From Charles Platt Fri May 3 21:32:28 1996
Date: Fri, 3 May 1996 12:30:14 -0400 (EDT)
To: lewiz@netcom.com
Subject: Text you Asked For
Hi Lewis--
Jane Huber (the person who is gathering photos for my book)
tells me you don't remember seeing the text that mentions you
and Kevin. So, I'm hoping to refresh your memory! Below please
find the text that will appear when the book is published this
August by Harper-Collins. Some very minor copy-editing changes
may still occur (correcting my grammar and spelling), but
otherwise, this is the final draft. I think I sent it to you
while you were away at an educational seminar of some kind late
last year ... anyway, I'm happy to send it again. I hope you
like it and approve. And I hope we can include a picture of you
(under the name Roscoe), and a nicer picture of Kevin than that
damned mug shot that the NY Times used.
--Charles
-------------------------------------------------------------
Markoff's former wife and collaborator, Katie Hafner,
also seems to have been spoofed by hackers while she was
gathering material for _Cyberpunk,_ a book that she
coauthored with Markoff. Hacker Kevin Mitnick was graphically
profiled in this account, and so was "Roscoe" (not his real
name), a friend of Mitnick's who now claims that he conspired
to deceive Hafner and never did tell her the whole truth.
"What she wrote only covered maybe ten percent of what
had actually gone on and was interesting," he says. "I spoke
to Kevin [Mitnick] and his ex-wife, and we decided to
collaborate on what we were going to tell Katie, so that our
stories would coincide. We gave her the impression that none
of us were on speaking terms with each other, but in fact we
collaborated on our roles, deciding who would play the
victim, who would be the afraid person, and so on. We put it
all together and had a blast. She wrote what we told her, and
she only heard what we wanted her to hear. Some of it was not
true, some of it was. She had no idea we had prepared it all
together in advance."
Katie Hafner naturally objects to being characterized as
a gullible victim of con artists, and points out that she
also relied on police reports and court documents for her
information. "I spent months and months reporting that
section of the book," she says, "and was as responsible as I
could possibly be. So please don't just take Roscoe's word
for this."
Still, Hafner and Markoff were never able to interview
Kevin Mitnick himself, because he claimed that he deserved to
be paid for his time. Eric Corley, editor/publsher of _2600_
magazine, believes that Mitnick's attitude created a grudge.
"It seemed to me that _Cyberpunk_ was unfairly slanted
against Kevin because he wouldn't talk without being
compensated. They seemed bitter and unfair in the way they
treated him."
In a letter to _2600_ magazine, Mitnick said much the
same thing: "It seems that the authors acted with malice to
cause me harm after my refusal to cooperate."
In an interview for "Newsbytes," an online newsletter,
Katie Hafner denied this. "Mitnick's lack of cooperation
certainly did not lead to any malice or bias directed toward
him," she said. But she added: "Kevin's lack of cooperation
did make the job more difficult and may have possibly hurt
him. If he had been willing to talk, he would have had an
opportunity to respond to other people's statements about
him."
...
John Markoff has literally made a fortune by writing
about Kevin Mitnick. Markoff wrote his first Mitnick piece in
the early 1980s. _Cyberpunk_ profiled Mitnick largely in
Katie Hafner's words (she confirms that her divorce
settlement with Markoff gives her all future royalties from
the book). But Markoff then went on to build a grandiose mix
of fact and exaggeration on this relatively small foundation.
Ultimately, in collaboration with security expert Tsutomu
Shimomura, he personally reaped at least half a million
dollars from Mitnick's story.
Eric Corley still doesn't understand how this was
possible. "Markoff never even met Mitnick," he says. "But he
_took ownership_ somewhow. A lot of the other media outlets
don't seem to realize, this depiction of Kevin is just one
person's conception. Since Markoff benefits so much
personally, you have to wonder how accurate he can possibly
be when he has such a vested interest in the outcome."
One way or another, the Markoff/Mitnick case history is
the most powerful illustration of the journalist/hacker
dynamic--and the most surprising example of teenage pranks
becoming a hugely bankable commodity.
From Jules Verne to John Markoff
Every age has its bogeymen. A hundred years ago, popular
novelists cashed in on people's fear of science and
scientists by creating fictional antiheroes such as Dr.
Jekyll, Dr. Moreau, Captain Nemo, or Dr. Frankenstein.
Today, computer criminals are the new antiheroes.
Instead of Jules Verne we have John Markoff, and instead of
Captain Nemo we have Kevin Mitnick.
Mitnick, of course, is not a fictional character. Yet in
_Cyberpunk_ he became larger than life, a "Darkside Hacker,"
omnipotent, obsessive-compulsive, egotistical, vindictive,
using his computer to take revenge on the world that had
spurned him.
Mitnick later claimed that this was "twenty percent
fabricated and libelous." Maybe so, but the moody,
petulant fat boy punishing his enemies via a computer
keyboard was such a potent image, it was more believable than
Kevin himself. In fact, it displaced reality.
Reality itself was not very exciting. Mitnick held down
a succession of low-paying jobs, took a few computer courses,
and spent huge amounts of time breaking into other people's
computers and snooping around. He was arrested four times,
spent some time in jail, was released, but was then accused
of a probation violation, at which point he disappeared for a
couple of years.
In February, 1995, he was arrested for the fifth time
and accused of copying thousands of credit-card numbers from
Netcom, an Internet service provider based in San Jose. His
big mistake, though, was that he broke into a system owned by
Tsutomu Shimomura at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
Shimomura was so annoyed, he gave up a two-week skiing
vacation to help police find Mitnick and make the
arrest.
Writing in _The New York Times,_ John Markoff said that
Mitnick had been on a "long crime spree" during which he had
managed to "vandalize government, corporate and university
computer systems." Markoff didn't actually name any systems
or say what he meant by the word "vandalize." He went on to
quote Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Walker, who had helped to
run the investigation and naturally had an interest in making
the arrest seem as important as possible. Walker claimed
(again, without any proof) that Mitnick "had access to
corporate trade secrets worth millions of dollars. He was a
very big threat."
In fact, Mitnick hadn't physically damaged any of the
computers that he had supposedly "vandalized," and he hadn't
used any of the credit-card numbers purloined from Netcom.
Markoff tried to make up for this with another titillating
tidbit: some of card numbers belonged to "the best known
millionaires in Silicon Valley."
Other journalists swooped down onto the body of the
story like carrion eaters seeing a carcass that was so big
and juicy, there had to be enough to share. Writing for
_Time_ magazine, Joshua Quittner artfully reworked the
leftovers so that it almost seemed as if he had been an
eyewitness. "Kevin Mitnick, 31, stood in the federal
courtroom," Quittner wrote, "his hands cuffed--unable, for
the first time in more than two years, to feel the silky
click of computer keys." Quittner confidently compared
Mitnick with Billy the Kid, talked about his "hideout," and
praised his "husky, spaghetti-western cool." No one
would have guessed that Quittner's account was derived from
wire stories and from John Markoff--who had never exchanged
more than a dozen words with Kevin Mitnick.
Surely the carcass was now picked clean--but no, there
were just a few more shreds of meat, not enough for a real
meal, but maybe sufficient for some soup. In another article
for _Time,_ Quittner spiced this thin gruel with an
authoritative psychological profile of Mitnick as
cybercriminal. He spoke eloquently about the tragedy of
Mitnick's absent father and typed him as "yet another Lost
Boy in cyberspace, hoping, perhaps, to be found." In fact,
according to Quittner, Mitnick broke into Shimomura's
computer because he was "unconsciously asking to get
caught."
This was truly a landmark in clinical diagnosis, bearing
in mind that it was still based on information from another
journalist who had never conducted one interview with his
source.
After Mitnick was jailed, Katie Hafner managed to meet
him face to face for less than a minute in a public hallway,
where she exchanged a couple of words with him. From this
fleeting encounter she concocted still another Mitnick
article. It appeared in the August, 1995 issue of _Esquire_
beside a full-page painting of Kevin Mitnick glowering into a
computer screen, his brooding face lit by a sinister yellow-
green glow, like a malevolent troll.
The Markoff Story
The summary of Kevin Mitnick's criminal record reads
like the career of a small-town peeping Tom. He's an
electronic voyeur who can't seem to stop himself from peeking
into other people's computers. True, he's a repeat offender;
but he doesn't steal anything, he doesn't do any damage, and
he certainly doesn't make any money out of it. In a world
where genuine computer criminals reap hundreds of thousands
of dollars from banks or telephone companies, why has Kevin
Mitnick been singled out as a menace to society?
Well, John Markoff certainly had a strong financial
incentive to make Kevin Mitnick seem as frightening as
possible. Markoff's first big success developing the "Mitnick
threat" occurred after Mitnick had gone into hiding following
a minor parole violation. "It was weird," says Eric Corley,
"because Kevin hadn't actually _done_ anything. I mean, how
often do you see a front-page story in _The New York Times,_
with a picture, about someone who happens to be on the run
for really minor crimes such as making free phone calls or
accessing computers without damaging them? If he was a serial
killer, it might make sense."
The story appeared in _The New York Times_ dated July
4th, 1994. Headlined "Cyberspace's Most Wanted: Hacker Eludes
F.B.I. Pursuit," it described Mitnick as "one of the nation's
most wanted computer criminals" who was "always fascinated by
spying." Strangely, there wasn't much real news in the
article; after noting that Mitnick had been on the loose for
18 months, it mainly contained material reworked from
_Cyberpunk,_ the book that Markoff had coauthored with Katie
Hafner. Markoff later claimed that "The news was that
[Mitnick] was being pursued by the FBI (three agents full
time), the California DMV, US marshalls, telco security,
local police, etc." This sounded impressive, but
"pursued" hardly seemed an appropriate word, bearing in mind
that the case had gone nowhere for a year or more and many
agencies seemed to have lost interest in it. According to
journalist John Littman, a bounty hunter named Todd Young had
actually tracked Kevin Mitnick down in Seattle months
previously and had kept him under surveillance for two weeks.
"But the Secret Service didn't think the crimes were
significant. The U.S. Attorney's Office wouldn't prosecute
the case. Even the local cops didn't really care."
Still, the headline said "Cyberspace's most wanted," and
the implication was clear enough: a weirdo who could paralyze
vast computer networks was on the loose, and law enforcement
had been too stupid to catch him.
When security expert Tsutomu Shimomura realized that it
was Mitnick who had broken into his system, he called
Markoff, initiating a collaboration that continued to the
moment when Mitnick was finally captured. Law enforcement
also asked Markoff's help, and he told them what he knew,
although it may not have been worth much. He said, for
instance, that Kevin could probably be found at the nearest
Fatburger (a fast-food chain in California) when in fact
Mitnick now worked out frequently, was no longer overweight,
and had become a vegetarian.
Still, the usefulness of Markoff's advice was a
secondary issue. The real point was that he had crossed a
line; he was no longer just a journalist reporting a story
but was now helping to _create_ the story. As he put it
himself, with characteristic hyperbole: "I too became
enmeshed in the digital manhunt for the nation's most wanted
computer outlaw."
When Mitnick was finally placed under arrest, Markoff
and Shimomura were ready to cash in. Just four days after
Markoff's final story appeared in _The New York Times_
their book deal was negotiated with Hyperion. Shortly after
that they had a movie deal with Miramax, and there were plans
to get a CD-ROM out of it as well. Markoff and
Shimomura retreated to a cabin in the beautific country near
Lake Tahoe to crank out the book. Mitnick, of course, was now
behind bars.
According to John Littman, who wrote his own fairly
sympathetic account of the saga, Mitnick was shunted through
a worsening series of county jails, finally ending up in a
cell with seven other men. He was allowed one piece of paper
per day, and a pencil that was shared between all the
cellmates and taken away in the afternoons. Meanwhile, in the
outside world, advance advertising for the Shimomura/Markoff
book claimed that "He could have crippled the world."
Embarrassingly enough, the twenty-three count indictment
against Mitnick--which the Associated Press had suggested
could put him behind bars for 460 years--was plea-bargained
down to one count of possessing a list of phone numbers for
purposes of accessing computer systems. Suddenly it seemed
that Mitnick would probably serve less than a year of jail
time, although this report was buried in a back page of _The
New York Times_.
Having spent a rumored $750,000 on the book deal,
Hyperion obviously had a strong incentive not to back away
from their own hype. Consequently they simply ignored the
prosaic facts of Kevin Mitnick's situation and referred to
him, in the dust-jacket blurb, as "the most wanted hacker in
history" who had enjoyed "one of the most dramatic and
bizarre crime sprees in recent times." Actually, during most
of the so-called manhunt, Kevin Mitnick had lived reclusively
in a small apartment in North Carolina, spending most of his
time with a small computer and a bottle of stomach medicine.
No matter; the machinery of hype continued to run.
The online community was not impressed. "There is a
factor here," a net user named Ronald Austin wrote in an
online news group, "which did not manage to make the front
page of _The New York Times,_ and that is Mr. Markoff's
sequel to his book _Cyberpunk._ He has created the story for
that sequel by abusing his position and perpetrating a hoax
on the public."
Austin was scathing, also, about Shimomura. "I want to
see _exactly_ what happened when, rather than using
traditional signal strength meters and cellular service
testing equipment, our hero pieced together his own OKI900
cellular phone with his HP palmtop to make a device (along
with some neat software he helped develop) which is capable
of following the audio of cellular phone calls from cell to
cell. Why, I'd bet the software even lets him put in the
numbers of the cellular phones he wants to overhear. How such
a piece of equipment would not be considered 'primarily
useful' for the surreptitious interception of oral
communications, thus its mere possession a crime under 18
USCS Section 2512, will of course be thoroughly explained in
the book."
In fact, Shimomura claims that since he was accompanied
by an employee of the cellular telephone company, and was
working on the company's behalf, he had the right to listen
in on phone calls. But once again, this isn't the real issue.
Shimomura had helped to catch Mitnick basically by out-
hacking him. Didn't that mean that Shimomura was himself a
hacker? Were he and Mitnick brothers under the skin?
Supposedly, Mitnick had broken into Shimomura's computer
in search of software for hacking cellular phones. Early in
1996, however, a very different theory was proposed. John
Gilmore, one of the founders of the hugely successful
computer manufacturer Sun Microsystems, revealed that Tsutomu
Shimomura had been working on some highly specialized
software for the National Security Agency that was the real
magnet for Mitnick's interest. Supposedly, the routine was
designed to patch itself invisibly into the kernel (the most
fundamental section) of a Sun computer's operating system,
where it would hide and monitor all the data passing through.
An enhancement would automatically forward interesting
material to some other location on the Internet.
This would have been the ultimate surveillance system.
"Think of it as Digital Telephony wiretap technology for the
Internet," Gilmore wrote in a memo for the "cypherpunks" news
group. "It's a tool customized for crackers. ... Tsutomu has
lots of glib rhetoric about how he just builds tools and they
can be used for good or evil. This tool is custom-designed
for evil."
True, Gilmore had a grudge against Shimomura, who had
walked off with his girlfriend. On the other hand, Gilmore
seemed to have a very clear understanding of the work that
Shimomura had been doing, and he also claimed that when
Shimomura had had a disagreement with the Air Force, he had
threatened to release his invention freely to net users.
Wasn't this just the kind of wild behavior that made
people nervous about hackers? Didn't it imply that Shimomura
was almost as unpredictable as Kevin Mitnick?
The idea was unthinkable--mainly because Markoff had
already gone out of his way to typecast Shimomura as a gentle
scientist with a strong moral code. As Robert Wright noted
sardonically in a piece for _The New Yorker_ titled
"Hackwork," Markoff spared no adjectives in newspaper reports
describing Shimomura:
Shimomura went from being "a well-known computer
security expert" to being "one of the country's most
skilled computer security experts" and then to being (on
the day of the arrest [of Kevin Mitnick]) a "brilliant
cybersleuth." And that was just the beginning. Four days
later, in a piece on the front page of the Sunday "Week
in Review" section, Shimomura became a "master at
manipulating computers".... Shimomura also had "a deeply
felt sense of right and wrong"--in contrast to his
nemesis, Kevin Mitnick, a "chameleon-like grifter," a
"darkside" hacker.
Clearly, if Shimomura really did have something in
common with Mitnick, this was one story that John Markoff was
not going to write. For the sake of the upcoming book
project, Shimomura _had_ to be a good guy.
This raised still more ethical questions. _The Nation_
news weekly quoted _New York Times_ assistant managing editor
Allan Siegal, who admitted that his newspaper has "explicit
rules about people writing about others with whom they have a
commercial or business relationship. We don't allow
it." Of course, Markoff contracted with Shimomura just
a few days _after_ he wrote his story for the _Times_ about
capturing Kevin Mitnick. But Markoff and Shimomura had worked
together on the case for months before that. Had they really
never talked about a book or movie deal? Had Markoff been
"just a journalist" and Shimomura "just a source" until the
precise moment at which Mitnick was caught, at which point--
within a few days--they suddenly decided to get rich from
their unexpected good fortune?
Other critics were more concerned with the crime itself.
Kevin Mitnick had broken into some computers; so what? He had
copied 20,000 credit card numbers; but even Netcom's CEO Bob
Rieger had to admit, in a public statement, that "we have
absolutely no indication that any of our Unix shell
customers' credit card numbers have been used
illicitly."
Some people suggested that the real crime was negligence
by Netcom. Eric Corley claimed that he had published a news
item about Netcom's lax security six months previously,
revealing how easy it would be to access the credit-card
numbers via the net. At that time, Netcom had said it was
impossible.
According to Mitnick's friend Roscoe, "Netcom's credit
card numbers were being _handed out_ over IRC [the Internet
Relay Chat network] _last year,_ and we didn't hear anything
about it from Netcom then." Roscoe added: "When
talking of incompetence, don't forget to mention Tsutomu's
gross negligence and incompetence at computer security, where
he left himself open to penetration by a 'quirk' [in Unix]
that was known for ten years! The bug that was used to
get into his machine was written up in a paper by Robert
Morris. You can look it up."
In fact, Shimomuto's blunder caused Roscoe to label him
a "computer _insecurity_ expert."
Risks
Even Hafner and Markoff have admitted (in _Cyberpunk_)
that Mitnick "seldom if ever tried to sell the information"
he obtained. Nor did he damage data, with the possible
exception of one case where some information may have been
erased by accident. He just liked snooping around.
The real risk, as always, was in what Mitnick _hadn't_
done. "It would not have been difficult," wrote Hafner and
Markoff, "for Kevin and Lenny to take down the telephone
service for the entire [Los Angeles] metropolitan area." Yes,
he _could have,_ couldn't he? And maybe he could have ruined
large corporations, sold secrets to communists, or launched a
nuclear attack. This was the kind of stuff that gave Mitnick
his bogeyman aura and generated a deliciously marketable
mixture of curiosity and fear.
But all of us, hackers or non-hackers, have a huge
untapped potential for causing mayhem in the modern world. As
Patrick Kroupa puts it: "Any idiot can get a gun, take a
stroll down to the local mall, and start blowing away
shoppers. Yet this just doesn't happen all that often. Just
because someone has power, it doesn't mean that he is going
to use it to inflict harm on others."
Most human beings simply choose not to be vandals or
murderers. Society works on a cooperative basis of self-
restraint that we take for granted.
But where hackers are involved, we lose this faith in
human nature. We tend to assume that they _don't_ know the
meaning of self-restraint and will use their skills in the
worst possible way. Why? Because they're not like us. They
have the bogeyman aura, the mad-scientist image. They're
alien and inscrutable. They set themselves apart from
society. Their skills seem like black magic. In the words of
John Markoff: "Federal officials say Mr. Mitnick's motives
have always been murky." Translation: "We don't
understand this guy. Therefore, we don't trust him. So we'd
better lock him up."
In _Cyberpunk,_ Mitnick's obesity and his eating habits
were mentioned more than a dozen times, presumably because
this was the one simple, everyday, visible feature that the
authors could relate to, while Mitnick's mental processes
remained a total mystery.
One reason Hafner and Markoff were baffled may have been
their own ignorance of computers. Hafner claims that her
mother is a computer programmer, but according to Roscoe,
Hafner had to bring along a technical consultant to some
interviews while she was writing _Cyberpunk,_ so she could
understand what the hackers were talking about.
Oddly enough, most other writers who have become
"authorities" on computer crime lack any formal knowledge of
computers. Joshua Quittner was a history major in college and
has a master's degree in journalism. He became a regular
journalist at the Long Island, New York newspaper _Newsday_
and freely admits "I had no background in computers, and what
little I know about them now I learned on the job." Even
Bruce Sterling, whose _Hacker Crackdown_ predates most books
on the subject, was trained in the biological sciences, not
computer science.
It should be no surprise, then, that journalists such as
Quittner and Markoff have an aptitude for echoing and
amplifying the public's fear of the unknown.
Unfortunately, once a media figure has been created and
given frightening powers, another syndrome kicks in: the
witch-hunt. Jim Thomas, the professor of sociology and
criminal justice at Northern Illinois University who also
edits _Computer Underground Digest,_ wrote a paper with his
colleague Gordon Meyer in which he compared anti-hacker
hysteria in the 1990s with anti-communist hysteria in the
1950s:
Witch hunts are about images and social control.
They have typically occured during times of social
upheaval as a way of re-affirming normative boundaries
or providing social unity in the face of a perceived
threat. Similarly, in the 1950s, the imagery of good
against evil was played out in media portrayals,
political rhetoric, public ideology, and legislation. In
both, the public was whipped into a paranoid frenzy by
the creation of mysterious alien demons, in which the
ends justified the means in removing the scourge from
the public midst.
Thomas and Meyer continue by stating that a witch hunt
is a form of scapegoating in which public troubles are traced
to and blamed on others.
Although sometimes the others are guilty of some
anti-social act, the response exceeds the harm of the
act, and the targets are pursued not only for what they
may have done, but also for the stigmatizing signs they
bear.
In other words, if he looks like a hacker and smells
like a hacker, it makes no difference whether he stole a
couple million from Citibank or merely trespassed into
someone's computer. The reaction is the same in both cases.
and this is exactly the attitude we see toward Kevin Mitnick.
To people who actually know Mitnick and have some
knowledge of computers, he's neither scary nor weird. Eric
Corley met him twice in 1990 and talked to him on the phone
many times, right up to the day in 1995 when Mitnick was
captured by the FBI. According to Corley, "Kevin wasn't
compulsive when I hung out with him. He didn't seem to be
addicted to anything. A lot of people who use computers are
portrayed as strange or compulsive by journalists, but to me,
they just seem like regular people who just happen to be
interested in computers."
Roscoe feels that Mitnick did have compulsive work
habits, but not to a pathological degree. "It's true," he
says, "that Kevin would stay up all night if he got started
on something. He had to finish it; he couldn't pace himself.
But in any other area, we'd call that kind of person a
workaholic, or an overachiever. When it's someone who's
breaking into a computer, all of a sudden he has a
psychiatric label attached to him."
Was there a vindictive streak? Corley doesn't think so.
"I never saw a malicious side of Kevin. I've seen him
frustrated and wondering why all this publicity is of
interest to so many people, but he never wanted revenge, he
just wanted not to be put back in jail. It seems to me they
wanted to put him back no matter what. He had tried to get
legitimate jobs, he was trying to fit in somehow, but he was
never given the chance."
Roscoe is a little less sanguine. "FBI agents have
already complained that while Kevin was on the run, they were
getting strange things happening to them," he comments. What
kinds of things? Mindful that anything he says might be used
as evidence in some future trial, Roscoe is careful to answer
only in general terms. "Hypothetically," he says, "a person
might find all his credit cards reported stolen. Or he might
be buying a car or trying to buy a home and find that the
escrow is held up because of negative entries in the credit
profile that don't belong there. He may have a quit-claim
deed filed to the state on his property, which causes massive
confusion with the title company. His kids can get pulled out
of school for emergencies that don't exist--there are all
kinds of possibilities."
Lenny, Mitnick's one-time co-conspirator who turned
against him, would seem to be a prime target for this kind of
harassment. Roscoe agrees. "Kevin doesn't like Lenny, and
when the opportunity arises, Lenny will start having some
trouble."
Still, many people might feel tempted to retaliate in
some way against a former friend who turned them in to the
police, resulting in a one-year jail sentence. It's more
relevant to ask if Mitnick hurt people who were _not_ his
enemies. Was he, in any sense, a "darkside hacker"?
"In no way," says Corley.
"If 'darkside hacker' means Kevin was trying to steal
national defense secrets to give them to a foreign country,"
says Roscoe, "that certainly isn't Kevin. He had no interest
in military secrets, US government items, anything like that.
Here's what I told Katie Hafner for her piece in _Esquire,_
where she quoted me out of context: There are many serious
criminals plying their trade across the United States. But
Kevin Mitnick was not in business making money from other
people's computers. He only obtained information to show that
he could do it. At worst he was a pain in the neck whose
punishment should be that he has to walk around for six
months with his pants off."
A Bankable Commodity
John Markoff adamantly maintains that he has presented
an accurate picture of Kevin Mitnick at all times, with no
undue exaggeration. "I didn't create the character, Kevin
did," Markoff wrote in response to one critic. "He has now
been arrested six times in fifteen years. Each time, except
for this last time, he was given a second chance to get his
act together. He chose not to. ... He chose to keep breaking
into computers. He knew what the penalty was. So what's the
problem?"
Katie Hafner isn't so sure. She now admits that she
characterized Mitnick unfairly in _Cyberpunk._ "It might have
been a mistake to call him a darkside hacker," she says.
"Still, that's how you learn."
Today, having benefited from her "learning experience"
of erroneously labeling Mitnick a threat to society and
disseminating this distortion to a potential audience of
millions, Hafner seems to have a kinder, gentler attitude.
Speaking on the phone from her office at _Newsweek_ magazine,
she sounds sympathetic--almost motherly. "I really think he
is not darkside in the sense of being an electronic
terrorist," she says. "He's not out to cripple the world. He
isn't, he isn't! Saddam Hussein, or Hitler, they were out to
cripple the world. There are malicious characters out there,
but Kevin is not one of them. But it was hard for me," she
adds plaintively, "since I hadn't spoken to him personally
till after I wrote the book, to know what his motives were."
Hafner is now divorced from John Markoff. She seems to
be on friendly terms with her ex-husband and is reluctant to
say anything negative about him, but she does agree that the
exploitation of Kevin Mitnick has gotten out of hand. "He has
been turned into this bankable commodity," she says. "Leave
the guy alone! He's had a really tragic life."
The Roscoe Story
Roscoe is bitter about the way that he and Mitnick were
treated by Hafner. "She would interview us with her nice
smiling face," he says, "but once she got out of there she
labeled us cybercriminals."
He maintains a prickly relationship with journalists in
general. While Mitnick was hiding from the authorities,
reporters called Roscoe repeatedly, begging him to set up an
interview for them with Mitnick. When they annoyed him
enough, Roscoe made sure that they weren't disappointed. "I
enjoy playing performance art on the media," he says. "There
was a prime thing that happened to KCOP TV, Channel 13 news.
They got their interview with Kevin--or so they thought. The
same thing happened with _The Los Angeles Times._ A reporter
from the _Times_ kept calling and calling, wanting an
interview--so, she got an interview. According to the Sunday
valley edition, a source close to Kevin revealed he learned
how to play classical piano at an early age in order to
control his blood pressure. He had a secret penchant for
opera, and he was devoted to a pet poodle." Roscoe chuckles
happily. "Needless to say, nothing could be further from the
truth."
Roscoe knew Kevin Mitnick better than almost anyone, and
had hoped to sell a book of his own that would tell the true
story once and for all. Ironically, Roscoe had trouble
finding a publisher for his book--presumably because truth is
less salable than fiction.
I happened to catch Roscoe in a mellow mood one evening,
and spoke at length with him on the phone. Since he has
admitted playing pranks on journalists, there was obviously a
possibility that he wasn't being straight with me, and I
asked him to document some of his claims--which he was more
than ready to do. His story creates a valuable picture, not
just of Kevin Mitnick but of Roscoe himself, who was just as
much a hacker during his teenage years.
Roscoe freely admits that Mitnick was a master of online
deception. "To give you just one example," he says, "Neill
Clift, in England, specializes in documenting Vax bugs
[defects in the Vax computer operating system]. He was using
PGP encryption to send bug reports to Digital [DEC].
Eventually he learned that he was not really sending them to
DEC, he was sending them to an intermediate site where Kevin
was decoding the messages."
Of course, this is supposed to be impossible. Messages
encrypted with Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software are
impregnable. So how did Mitnick break the code? Like any good
hacker, he set things up so that he didn't have to.
According to Roscoe, Mitnick was already intercepting
Cliff's messages to and from DEC _before_ Cliff started using
encryption. When Cliff and Digital agreed on the code key
that they would use for future messages, Mitnick intercepted
this information along with everything else. "After that,"
says Roscoe, "it was simple for Kevin to decrypt the messages
from Neal, copy them, re-encrypt them with the proper key,
and send them on their merry way. And this went on for
_eight_ _months._ Neal only found out in the end because some
of the bugs were too good to waste, so Kevin kept them
instead of passing them along. Neal finally talked to the
folks at Digital on the phone, and he found that things
didn't quite jibe."
Roscoe chuckles over the story. He obviously enjoys the
Mitnick touch--spoofing that is so arrogant, so outrageous,
it goes one step beyond what anyone assumes is possible.
Roscoe believes, though, that Mitnick will never serve
any more time in jail. "They will never catch Kevin again.
Every time, he has learned not to repeat his mistakes. In
this case he learned the ultimate lesson: don't trust
strangers. Do it alone, by yourself."
The stranger who betrayed Mitnick in 1995 was Justin
Petersen, a former hacker who used the handle "Agent Steal"
after he was recruited to work on behalf of the FBI.
"Petersen was sitting in a Texas jail when they approached
him," says Roscoe. "Later, while he was out there introducing
himself to Kevin, he was also committing credit card fraud
using FBI-supplied ID as well as wiretapping bank transfers.
My attorney, Richard Sherman, now has an action sitting in
Federal court accusing the FBI of complicity, and part of
that is due to Justin Petersen, because he was acting as
their straw man and setting up wiretaps without a warrant. He
was also committing fraud with credit card numbers, so he's
now at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles,
awaiting sentencing. So there you have it," he says, moving
into sarcastic mode. "The FBI's trusted information
source."
Some people might assume from this that Roscoe has a
knee-jerk anti-authoritarian attitude, but that label doesn't
quite fit. For several years he has been Manager of
Information Services for a large California corporation where
part of his job is maintaining system security. He also says
that he does unpaid work for local law enforcement. "While
these idiots at the FBI are themselves breaking the law in
order to get a conviction, here I am doing volunteer work for
the LAPD. They're understaffed, so I put together donated
equipment from various vendors, and I write the code to do
automatic call processing, so people calling the front desk
can be transferred to the proper department. I also have a
sheriff's departmentt that wanted me to participate in the
design of a database to track narcotics crimes. That one was
actually a joint project with the FBI! So I'm helping law
enforcement in areas where they can use help. You see, I
don't have any problem with authority figures unless they try
to be authoritative. When they try to be pompous, then I
enjoy playing with them."
That was what happened when his own apartment was raided
last year. The FBI seized his equipment, then demanded the
password that they needed to unlock his files. Roscoe
refused; he said he would use the password himself while the
FBI were present, and would open up his system for them, but
he would not reveal the password. The FBI refused to accept
this; and so, Roscoe says, his attorney filed a court order
ordering them to return his property. "The same agent who'd
taken it out had to bring it right back," he says happily. "I
told him, 'You can set that right there, Ken. Is there
anything else missing that we might have to go to court on?'"
Behind the humor, though, Roscoe seems righteously angry
about this kind of routine seizure. Like most hackers, he has
a deep-rooted "don't tread on me" reflex; and he's also
capable of being inhumanly persistent. As a result, he says,
suing the authorities has become a fulltime hobby: "I'm now
pursuing the Department of Justice simply because it has to
be done. For some time now, these guys have been finding any
excuse they can to get a search warrant so they can break
into someone's home, whenever they suspect something about
hackers. Most of their victims can't afford an attorney, and
they have to settle out of court or reach a plea bargain
arrangement--or go into debt for the rest of their lives. I
want to put a stop to that. I can afford to hire a good
attorney, and I can oppose them all the way through to the
Court of Appeals."
This, says Roscoe, is where his own case is currently
pending. "The Department of Justice said I had features on my
phone line that I wasn't paying for, and therefore there was
a crime being committed, and therefore there was
justification for a search warrant. Well, we obtained a
statement from the president of the department that does
audits for Pacific Bell, and out of 11 million accounts,
between 1 and 4 percent were getting features they didn't pay
for. That's more than 100,000 people, minimum. I want a 100
percent ruling in my favor. I want the search warrant
declared void and invalid. Once I have that, I can file a
civil suit against them."
How far does he pursue this hobby, and how much does it
cost?
"Let's just say that even with the ungodly prices that
real estate fetches in this area of the country, I could have
paid for a good part of a house with what I've spent. But I
already do own a three-bedroom home. I also have a vacation
home, and I own land. So, I'm able to spend money on my
hobby."
And the ultimate objective?
"Hopefully, if all this goes through properly, when the
FBI's abuses get to Congress with a court seal, it might set
the FBI back to the 1960s."
Earlier this year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals
ruled in Roscoe's favor.
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end of extract