By SCOTT ROSENBERG
I. T h e T w o P i c t u r e s
Thick glasses, double chin, frowning lips and a bitter stare: Kevin Mitnick's 1989 mugshot is forbidding -- a hacker gargoyle. By the time of Mitnick's most recent arrest, in February, 1995, the photo had appeared twice on the front page of the New York Times.
No one made Mitnick into a hacker; that was his own choice and responsibility. But the media turned his trespasses into legend. The Times turned that little photo into a receptacle for all its readers' projections of digital-age paranoia -- an icon of junk-food-fed, anti-social computer thievery.
Who might exorcize this demon? How about a young, Japanese-born physicist, ski bum and computer-security expert, revealed in photos as an elfin young man with long black hair -- in short, a wizard like Tsutomu Shimomura?
When Mitnick apparently broke into Shimomura's computer system on Christmas Day, 1994, he threw down a challenge that would lead to his capture two months later. If Mitnick was "the dark-side hacker" (as he's called in "Cyberpunk," until recently his only in-depth portrait), then his nemesis, Shimomura, stepped right out of central casting into the role of a Jedi knight.
The story of the Mitnick manhunt, recounted by veteran computer reporter and "Cyberpunk" co-author John Markoff, broke in the New York Times on February 16, 1995 -- setting off a different kind of chase, one involving agents and deals and contracts. This month, the stores will be crowded with the fruits of that second hunt -- a complementary trio of books, each, "Rashomon"-like, providing a different angle of vision on the Mitnick saga.
Individually, these volumes are dissatisfyingly incomplete. Put them together, though, and they debunk the very media-legend stereotypes that sold each of the authors' contracts. Mitnick is no demon; Shimomura is no wizard. Crime and punishment online is a lot harder to score than a Dungeons-and-Dragons-style duel.
Next page: A trio of tales