Lewis De Payne

Overview

Lewis De Payne, also rendered Lewis DePayne and known within the computer underground by the handle Rosco (also written Roscoe), is an American former phone phreaker and computer hacker. He was a prominent figure in the Southern California phone-phreaking community of the late 1970s and 1980s, and is best known as one of Kevin Mitnick's earliest and closest associates. Federal prosecutors later named him as Mitnick's co-defendant in the 25-count indictment returned in Los Angeles in 1996 covering the intrusions Mitnick committed while he was a fugitive.

The Los Angeles phreaking scene

De Payne became active in the Southern California phone-phreaking community during the late 1970s, a period when telephone switching was moving from electromechanical to computer control and the boundary between phone phreaking and computer hacking was dissolving. He operated a telephone conferencing system known as the UFO conference line, later called HOBO-UFO, which functioned as a gathering place for hobbyists, phreaks and early computer enthusiasts in the Los Angeles area. Participants used the bridge to trade technique, swap internal telephone-company documentation and recruit one another into projects.

On July 18, 1980, the L.A. Weekly ran a cover story by journalist Eddie Rivera, “The Phine Art of Phone Phreaking: A Story of Telephones, Computers and the American Way,” which profiled De Payne under the alias Rosco. Rivera described him as a leading figure in the local phreaking community with detailed knowledge of telephone-network operations, corporate telephone systems and computer networks, and noted that he maintained substantial collections of technical material and acted as a reference point for other members of the underground. The piece is one of the earliest mainstream journalistic profiles of a member of the Los Angeles phreaking scene.

Association with Kevin Mitnick

De Payne met Kevin Mitnick through this scene in the late 1970s and remained one of his closest associates during the formative years of the Los Angeles hacking community. In Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (1991), Katie Hafner and John Markoff place De Payne among the prominent members of a Los Angeles group that also included Mitnick, Susan Headley and Steven Rhoades. Much of the group's activity relied less on programming skill than on pretexting and impersonation — what would later be formalized as social engineering — combined with detailed knowledge of how telephone companies and their internal systems actually worked.

The group's cohesion did not survive law enforcement attention. In 1981 and 1982 Headley testified against Mitnick and De Payne in a theft case involving Pacific Bell, and provided evidence against De Payne in a case concerning intrusions at U.S. Leasing, in exchange for immunity. In 1981 De Payne entered a plea of no contest to charges that he had broken into the computer systems of two San Francisco-based telecommunications companies; his attorney later characterized those offenses as misdemeanors that had been expunged from his record.

The 1996 federal indictment

On September 26, 1996, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles returned a 25-count indictment against Mitnick, alleging that he had broken into the systems of major software and communications companies and transferred proprietary material to computers at the University of Southern California over the Internet during the roughly two and a half years he spent as a fugitive before his February 1995 arrest in North Carolina. The indictment also charged De Payne, then 36 and a resident of Northern California, with helping Mitnick carry out the scheme.

De Payne surrendered to federal authorities in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on September 27, 1996, and was released on $100,000 bond. A former Burbank and Pasadena resident, he was at the time employed as a computer systems manager at WorldPac, an automobile-parts importer and distributor based in Newark, California. According to the indictment, De Payne provided Mitnick with cellular telephones, helped clone handsets by programming them with stolen serial numbers, maintained an Internet account Mitnick used to transfer software, and posed as an employee of a targeted company during a telephone call; he was also alleged to have attempted to mail computer tapes containing stolen software to a hotel in Compton. Only one count set out a specific act by De Payne: a telephone call placed from Los Angeles on May 9, 1994, to an office of Nokia Mobile Phones Ltd. in Largo, Florida. His attorney, Richard Sherman, disputed the strength of the case, arguing that the government's evidence amounted to a single conversation and that no completed crime had been identified.

De Payne's name also appeared in the record of Mitnick's supervised-release violation. In a June 27, 1997 press release, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California stated that Mitnick had disobeyed court orders not to hack or to associate with other known hackers, and identified De Payne as “an individual with whom he had previously engaged in computer hacking.” Mitnick ultimately entered a plea bargain in 1999, pleading guilty to four counts of wire fraud, two counts of computer fraud and one count of illegally intercepting a wire communication.

Significance and legacy

De Payne is significant mainly as a documented member of the pre-Internet Los Angeles underground, a scene whose methods and social structure shaped a generation of American hacking. The HOBO-UFO conference line is an example of how voice bridges served as the social infrastructure of the phreaking world before bulletin board systems and the Internet took over that role, and of how a community organized around the telephone network migrated into computer intrusion as that network became computerized.

He is also a recurring secondary figure in the literature and journalism surrounding Kevin Mitnick, appearing in the 1980 L.A. Weekly profile, in Cyberpunk, in Los Angeles Times coverage of the federal cases, and as an interview subject in Freedom Downtime (2001), the documentary about Mitnick's prosecution and the Free Kevin movement made by Emmanuel Goldstein and 2600 Films. Compared with Mitnick, whose case became a public controversy about proportionality in computer-crime prosecution, De Payne remained largely out of public view, and contemporary reporting described him as relatively unknown even at the time of his indictment.

Timeline

• 1970sBecomes active in the Southern California phone-phreaking community and meets Kevin Mitnick.
• 1980-07-18Profiled under the alias Rosco in Eddie Rivera's L.A. Weekly cover story on phone phreaking.
• 1981Pleads no contest to charges of breaking into the computer systems of two San Francisco-based telecommunications companies.
• 1981Susan Headley begins testifying against Mitnick and De Payne in a Pacific Bell theft case, and provides evidence in a U.S. Leasing intrusion case in exchange for immunity.
• 1991Described as a prominent member of the Los Angeles group in Hafner and Markoff's book Cyberpunk.
• 1996-09-26A federal grand jury in Los Angeles returns a 25-count indictment against Kevin Mitnick that also charges De Payne with helping carry out the scheme.
• 1996-09-27Surrenders in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles and is released on $100,000 bond.
• 1997-06-27A U.S. Attorney press release on Mitnick's sentencing names De Payne as a hacker Mitnick was barred from associating with.
• 2001Appears as an interview subject in the 2600 Films documentary Freedom Downtime.