Hacker Faces Trial in Hospital Phone Jamming

A telephone hacker who allegedly tied up the lines at Palomar Hospital for hours at a time was bound over for trial Monday on dozens of felony wiretapping and eavesdropping counts.

Rick Ivkovich is accused of using his touch-tone telephone to jam the lines of the Escondido hospital, bringing switchboard operators to tears.

From as early as April of last year, prosecutors alleged, the 25-year-old occasionally blocked both outgoing and incoming calls from the hospital and connected hospital operators to outside lines, including 911 emergency lines and the County Jail in Vista. He also allegedly reported false emergencies at the hospital to 911 while making it appear as if he were calling from the hospital itself.

“He was able to dial that phone very fast, and I was barely able to follow his fingers to realize that he was dialing the main number at Palomar,” Escondido Detective Richard Hardy testified at Monday’s preliminary hearing at Vista Municipal Court.

In court, Hardy, who was the only witness called, said Ivkovich “admitted to tying two people together (on the phone) and listening in” on them.

Hardy also testified that Ivkovich admitted to “getting a little carried away” in his phone calls to the hospital.

Outside the courtroom, Deputy Dist. Atty. James Valliant said Ivkovich “had a gripe with the operators at Palomar. He wanted to use their telephone system and he wasn’t allowed to.”

After his testimony, Hardy, who investigated the case, said Ivkovich had been “locked up” in Palomar’s mental health unit and had been arrested by sheriff’s deputies “several times,” but could not elaborate.

In total, Ivkovich is charged with 18 counts of wiretapping, 18 counts of eavesdropping and nine counts of falsely reporting an emergency, all of which are felonies.

Thirty-six misdemeanor counts of making annoying telephone calls were dropped because of an amendment to the law that came into effect this year. Before this year, all annoying phone calls were illegal, but the amendment excludes calls to businesses.

“This appears to be a bizarre amendment to the law,” Valliant said outside the courtroom.

The public defender representing Ivkovich, William Saunders, argued that even if Ivkovich did all the things that the prosecution accused him of doing, there may not have been a violation of the law.

“The calls are not private communications as required in the (eavesdropping) statute. First of all, he’s a party to the call,” Saunders told the court.

“Any call to 911 is a taped call . . . and I don’t think there is any expectation of privacy there.”

Saunders also argued that wiretapping charges require some physical attachment to the telephone lines, of which there was none.

But Vista Municipal Judge Harley Earwicker swept aside those arguments, saying that while no actual wiretapping took place, “there was an unauthorized connection,” which fulfilled the wiretapping provisions.

Palomar Hospital officials had been tearing their hair out last year trying to deal with the telephone hacker’s antics.

“He would do things that were very upsetting. He would grab access to one of our (telephone) trunks and then call 911 and say he was in the hospital and that somebody was chasing him with a knife,” said Palomar Hospital’s telecommunications representative Jane Miller in an interview before the hearing.

At times, a constant flow of calls from the prankster would come in on the hospital telephones, leaving the switchboard attendants frustrated.

“He did it to the point where our operators were in tears, and they couldn’t take it any more,” Miller said. “You’re a trauma center, supporting several hundred physicians, and you have several hundred beds, and even if you know that the next line is his, you can’t not answer it.”

Miller and the authorities thought at first that Ivkovich used computers to confound the system, but now believe that he managed to make the hospital’s PBX--private branch exchange--his own simply by using a touch-tone telephone.

Escondido police finally tracked down Ivkovich in December through a series of telephone “traps” that isolated a line and traced calls back to their point of origin.

Police believe that Ivkovich, who lives with his parents in Vista, used his family’s home telephone and the business telephone of his father.

The court released Ivkovich on his own recognizance in December with the stipulation that he not have access to a telephone.

“We have to unplug and lock the phones up when we’re not there with him,” said Richard Ivkovich, Rick’s father.

Ivkovich’s trial will begin Feb. 14 in Vista Superior Court.