[ISN] Hack Your Way to Hollywood

[InfoSec News]

http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63147,00.html

[Stories like this frost me to no end, what does it show? lie, 
cheat, steal, scam or hack, and you will be rewarded for it in the end. 
What kind of message does this send out? There is a definate lack of 
ethics education in the schools and at home.   - WK]


By Xeni Jardin
Apr. 29, 2004 

LOS ANGELES -- An America Online customer service rep illicitly surfs 
the company's customer database, ferrets out private data on celebrity 
members and then hunts them down online under a false identity, 
seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood. 

Sound like a prelude to prison? Not in the case of Heather Robinson. 
The former AOL employee managed to parlay privacy violations into 
useful contacts in Hollywood. With the help of those contacts, 
Robinson, 25, landed a movie deal, and she's using her toehold in the 
industry to advance another. 

Later this week, Universal Pictures will start filming Robinson's 
first movie, The Perfect Man, a romantic comedy staring Hillary Duff 
and Heather Locklear. The film is about a teenage daughter who tries 
to create a "nonexistent boyfriend for her dejected mother," Robinson 
said. The story is based on another of her youthful indiscretions when 
she was 16 -- this one involving a stolen credit card and thousands of 
dollars of purchases. 

Some would say it takes Robinson's level of moxie to succeed in 
Hollywood. In fact, the favorite legend in the movie business is that 
of a hard-working kid who starts in the mail room and through 
ambition, flexible ethical standards and political skill becomes a 
mogul. Judging by her exploits so far, Robinson is well on her way. 

"Although she's, at best, a scam artist, you have to grudgingly admire 
this young woman," said Mark Ebner, co-author of Hollywood, 
Interrupted, a book in which Robinson's exploits get a chapter. "In a 
town of liars, cheats and thieves, it's small wonder she's been 
welcomed." 

Hired by AOL in 1997, her $6-an-hour job involved answering subscriber 
questions, resetting lost passwords and solving billing problems. With 
access to screen names, phone numbers, addresses and credit card 
numbers through AOL's customer database, she gathered information on 
politicians and movie industry power brokers to pursue her career 
dreams. 

During about a year and a half of employment at AOL, the woman, known 
by the AOL screen name "HooterR," contacted or struck up online 
relationships with Goldie Hawn, Carrie Fisher, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, 
producer Lauren Shuler Donner and the late comedian Chris Farley, 
according to Robinson and Ebner. 

"I asked my AOL supervisor, 'Are we allowed to contact people?' -- and 
the answer was yes, as long as I followed specific policies," Robinson 
said. "It's hard to get into the entertainment industry. If I weren't 
a good person they would have told me to go away." 

She baited celebrities into online conversations by using private 
information she had collected about them without their knowledge, 
sometimes assuming false identities -- for instance, that of a lonely 
female airline pilot. 

Some of these online encounters led to sexually explicit chat 
sessions. Robinson said she even had a real-world rendezvous with an 
influential Hollywood producer that resulted in a back-seat sexual 
assault. She claims to have evidence locked away in Arizona: a stained 
shirt, à la Lewinsky. 

AOL declined to discuss details of Robinson's employment, but 
spokesman Andrew Weinstein said activities described in Hollywood, 
Interrupted and a subsequent New York Observer interview would 
constitute a violation of current and former company policy. 

A document obtained by Wired News shows that Robinson was disciplined 
at least once at AOL for inappropriate use of customer data. A 
"Corrective Action Business Conduct" letter addressed to Robinson 
three months after she was hired placed her on a 90-day probation 
after a customer complained about repeated misuse of confidential 
account information. 

Weinstein said internal security is tighter seven years later. He 
declined to state whether the company will pursue legal action against 
Robinson, but said AOL's legal department is currently reviewing the 
matter. 

The one-time AOL employee may also have broken state privacy laws. 

"There could be a variety of legal complaints under state law, and the 
celebrities themselves could potentially bring tort claims under 
various state laws," said Pam Dixon of the World Privacy Forum. "She's 
essentially an electronic stalker. It's unfair, unethical and in some 
states, probably illegal." 

Those issues aside, Robinson is attempting to turn the online snooping 
into her second movie deal within a year. She's now shopping a new 
semi-autobiographical feature film called E-Girl. A press release 
promises the movie "will only depict the clever, amazing and 
heart-rending aspects" of her "cyber subterfuge with major 
personalities and power players." 

Robinson had a colorful past even before she started at AOL. The 
Perfect Man chronicles some of it. The movie is a sugarcoated 
retelling of an episode in Robinson's teen years that resulted in 
felony charges of fraud, theft and forgery, according to Tucson Police 
Department documents. 

In late 1994, Robinson teamed up with a high-school friend and 
concocted a scam to assume the identity of an imaginary Air Force 
colonel to romance Robinson's single mother, Janet Robinson. 

Heather obtained access to an Air Force base near her Tucson home and 
sent her mother photographs and love letters from a fictional Col. 
Cunningham, duping the recent divorcée into believing she was carrying 
on a virtual affair with an officer. Heather perpetrated the fake 
affair for three months. She went so far as to send her mom a marriage 
proposal consecrated with the delivery of a ring, which she bought 
with a stolen credit card and altered ID swiped from an employee at 
the Air Force base. 

The girls were arrested Feb. 10, 1995, and confessed to having used 
stolen credit cards to make more than $4,000 worth of attempted 
purchases. Because Robinson had no prior criminal record, charges were 
later reduced from felony to misdemeanor, resulting in a 120-hour 
community service sentence. 

"We were 16 years old, and I wanted to do something good for my mom," 
Robinson said. "After the court stuff was done, my mom put her arm 
around me and said, 'I understand why you did it and maybe some day 
they'll make a movie about it.'" 

And they are. Perfect Man is slated for release in 2005.