Of course, all this time I was also still in contact with Eric Heinz, who kept bringing up Kevin Poulsen’s name. I had never met Poulsen but had read enough and heard enough to admire his hacking achievements. It was strange that we had never met, never hacked together, because we were close to the same age and had grown up just a few miles apart. He would later explain that he started learning about phone phreaking some time after I did—I was already famous in the hacker community when he was still a neophyte.