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.
-------------------------------------------------------------

end of extract