On June 1, 1990, Poulsen took over all of the telephone lines forLos Angelesradio stationKIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller and win the prize of aPorsche 944 S2.[2][3][4]
When theFederal Bureau of Investigation started pursuing Poulsen, he went underground as a fugitive. A storage company cleared out a storage shed in Poulsen's name due to non-payment of rent, where computer equipment was discovered which was furnished to the FBI for evidence. When he was featured on NBC'sUnsolved Mysteries, the show's1-800 telephone lines mysteriously crashed.[2][5] Poulsen was arrested in April 1991[6] following an investigation led in part byJohn McClurg.[7][8]
In June 1994, Poulsen pleaded guilty to seven counts of conspiracy, fraud, and wiretapping.[6] He was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary and banned from using computers or the internet for three years after his release. He was the first American to be released from prison with a court sentence that banned him from using computers and the internet after his prison sentence. AlthoughChris Lamprecht was sentenced first with an internet ban on May 5, 1995, Poulsen was released from prison before Lamprecht and began serving his ban sentence earlier. (Poulsen's parole officer later allowed him to use the Internet in 2004, with certain monitoring restrictions).[9]
Poulsen reinvented himself as ajournalist after his release from prison and sought to distance himself from his criminal past. Poulsen served in a number of journalistic capacities at California-based security research firmSecurityFocus, where he began writing security and hacking news in early 2000. Despite a late arrival to a market saturated with technology media,SecurityFocus News became a well-known name in the tech news world during Poulsen's tenure with the company and was acquired bySymantec. Moreover, his original investigative reporting was frequently picked up by the mainstream press. Poulsen left SecurityFocus in 2005 to freelance and pursue independent writing projects. In June 2005, he became a senior editor forWired News, which hosted his blog, 27BStroke6,[10] later renamed Threat Level.[11]
In October 2006, Poulsen released information detailing his successful search for registeredsex offenders usingMySpace to solicit sex from children. His work identified 744 registered people with MySpace profiles and led to the arrest of one, Andrew Lubrano.[12]
In June 2010, Poulsen broke the initial story of the arrest of U.S. service memberChelsea Manning and published the logs of Manning's chats withAdrian Lamo regardingWikiLeaks.[13][14]
In June 2019, Poulsen was accused ofdoxing Shawn Brooks, a 34-year-oldTrump supporter living inThe Bronx, when Poulsen revealed Brooks' identity in an article published inThe Daily Beast on June 1, 2019 as the alleged creator and disseminator of a fake video which showedNancy Pelosi speaking in a slurred manner.[15][16][17]
^Gissel, Richard (2005).Digital Underworld (August 23, 2005 ed.). Lulu.com. p. 222.ISBN1-4116-4423-9.Kevin Lee Poulsen was born in Pasadena, California in 1965. It was claimed that when he was 17 he used his radio shack TRS-80 to attack Arpanet, the predecessor of the Internet.
^ab"Kevin Poulsen".livinginternet. 2007.Archived from the original on January 2, 2016. RetrievedAugust 23, 2008.
