A W o r l d o f I n e p t i t u d e
Illustration by Eric White
Tsutomu Shimomura doesn't think too highly of most of the people who appear in "Takedown."
The word Shimomura loves to apply to hackers is "anklebiters." He evinces little interest in his opponent, Mitnick, whom he seems to view as a troublesome gnat that somehow became a bee-sized nuisance. The rest of the world is full of incompetents.
The WELL's representatives are either insufficiently skilled technicians or red-tape-spinning administrators. Netcom's people aren't much better, nor are most of the cellular phone company employees. The FBI, the Justice Department and the U.S. marshals? Forget it. His own trusty sidekick, a colleague named Andrew Gross, gets repeatedly called on the carpet for dumb mistakes. Even Shimomura's co-author, Markoff, is at the receiving end of some complaints about "melodramatic" writing.
Individually, these judgments may have their merits -- but collectively they form a portrait of impatient intolerance with the messy everyday world. Comparisons with "Star Trek's" Mr. Spock tend to pop up in profiles of Shimomura, but Mr. Spock found human error illogical, not contemptible.
Maybe this isn't the real Shimomura -- perhaps he's a much more compassionate fellow than "Takedown" lets on. We don't have much choice but to accept the book's portrait, though: it's written in Shimomura's first-person voice. Markoff takes a "with" credit, and appears in the book only in the third person.
As you'd expect, "Takedown" is adept at describing the intricate methods Shimomura used to track down Mitnick across the Internet and the cellular phone network. But it's surprisingly clumsy at offering a broader portrait of life in the community of computer-security experts.
You expect "Takedown's" avalanche of detail about Shimomura's extensive array of computers -- but not its alarmingly irrelevant level of detail about the meals Shimomura consumed during the Mitnick manhunt. We learn some fine points about California microbreweries, and spend a surprising amount of time hopping in and out of hot tubs.
The book's most awkward device is its romance subplot: while Shimomura is tracking Mitnick, he's also wooing a young woman named Julia Menapace. As Julia struggles to decide whether to break off her long-time affair with Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Gilmore and take up with Shimomura, Shimomura grows increasingly impatient with her.
It almost seems that, to him, she's just one more incompetent.