On June 1, 1990, Poulsen took over all of the telephone lines for Los Angelesradio stationKIIS-FM, guaranteeing that he would be the 102nd caller and win the prize of a Porsche 944 S2. When the Federal 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 nonpayment of rent, where computer equipment was discovered which was furnished to the FBI for evidence. When he was featured on NBC's Unsolved Mysteries, the show's 1-800 telephone lines mysteriously crashed. Poulsen was arrested in April 1991 following an investigation led in part by John McClurg. In June 1994, Poulsen pleaded guilty to seven counts of conspiracy, fraud, and wiretapping. He was sentenced to five years in a federal penitentiary, as well as banned from using computers or the internet for 3 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. Although Chris 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..
Journalism
Poulsen has reinvented himself as a journalist since 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 firm SecurityFocus, 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 by Symantec. 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 for Wired News, which hosted his blog, 27BStroke6, later renamed Threat Level. In October 2006, Poulsen released information detailing his successful search for registered sex offenders using MySpace to solicit sex from children. His work identified 744 registered people with MySpace profiles and led to the arrest of one, Andrew Lubrano. 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 with Adrian Lamo regarding WikiLeaks. In June 2019, Poulsen was accused of doxing Shawn Brooks, a 34-year-old Trump supporter living in The Bronx, when Poulsen revealed his identity in an article published in The Daily Beast on June 1, 2019 for being the alleged creator and disseminator of a fake video, which showed Nancy Pelosi speaking in a slurred manner.
