Hyperion took out an ad in Publisher's Weekly for "Takedown" that reprinted the Mitnick mug yet again with these words: "He could have crippled the world. Only one man could stop him. Shimomura."III. T h e H e i n o u s C r i m e s
"Crippled the world"? Huh?
"Takedown" summarizes Mitnick's wrongdoings as "reading other people's mail and stealing their software." These are certainly immoral and almost certainly criminal acts. I don't want Kevin Mitnick reading my e-mail -- no doubt neither do you. If I were Markoff or Shimomura I'd be pretty mad to find him rummaging around my hard disk, too.
But, as Littman persuasively argues, it's hard to see what deep national threat Mitnick posed. 
Among the files he allegedly pilfered from Shimomura's computer and stashed at various online locations -- including accounts he hacked into on the WELL and Netcom -- investigators found a big list of Netcom customers' credit card numbers. That sounds scary. But there's no evidence Mitnick ever used any of them, and it turns out that copies of this list had apparently been floating around the hacker underground for months.
Mitnick is also accused of stealing proprietary cellular-phone software systems, and that's of understandable import to company officials. But how do you calculate this sort of damage in dollar figures? Think back on your last few software purchases and "upgrades" and you'll recall how arbitrary the pricing of "intellectual property" can be.
Shimomura scoffs at the argument that Mitnick was simply a curiosity-driven hacker; he finds no "higher moral purpose" in Mitnick's exploits -- probably because there is none. On the other hand, Mitnick never seems to have made a cent from his hacking, and never escalated from electronic harassment and snooping toward any kind of violence to property or people. If this is how "the dark-side hacker" hacks, we can all breathe a little more easily.
Mitnick seems to have pursued his telecommunications trespassing out of some kind of compulsion (after one of his earlier convictions, he got some minor breaks by accepting a diagnosis of "computer addiction"). Most readers are likely to conclude that he deserves some sort of jail sentence. But did he need to be turned into a demon -- a posterboy for technophobic paranoia?
When we embrace reductive pictures for complex issues, we lose the chance to assess what's really at stake. Hypnotized by visions of duels between demons and wizards, we lose track of today's far more important conflict over computer security -- the battle for privacy and freedom on the electronic networks of the future.
Next page: That feeling of insecurity