John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura
John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura
Much of "The Fugitive Game" aims to question, if not discredit, Markoff's role in the Mitnick affair.S q u i s h y T h i n g s
Littman implies that Markoff had a kind of vendetta against Mitnick and suggests that the reporter aided the FBI in nabbing the hacker. Markoff adamantly maintains that, though he knew Mitnick was reading his e-mail, he was an impartial journalist covering a hot story -- an observer rather than a participant.
Littman reprints a Washington Post story that quotes Markoff: "I don't know if I consider myself a victim... It's a squishy thing. I was trying as hard as I could to be a reporter."
That sounds accurate and honest. Undercover reporting, after all, has its similarities to hacking. When Markoff hooked up with Shimomura and his FBI cohorts in North Carolina during the Mitnick endgame, he didn't lie about his identity -- but he didn't immediately announce himself as a reporter, either. A stickler might fault Markoff, but most of his colleagues would have done the same thing. Getting a great story usually involves some kind of squishiness.
A comparative reading of the three Mitnick books doesn't suggest that Markoff did anything terribly unethical, in my view. (As a matter of full disclosure, I should note that Markoff is a former colleague of mine at the San Francisco Examiner and that he wrote an article about SALON's launch. High-tech journalism is a small world; you're never more than an e-mail away.)
If there were problems with the New York Times coverage of the story, they had to do with that paper's tradition of impersonal journalism. Of course Markoff was "a part of the story" -- any journalist covering any big event for a high-profile media outlet can't help becoming a part of the story.
Markoff's original page-one news story about Mitnick's arrest made no mention of his e-mail being read. Only in a "News in Review" essay days later did the reporter write about the events in the first person. The delay in dealing with the story's personal angle made it appear that Markoff was trying to hide something.
The moral? Reporters are sometimes part of the news, too -- and when they are, they should write about it from the start.