Kevin Mitnick (born August 6, 1963) is one of the most famous hackers to be jailed and convicted. Mitnick was arrested by the FBI on February 15, 1995 and charged with breaking into some of the United States' most "secure" computer systems.
Following his arrest, Mitnick was held without bail for over two years before sentencing: He has said that he set some kind of United States record by being held for four and a half years without a bail hearing, while also held in solitary confinement for eight months "in order to prevent a massive nuclear strike from being initiated by me via a prison payphone." The course of his trial and punishment became a cause célèbre amongst the hacker community. This movement was spearheaded by 2600's "Free Kevin" campaign.
He was released from prison in January 2002, but banned from using the Internet until the midnight of January 21, 2003. On January 21, 2003, on the live television show The Screen Savers on TechTV, Kevin Mitnick visited the first website since his release, the weblog of his girlfriend. Mitnick is now working in consulting and is CEO of the security company Defensive Thinking.
His arrest is detailed in the book Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw-By the Man Who Did It (ISBN 0786889136). Other media inspired by Mitnick's story include the movie, also with the name Takedown, sometimes mistitled as Hackers 2: Takedown. A counterpoint view to the events surrounding Mitnick was written by journalist Jonathan Littman, in The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick (ISBN 0316528587).
Mitnick is also the subject of a two-hour documentary by 2600 entitled Freedom Downtime. It is from the perspective of a fellow hacker and offers a very different view of his case than found in Takedown or most other media today. The film is the winner of the Audience Award for Documentaries at the 2002 New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.
As a hacker, Mitnick is best known for his use of social engineering. He wrote a book on this subject after leaving prison but before returning to the Internet: The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security. It was published in October 2002. The first chapter of the book was omitted by the publisher. It gives some details of his own "career" and his grievances against journalist John Markoff. The chapter has since been made available elsewhere.
Controversy
Kevin Mitnick's criminal activities, arrest, and trial were controversial, and have caused some computer industry journalists to raise legal and ethical questions concerning the events surrounding him.
The core of the controversy came from two books that presented varying facts that were at odds with one another: John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura's Takedown, and Jonathan Littman's The Fugitive Game. In particular, Littman made allegations of journalistic impropriety against Markoff, of overzealous prosecution of Mitnick by the government, of main stream media over-hyping of Mitnick's actual crimes, and of the legality of Shimomura's involvement in the matter. Further controversy came over the release of the movie Takedown, with Littman alleging that portions of the film were taken from his book without permission.
The case against Mitnick was an important one. It tested then nascent laws that had been enacted for dealing with computer crime, and it raised public awareness of security issues involving networked computers. The controversy remains, however, as Mitnick is often used today as an example of the quintessential criminal hacker, despite the fact that his activities are thought to have been far less damaging and significant than those of other computer criminals of the time.
External links
- Free Kevin, The Official Kevin Mitnick Site, home of the Free Kevin movement.
- Freedom Downtime, the 2600 documentary.
- Takedown - the timeline, the evidence (including Mitnick's online sessions and voice calls) and other information on the Mitnick's break-ins and the resulting pursuit and finally - arrest.
- The Kevin Mitnick/Tsutomu Shimomura affair - lots of information on the case.
- The missing Chapter 1 of Mitnick's book (or from a site where it appeared earlier, but in MS Word format only.)
- Mitnick interview, February 5, 2003
- Kevin Mitnick Buys Hacker Stories for Upcoming Book Titled The Art of Hacking
- thebroken.org has a downloadable video interview with Kevin Mitnick in Episode 3 (released January, 2004)