Telephone company officials generally reject the idea that outsiders can get past security measures to reprogram the computerized switching gear to redirect telephone calls. But in the past decade, there have been numerous examples of hackers who were able to commandeer telephone switches in central offices, allowing them to tap phone lines, reroute calls, destroy billing records and otherwise create mayhem. And Emmanuel Goldstein, publisher of 2600, a quarterly journal for members of the computer underground, said it would be fairly easy to divert calls by falsely applying the phone company's call-forwarding feature to a phone number. Any sort of business might be vulnerable to such sabotage, he said. In September 1995, for example, Michael Lasch, an independent plumber in Levittown, Pa., a suburb northeast of Philadelphia, was sentenced to seven to 23 months in the Bucks County Prison after pleading guilty to using a telephone call-forwarding scheme to pick up service calls from his competitors' customers.
Prostitution is illegal both in Las Vegas and in surrounding Clark County.
Recently, the phone company and the telephone directory publisher filed papers seeking to have the suit dismissed. If they can do this to us, they can do it to anyone. Eddie P. Munoz, another operator of a nude-dancing business in Las Vegas, tells a similar tale. Like Mrs. Brauer, Munoz blames his competitors and believes that he has evidence that his calls are being diverted either by a group of computer outlaws or by corrupt phone company employees. A spokesman for the FBI said the bureau had also found nothing.