption, and the argument is not finished: replace *central office* with *cloud console* and the sentence still describes a real risk.