Why was I willing to be tempted into exchanging information with Eric, when for me to even talk with him violated my terms of release? Think of it like this: I was living in Las Vegas, a city I didn’t know well and didn’t much like. I kept driving past the gaudy hotels and casinos, all tarted up to draw the tourists and gamblers. For me this was no fun-town. There was no sunshine in my life, none of the thrill and intellectual challenge I’d experienced when hacking into the phone companies. None of that adrenaline flow from finding software flaws that would let me electronically march right into a company’s network—the rush I’d felt back in the days when I was known in the online underworld as "Condor," my hacker handle. (I had originally chosen that name out of admiration for a character who was a particular hero of mine, the one-step-ahead-of-everybody guy played by Robert Redford in the movie Three Days of the Condor .)