Since adult entertainment operator Eddie Munoz first told state regulators in 1994 that mercenary hackers were crippling his business by diverting, monitoring and blocking his phone calls, officials at local telephone company Sprint of Nevada have maintained that, as far as they know, their systems have never suffered a single intrusion.

The Sprint subsidiary lost that innocence Monday when convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick shook up a hearing on the call-tampering allegations by detailing years of his own illicit control of the company's Las Vegas switching systems, and the workings of a computerized testing system that he says allows silent monitoring of any phone line served by the incumbent telco.

"I had access to most, if not all, of the switches in Las Vegas," testified Mitnick, at a hearing of Nevada's Public Utilities Commission (PUC). "I had the same privileges as a Northern Telecom technician."

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