Jonathan Littman

review of
Jonathan Littman's The Watchman - The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 24, 2016

READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/495781-the-extraordinary-accomplishments?ch...

To Kevin Poulsen, wherever you are, I wish you well. Ignore the title of this bk, it's one of those 'we-must-contextualize-this-as-criminal-b/c-we-don't-want-people-acting-this-way' types of frame-up. It cd more appropriately be titled The Extraordinary Accomplishments, Audacity, Bravery, and Intelligence of a Hacker - not that I agree w/ everything Poulsen did but I think there's no good reason to throw out the baby w/ the bathwater.

Then again, author Littman doesn't really throw out the baby either. He manages to let enuf of Poulsen's purported outlook enter the narrative for those of us sympathetic to it to catch on. Take this bit from the Prologue:

"To Kevin, the FBI doesn't understand. They take away his job, his life, they paint him as a criminal when he believes his actions have always been beyond reproach. In his mind, they're the real threat to freedom and privacy in the information age: the things they do to hackers, they'll soon try to do to ordinary citizens. But it won't work, not with what Kevin has planned. One more hack and he'll be a legend in the underground." - pp 4-5

Whether this is a fair & accurate depiction of Poulsen's POV I don't know. After all, I don't know the guy personally, I'm just taking the writing here as reasonably truthful & keeping a critical mindset for things that might seem suspiciously not so. If it IS Poulsen's POV I can relate. Any truly creative person is at odds w/ a status quo society & the FBI's job is to reinforce the status quo. Even if the FBI were a model of integrity, enforcing only laws that truly protect people from harm, it wd still have a rigid mindset incapable of understanding nuance resistant to the Draconian.

But do YOU trust the FBI? Just about any political activist is familiar w/ the tales of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that framed & imprisoned & murdered Black Panthers & AIM members & the like. & let's not EVER forget the massacre of the MOVE folks - the FBI certainly had a hand in that. Ok, it was the BATF that slaughtered the Branch Davidians but it was still a branch of 'law enforcement' whose trigger-happiness did the killing. Poulsen is right to criticize & resist these people. Hackers can be the wild card in a game that's otherwise rigged.

"Hackers were making computers better, more powerful, easier to use, blazing a path the next generation could use to probe deeper. The process of hacking, the dedication, the abandon with which they hacked, formalized a code: question authority and demand access to information. Hackers would change the world, hack the machines into something that would improve the life of the ordinary man. Impure motives were impossible for the self-evident reason that by nature and training, hackers had superior ethics. Real hackers never hacked or phreaked for money, To do so would be to undermine the calling, to prove that you were not, after all, really a hacker." - p 12

"question authority and demand access to information" or, better yet, Question authority and access information - in other words, it's not a matter of 'demanding' information from those who think they have the right to keep it from you, it's a matter of taking the personal initiative to be a researcher. BE A CRITICAL THINKER - but also recognize what you want to support & don't oversimplify.

"The year is 1978, the birthdate of the test-tube baby. There's talk of DNA sequencing to cure disease and the emergence of a mysterious malady that destroys the immune system and slowly kills huge numbers of its victims. The first breeze of the microcomputer revolution is in the air, and sales of Steve Jobs's and Steve Wozniak's revolutionary Apple II personal computer are taking off." - p 12

This is the kind of thing that triggers my "Wha?"-alert, my critical reading.

"It is widely believed that HIV originated in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo around 1920 when HIV crossed species from chimpanzees to humans. Up until the 1980s, we do not know how many people developed HIV or AIDS. HIV was unknown and transmission was not accompanied by noticeable signs or symptoms.

"While sporadic cases of AIDS were documented prior to 1970, available data suggests that the current epidemic started in the mid- to late 1970s. By 1980, HIV may have already spread to five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia). In this period, between 100,000 and 300,000 people could have already been infected." - http://www.avert.org/professionals/history-hiv-aids/overview

Now that's from an online history accessed in 2016, it's historical wisdom in hindsight. Rather than say that in 1978 there was "the emergence of a mysterious malady that destroys the immune system" it might be more accurate to say that "In September," [of 1982] "the CDC used the term "AIDS" (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) for the first time, describing it as... "a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease."

"In 1983, scientists discovered the virus that causes AIDS. The virus was at first named HTLV-III/LAV (human T-cell lymphotropic virus-type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus) by an international scientific committee. This name was later changed to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)." - http://www.theaidsinstitute.org/node/259

W/ these quotes in mind, I think that Littman is tweaking the timeline just a tad to make his narrative more compact. Placing "the emergence of a mysterious malady" in 1978 might be a little too early - & if such a tweak is evident to me here where in the rest of the bk might it not be evident to me?

""Operator, can you connect me to 213- . . ." It's the number of the pay phone next to Kevin in the mall." - p 13

""OK, you call an operator and make a collect call. Before the party answers, after one ring, you click the line and shout, "Yes, I'll accept!"" - p 22

Kevin starts off his hacking as a phone phreak in 1978, he was 12 or 13 (having been born in the fall of 1965). On January 24, 1979, "TESTES-3", the 1st of a series of "phone stations" initiated by Richard Ellsberry & cofounded w/ myself & Doug Retzler officially began. We were in out mid 20s. We were unaware of the phone phreak scene at the time. Phone stns were phone numbers that cd be called for interaction w/ a more participatory media. We advertised TESTES-3 (the phone number (this was before dialing the 3 digit exchange became necessary for local calls)) thru word-of-mouth & stickers stuck in public places that sd "For a Good Time call TESTES-3". Callers heard our outgoing msg & had the chance to be recorded at its end by our answering machine. Such machines were still new enuf at the time to be unknown to most callers. We operated anonymously.

A yr later, we moved onto our 3rd stn, 962-0210, the one founded at a time when the phone company was 1st making various services available: call-waiting & call-forwarding in particular. 962-0210 was very experimental & I was the main person running it. One of the things we did was forward calls to us to phone booths. At the time, if a person was making a long-distance call it was possible for the operator to call a number given by the caller where a person wd answer & accept the charges for the call. One 962-0210 caller made a call from the phone booth next to the one that 962-0210 was forwarding to & had the operator call 962-0210 for the charges to be accepted. They then answered the adjacent phone to accept. They presumably did this just to demonstrate that it was possible &, perhaps, to warn us to be more careful. They didn't do it to drive up our phone bill b/c they immediately hung up their calling phone after accepting the charge. We found that interesting & educational.

TESTES-3 only lasted for 5 mnths before we changed our number to "VD-RADIO" & opened up our way of doing things much more widely. Nothing that we were doing was illegal. The TESTES-3 phone & answering machine was hidden in my bedrm closet. Nonetheless, one day when I wasn't home. one of my more politically naive roomies opened the door to a self-identified 'phone repairman' who claimed to be responding to a call about problems w/ the 837-8373 (TESTES-3) phone. My roomie let the 'repairman' into my bedrm where he stayed unsupervised for the next 20 or more minutes. If I had been home, the 'repairman' wdn't've been allowed in so it seems obvious to me that our house, & possibly my life, was enuf under surveillance already for it to be known that only my most naive roommate wd be home.

When the roomie told me about this I was upset since, of course, there'd been nothing wrong w/ the phone & no call to the phone co had been made. I immediately assumed/deduced that the phone was now tapped. However, I made no effort to find the tap & didn't worry about it. TESTES-3 always took it for granted that participation in the project was done at one's own risk & hoped that callers had enuf since to not do anything incriminating. One caller identified himself as the "Columbo Kid" & advertised pot for sale. There was always the possibility that this was a sting operation. At any rate, we hoped he wasn't really so stupid as to advertise actual pot dealing in such a public way & we hoped no-one was stupid enuf to buy from him. Maybe the 'phone repairman' was a hacker. It's unlikely that I'll ever know.

If this was a phone co tap what was the justification? We were paying for the phone service & were merely allowing people to use us a conduit. There was nothing illegal at our end. As I wrote earlier, "Any truly creative person is at odds w/ a status quo" & the police state has "a rigid mindset incapable of understanding nuance resistant to the Draconian." In other words, we were presumably under surveillance b/c what we were doing was weird, ie: creative, & that's inevitably suspicious in a society where robopathically toeing the line is primarily what's ultimately encouraged. Such obeisance makes it easier for the TOP DOG CRIMINALS, the ones who permeate society w/ heroin, the ones who try to run the world w/ money, the ones who can't think much past the power-that-money-CAN-buy. I have no respect for them & much respect for the hackers who represent an ethic rather than greed.

Whenever I read something purporting to be biographical by someone who obviously has limited access to reliable data I have to wonder how much is fictionalized?:

"But Kevin's mechanical skills won't manifest themselves for years. Books are his first love, nonfiction mainly. Biographies. Everything from Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamen's tomb, to the legendary Harry Houdini. Kevin is amazed by Houdini's feats as an escape artist and magician, but he's even more intrigued by Houdini's second career as a debunker of spiritualists and exposer of frauds and charlatans. To Kevin, magic is the search for wisdom and justice." - p 17

Ok, that's all believable enuf, I, too, was fascinated by Houdini (have you seen his movies?) but the sources for this narrative aren't directly credited. They're probably from Poulsen & his family & friends.

"One morning, when his high school English teacher isn't looking, Kevin pencils another name into her roll sheet. The class is so large and the teacher is so harried that at first she doesn't even notice. Kevin writes his story, then he writes another one for his double. What could be more creative in a creative writing class? He reinvents himself, pushing himself to develop a different style and voice. But being two students in the same class is too demanding. Kevin is juggling, trying to keep his own alter ego up in the air. He's fifteen years old, and he's already experimenting with his first alias." - p 24

I'm impressed, Poulsen was going where few people ever go - in the direction of the truly creative. Most students wd've just written their story & never considered the meta-context of creative writing in general. When I was 15 I wrote my Honors English seatmate's high school yrbk entry for him & then wrote "Indifferent" as my own self-description. That, too, was a way of creating an alter ego. One can more or less count on other people not having the time or energy to notice how complex a person might really be.

Poulsen & fellow hacker Ron Austin become friends. Both get arrested. Poulsen is still a minor so he gets off.

"Ron's accommodations immediately improve once they realize he's important enough to make the front page of the Times. They transfer him to Highpower, where his cell adjoins that of Angelo Buono Jr., the legendary Hillside Strangler, convicted earlier in the week of torturing and sexually assaulting an eighteen-year old girl before strangling her to death." - p 37

SHEESH. If that's true, then I, personally, think that was a bad call. I don't think that Austin's accommodations exactly 'improved' by being next to a torturer/murderer. At least Tom Hayden stepped in. It's nice to see that an older generation political activist noted the hacker potential:

"Out on a $2,000 bail bond put up by his parents, Ron makes the trip alone in his Mustang to the posh house Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda share in north Santa Monica. Hayden, the famous sixties activist, is Ron's local state assemblyman. The maid opens the big oak door. "I don't think you've done anything that serious," volunteers Hayden"

[..]

""You know I've been in trouble with the law myself once," the celebrated left-wing politico confides in the young hacker. "Ever hear of the Chicago Seven?" Ron shakes his head, and Hayden tells how he, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and other antiwar crusaders were harassed after they disrupted the 1968 Democratic convention. "Ron, I think they're trying to do the same to you. They're looking for a scapegoat. You're going to get railroaded."" - p 38

Then again, what's wrong w/ this picture? "The maid opens the big oak door." How egalitarian & revolutionary can Hayden be if he's got fucking servants? Austin & Poulsen are approached by a financially successful computer expert:

"Kevin tallies up Goodfellow's toys: the new BMW, the $10,000 Grid portable, the $4,000 Motorola Brick, and the luxury cars Goodfellow mentioned, among them a rare vintage Jensen Intercepter. Is there really this much money in legitimate computer hacking?

""You know I'm really proud of you guys," Goodfellow gushes as he motions for the bill. "Yup, you guys are following right along in my footsteps." Then, the patron saint of hackers pulls one more gizmo he hadn't shown his young friends. A plain old pocket calculator. "Let's see," he says, rapping the buttons like a keyboard. "Ron, you owe . . . and Kevin you owe . . ."" - p 42

Obviously, there's a subtext here, presumably intended by Littman: the showily rich guy courts the young hackers as possible employees of the place where he works but then makes sure they pay their parts of the bill even though it wd be much more affordable for him than it is for them at the expensive place he's chosen for them to eat at. I wdn't trust a guy like that.

"It's the fall of 1984, and once more Kevin is ahead of the game. Ron may be facing trial, but Kevin has a security clearance and a job. Goodfellow arranged for an account for Kevin on the Arpanet via a Navy host computer, and Kevin proved a fast learner. Perhaps most surprising was not that Goodfellow got Kevin a job at SRI as a computer operator and junior system administrator, but that he did it so easily. Top SRI managers, many of whom were internationally recognized experts with Ph.D.s in computer science, trusted Goodfellow's judgment, and saw no conflict in hiring a computer hacker and high school dropout to do classified military computer work. Only Don Parker, a world renowned SRI computer security expert and author of numerous books on computer crime, protested Kevin's hiring. Parker had interviewed hundreds of hackers and computer criminals, and was the nation's most quoted authority on hackers and computer crime. He didn't believe hackers could be rehabilitated." - pp 46-47

Given "Question authority and access information" let's hope that hackers can't "be rehabilitated" if being "rehabilitated" means becoming a robopathic pawn for the Military-Industrial Complex instead of resisting it. As time goes on, Poulsen certainly becomes less "rehabilitated" as he hones his B&E skills & switches from the computer to physical bldgs:

"One night, Kevin squeezes the bolt cutters and snaps off the padlock from the metal gate at the nearby central office. Back at home, Kevin slices the lock open with a hacksaw. Since Pac Bell makes its own custom key blanks, Kevin must also modify a standard blank with a fine grinder, widening grooves, reshaping the edging. Thirty minutes later, Kevin's handmade blank fits the lock.

"Kevin places his new blank in the cylinder, watching the lock's seven pins push up. he has to shape it so the pins align with the top of the cylinder. Kevin files the key carefully, then puts it back in to see where the first pin aligns. He files a little more until it's flush with the cylinder. Six more pins and Kevin gets lucky. When he returns, the key also fits the central office front door." - p 62

When most people think of Breaking & Entering they probably think of someone burglarizing their home to steal their valuables. Understandably, people don't want this to happen. What Poulsen's doing here is different, he's entering telephone company bldgs in the pursuit of knowledge. Not every B&E is done w/ malicious intent. Long ago, friends of mine & I used bolt cutters to cut off the padlock on a water tower so we cd take the spiral staircase inside to reach the top & enjoy the view. Then we'd put our own padlock on. Then someone else wd come along & cut our lock off & put theirs on. We stopped when they put TWO locks on, even tho it wd've been easy to cut both off, b/c we figured we were becoming enuf of an annoyance for them to want to catch us. Poulsen might've just picked their lock & left it there & they wd've been none-the-wiser.

As I'm fond of saying, "We are all UNEQUAL under the LAW & THAT is its PURPOSE" & "When Money's God Poor People are the Human Sacrifices". In other words, anyone who has the misfortune to be at the bottom of a society wants a deviously skilled person like Poulsen as a friend b/c it's hunting season all yr round for the poor & ya just never know when you might need some extralegal skills to save yrself from laws that don't necessarily have yr best interests at heart. Of course, it's better to learn these skills yrself but some of us have other things to do, other approaches. If this were Hitler's Germany or 21st century Philippines you might want to hone yr skills for slipping thru the net b/c the people w/ the net are playing for keeps. They'll kill you off until they start to worry about the lack of slaves.

READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/495781-the-extraordinary-accomplishments?ch...… (mais)

I’ve long heard about Kevin Poulsen, but didn’t know as much about him as I did about another early hacker, Kevin Mitnick, and I wanted to learn more, so this book was great. And it just so happened that it was by one of my favorite technology nonfiction authors, Jonathan Littman, who also wrote a book on Mitnick that is also quite good. Mitnick may be more infamous, but Poulsen was possibly better. It’s debatable, but regardless, Poulsen was one of the early old school hackers to take complete control of the phone system and change the way America and law enforcement looked at hackers.

Poulsen started out, like so many of the early ones, phone phreaking in his early teens and graduated into hacking. He early on learned the innards of Pac Bell, first by dumpster diving, then by social engineering, then by phreaking. By his late teens, he probably knew more about the phone system than any non-phone employee in the world, and more than many phone employees themselves. Unfortunately, he of course, got into legal trouble and had to get a “real” job, so ironically, he got a job with SRI, a major defense contractor, where he got a security clearance and worked with top secret military information. Also, ironically, his young boss was another (former) phreaker who started to encourage Kevin to resume phreaking and hacking and together they started engaging in criminal activity, going to Pac Bell switching centers and picking locks and breaking in, stealing manuals, passwords, souvenirs, phones, accessories, switches, and everything else. Kevin eventually got COSMOS manuals, which gave him total access to everything in Pac Bell’s systems, so that he could create new phone lines, new switches, could wiretap anyone he wanted from anywhere, could place calls from dozens or hundreds of untraceable locations, etc. He broken into TRW to scam credit reports, the DVM, the FBI, Pac Bell Security, etc. His buddy Ron, who’d already been busted for hacking/phreaking, grudgingly helped him at times. However, he started spending so much time at night out doing criminal activity that he was neglecting his really important defense job, that they fired him. However, he landed at Sun Microsystems, which would have been really cool if he could have stayed there. Except he got arrested. And released on bail. And went from Northern California to L.A. There, he and Ron met a strange so-called hacker named Eric Heinz, among many other names (Justin Peterson was another). He figures prominently in the Mitnick book. He was an older hacker who looked and acted like a celebrity rocker, hanging out in Hollywood clubs, driving a Porsche, having sex with different girls, usually strippers, every night, recording the acts, usually bondage, and he was a violent criminal – who also knew how to hack, to a certain degree. He wasn’t as good as Kevin, but he wanted to learn and he was eager to help Kevin, so they formed an uneasy partnership and off they went breaking into Pac Bell switches at night. By this point, Kevin was so brazen that he made himself Pac Bell IDs, uniforms, stole a Pac Bell van, drove to their headquarters in LA, walked in, knowing he was wanted, signed himself in, walked to the Security department after hours, broke in, and made copies of all of the memos and documents about him and his partners, hundreds of pages, and walked back out. When the Pac Bell security personnel finally tracked him down with the police and the FBI some time later, they were shocked at finding their own “secure” documents in his place. He also found out who they were wiretapping and wiretapped them back.

Here’s something he did that was a little sleazy. He had always justified his actions as simply innocent old school hacking, harming no one, searching for information and knowledge. However, at some point, he became aware of a group of 50 dead phone lines and voicemail boxes attached to LA escort Yellow Page ads. He went into COSMOS, snagged all the lines for himself, making them untraceable, set up the mailboxes, found a pimp/partner who had the girls, set up an escort ring, and became an digital pimp. He never saw the girls or the pimp. He just liked the challenge and I guess he made a few bucks from it too. However, what he’s most famous for is fixing, not once, but twice two radio station call in competitions with the DJ, Rick Dees, where they were giving away a $50,000 Porsche. He and Ron rented a seedy office, got eight phones, set up eight phone lines attached to the radio station, ran them into his phones, and when the three songs were played in order and the phones started ringing, at some point, the callers all got busy signals and Kevin and Ron were the “right” callers and won their cars. They also won other deals, like $10,000 in cash and trips to Hawaii. Another biggie is when Kevin was featured on the TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, at the request of the FBI. While it was being aired, all 30 phone lines to the show went down for the duration of the show while the FBI sat there and fumed. They knew what had happened and who had done it.

Eventually Kevin and Eric had a bit of a falling out and Eric got especially careless. Kevin was cocky and got a little careless himself. Arrest. He was facing two federal indictments in northern and southern California, one of which would have netted him 100+ years in prison, the other of which would have given him 37 years in prison. The headlines were brutal. The charges were insane. Espionage. Breaking into military computers. Military networks. The implication that he had been wiretapping the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Not proven. Classified military documents. Well, he has security clearances and that was part of his job. Idiot prosecutors and FBI were too stupid and too eager to send him to prison for life to actually look at what he had actually done or not done. When it was all said and done, most of the charges were dropped, virtually all of the serious charges, and he served about five years in prison. This was in the early 1990s, even though his hacking career began back in the very early 1980s. I don’t know what happened to him between when he got out of prison and now, but I do know that now he’s a respected security “expert” and journalist. He’s an editor for Wired Magazine and recently wrote a book called Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground, which I read just a month or two ago. It was well written and quite interesting. So obviously, he’s come a long way and more power to him. He had a lot of growing and maturing to do and he seriously had to pay his debt to society. It appears he has.

For me, this book is probably worthy of five stars, but I’m not certain if it’s outstanding enough to actually merit five stars. It’s a tough call. It’s at least a four star book. It’s interesting, well written, detailed, tension filled, easy to understand (for the most part), and well documented. And I don’t really know how it could have been improved. So to be honest, even though I’m not certain it’s a five star book, I don’t see how I can’t give it five stars. I just don’t see how it could have been better. It was an excellent book. So, five stars and recommended if you like to read histories of old school hackers and hacking.… (mais)

I realized as I was reading this that I had read this before -- 20 years ago when it was first published. I had forgotten that, but it came back to me as I read it again. And I really enjoyed reading it again, even though so much about technology and the Internet has changed since then. Littman wrote so that the information still seems relevant all this time later.

The book is, of course, about the world's most famous hacker, Kevin Mitnick, and about the government's insane obsession to catch him and bring him to their form of "justice" back in the mid-90s when he was a fugitive. Littman interviewed tons of people for this book and spent over 50 hours interviewing Mitnick himself, so I take Littman's word over anyone else's aside from Mitnick's himself in his own autobiography of a couple of years ago (which was excellent), particularly those of John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura, the author/New York Times reporter and the NSA spook and super security expert/hacker who "helped" the FBI track and catch Mitnick.

The book details Mitnick's unhappy childhood, his beginnings in ham radio and then computing and phone phreaking, his growth in social engineering and his troubles with the law as a teenager. It started early. And hacking became an obsession. However, Mitnick was an "old school" hacker. He didn't do it for money or profit. He did it for the challenge and for information. He liked breaking into systems and finding out information and he liked breaking into phone systems. As a young adult, he was once again caught and sentenced to a fairly short term in prison, but he was put in solitary for eight months and it scarred him, permanently. He was allowed outside for one hour a day -- with murderers. He wasn't allowed access to computers, of course, or even to telephones, as the prosecutor had convinced the judge he could start World War Three by using the phone to launch our nuclear missiles, as insane as that sounds, and the judge bought it. When he got out of prison, he tried to get a legitimate job, but his probation officer would call these companies and tell them Mitnick couldn't be allowed near money or anything secure, so he couldn't get work. He grew even more bitter. He and his hacker best friend Lewis DePayne started doing some black stuff again.

Meanwhile, much to my initial confusion, Littman's book actually pretty much starts off with the story of a different hacker, Eric Heinz, aka Agent Steal. Aka quite a few names actually. And one who is actually an FBI informant. And one who sets up Mitnick for a sting which the FBI will use to arrest Kevin again so they can put him away for a good, long time. Why? Don't know. He had already done his time. He was doing no real harm. He was trying to live a decent life. So the FBI was trying to screw him over from day one. Nice. Great government watching over us. Mitnick and his buddy caught on, however, and started tapping the phones of the FBI agents watching them. Kevin was working for a detective agency at the time and found out its lines were tapped, as well as his father's, so he knew what was going on. At some point, though, Heinz started screwing the FBI by doing some black hat hacking and when they went to arrest him, he went on the run, so their informant was a bust. Littman actually interviewed him over the phone a number of times.

Around this time, Kevin's probation was about to run out. However, literally as that was about to happen, he screwed up and was almost arrested and he fled. All of a sudden, he was a fugitive on the run. And so it really began. Mitnick disappeared, although he apparently later went to Seattle because he narrowly escaped arrest there some time later. He and Littman got in touch through Lewis and the telephone calls began. Littman paints a fairly sympathetic picture of Mitnick, although not always. For instance, he wasn't thrilled when he discovered that Kevin was reading his email on The Well, an ISP I used to use at the same time. When Littman told The Well's tech support staff that a hacker had root access on their system, they said it was impossible, their system was impregnable, and they wouldn't believe him. But Kevin had hacked their system and was not only reading email, but dumping huge files on their system, stolen source code he had hacked from corporations such as Motorola, Qualcomm, perhaps DEC, and ultimately over 21,000 credit card numbers he stole from Netcom, another ISP. Ultimately, the FBI would accuse him of stealing credit card numbers from computers all over the country, which wasn't true, but they never accused him of actually USING any, as he never did, so he never gained anything monetarily from them. Furthermore, with all of his hacks of source code and programs, they claimed he stole $80,000,000 worth of stuff. But he never sold any of this source code, never profited from it in any way, never deleted the original source code from the companies he made COPIES from, never actually hurt them. So the FBI was clearly out to screw him. And when they ultimately got him, he was facing over 200 years in prison.

Meanwhile, the self described Kevin Mitnick "expert," John Markoff, a New York Times reporter who had written a book on hackers a few years before, about a third of which featured Mitnick, was busy writing front page articles on Mitnick and the dangers he presented to the world. He wrote old allegations and myths that Mitnick had hacked into NORAD, inspiring the movie Wargames with Matthew Broderick, that he had hacked into numerous secure sites that endangered the safety of our country, that he was stealing phone companies' software worth billions, etc. Markoff hadn't even talked to Mitnick. Littman had. A lot. Markoff and Littman knew each other as journalists. They even had lunch together a few times. Littman never told him he was in contact with Mitnick, even as Markoff stated that he wanted to catch Mitnick himself. Littman was a little shocked by that.

So Kevin was on the run all over the country and kept calling Littman. Meanwhile, on Christmas day in 1995, I believe, Tsutomu Shimomura, a quietly well known NSA "spook" and super security expert had his personal computer broken into and everything in his computer stolen, which included a number of custom built "tools" which would enable someone to basically break the damn Internet and also cell phone code that would enable anyone to eavesdrop and trace calls without a warrant, among many other things. It made huge news and within hours, Markhoff reported it on the front page of the New York Times. At the same time, Mitnick called Littman, gleefully giving him a detailed account of how the hack attack took place, what happened, what was stolen, what happened to it, etc. Obviously, Littman was left to conclude that Mitnick did it, and everyone else concluded the same thing, based on Markoff's article. Shimomura was mega-pissed and vowed to catch the person responsible as a matter of honor and immediately set about doing so. With Markoff at his side. Which was odd. What was an NSA spook and a journalist doing going about pursuing a federal fugitive with or without the FBI's help? Were they deputized? No. Nonetheless, they flew to San Francisco, where the US Attorney and FBI agent in charge essentially put Shimomura in charge of things. He brought his own equipment with him and using it, as well as, perhaps, the equipment of the cell phone companies and the FBI, he was able to determine that Mitnick was in Raleigh NC, so he flew there immediately and joined a Sprint technician with scanning equipment. Where they were joined by an unidentified Markoff. And a couple of FBI agents. The Sprint guy and Shimomura located Mitnick's apartment in 30 minutes. They then returned with Markoff holding the equipment for another look. A journalist playing the active role of law enforcement. Littman pulls no punches in how he views this. And when the FBI finds out about this, they lose it. Shimomura tries to throw his weight around, but they dump Markoff. Nonetheless, Shimomura still has enough weight to accompany the FBI to Mitnick's apartment the next day to arrest him. As Mitnick is being handcuffed, he tells Shimomura that he respects his skills and Shimomura just stares at him.

But it doesn't end there. Mitnick is eventually flown from North Carolina to California after being jailed there for far too long and after Markoff's articles have made Shimomura a superstar. And surprise, surprise, Markoff and Shimomura sign a $750,000 book deal for a book on their tale of tracking down and capturing Mitnick. Then they sign a movie deal based on the book for a whole lot more money. It's truly disgusting. Mitnick hires a good attorney, but the US Attorney hates this man and sets out to screw Kevin by indicting his buddy, Lewis. Mitnick's attorney already represents him and can't then represent Kevin too, so Kevin is left without a lawyer and the public defender says they have no one to take his case. He's truly screwed and looking at 200 years in prison. But something happens. Magazines and newspapers start looking at and questioning Markoff and Shimomura's roles in this event. It seems suspicious. For everything that happened in this case, Markhoff was prepared with a front page story within several hours, like he had written them ahead of when they actually occurred. Almost like Mitnick was entrapped by Shimomura on the Christmas day attack. And then there was the rumor circulating that an elite Israli hacker had actually been the one behind the attack on Shimomura's computer and that, moreover, it wasn't the first time his computer had been penetrated and that, moreover, a number of people had his files and programs. Kevin was just one of them. So was Kevin set up by the government and Markoff/Shimomura? They certainly appear to have used unauthorized wiretaps, illegal hacking actions, illegal hacking/phreaking tools and actions for which Shimomura had had to get immunity to display to Congress two years before, but which was still illegal, etc. There were a lot of irregularities with this case. And of the 24+ indictments, not too many made sense. There weren't many that were absolute and provable. In fact, the only one that seemed solid was his probation violation. That's it. He never actually broke anything. He never used anything. He never made any money. He never really did anything evil, unless you think tapping FBI agents' lines who are tracking you is evil or reading the occasional illicit email. Really, this deserves 200 years?

The book ends before Mitnick is sentenced. The good thing is the book is old, so you can find out that Mitnick only had to serve five years in prison and is out and reformed and has his own security company now and seems to be doing well, so more power to him. Meanwhile, Shimomura lost his fame almost as soon as the media started questioning his actual role in things and Markoff's legitimacy took a hit too. And they lost their movie deal. Boo hoo. Frankly, I think they were vindictive assholes, plotting to take down the world's most famous hacker for no other reason than pure fame and profit on their part. I think they were mega-dicks. I'm pretty sure Markoff is still around. I don't know what became of Shimomura. I assume he's still at it, but if so, I hope he's keeping a low profile and isn't doing what he very obviously was doing then -- illegal hacking and phreaking -- for the feds. Fascinating book, even after all these years. Definitely recommended.… (mais)

If you’re – ahem – of a certain age, you remember a time when telephones were rotary dial and had cords, when you had to use carbon paper to make two copies of something, and when there were no such things as home computers and WE LIKED IT!

Then came video arcades, and we began reading articles about home brew computer clubs and the like. We would later hear about a young man who dropped out of Harvard and drove across country to write software for a company called MITS, whose “build it yourself” computer made the cover of Popular Electronics and sparked a whole generation of young people to get excited about computers.

In the middle of all this came a man named Bill Millard, a one-time IBM employee, who started a consulting company out of his home called IMS Associates. Recognizing the nascent home computer market, he turned his company into a computer manufacturer, making a competitor to the MITS Altair computer called the IMSAI, and they flew out the doors . . . for a while.

And here’s where Millard’s genius came to the forefront. Recognizing a new market when he saw one, he started a retail chain of stores called ComputerLand and began franchising them. Before you knew it, ComputerLands were everywhere, and Millard was a billionaire.

And that’s when things got interesting.

I found this book in the remainder bin a long time ago, and it is one of the most remarkable stories of genius and madness I’ve ever read. From the young IMSAI computer company enlisting friends and family to fill orders for their hot computer, to IBM executives showing up for a business meeting on Halloween and finding the CFO of ComputerLand dressed as a cowboy, complete with gun, and not shy about brandishing it as he and the IBM executives negotiated discounts; to Millard’s flirtation with the 70s, cult-like self-improvement program EST, forcing his employees to participate; to – mostly – court battles over a $250,000 loan that may (or may not) be convertible into hundreds of millions of dollars in ComputerLand stock, this is simply one of the most compelling business books I’ve ever read.

It’s also a wonderful window into a time long past, when computer standards were just being developed, when Apple was King of the Hill – until IBM entered the market and set the status quo on its head.

If you have any interest at all in the early days of home computing, this is one of your must-reads.… (mais)