Cashing in on Mitnick: The Fugitive Game and Takedown
Reviews by Scott Skinner
The Fugitive Game, by Jonathan Littman (Little, Brown and Company)
In The Fugitive Game, Jonathan Littman has written the most sympathetic account of hackers since Bruce Sterling penned his own investigation in the Hacker Crackdown. But Littman's sympathy has very little to do with the hacker lifestyle or its ethic; indeed, he does not seem to condone either. Rather, Littman's brand of compassion is an acute understanding of the abuses of his own craft, that of the media in distorting facts to the point of creating fiction. The Fugitive Game is the story of how just such irresponsible journalism turned computer expert Kevin Mitnick into "the most wanted computer hacker in the world."
Readers will remember Mitnick as the spiteful and vindictive teenager featured in Katie Hafner and John Markoff's Cyberpunk: Computers and Outlaws on the Electronic Frontier. At the time of its release, Cyberpunk's portrayal of Mitnick was thought to be biased, allegedly because Mitnick was the only hacker featured who refused to be interviewed. Biased or not, he was portrayed by the authors as a "Dark Side" hacker, and the antithesis of the hacker ethic. He was considered more evil than Pengo, a West Berlin hacker who sold his knowledge of American systems on the Internet to the Russians for cash. But Mitnick's worse crime, by comparison, seemed only to be a lack of respect for anyone who was not up to his level of computer expertise, and few people were.
In The Fugitive Game, Mitnick returns, only this time the reader is left with the distinct impression that something is missing. The question is what? Mitnick, after all, is hacking as usual. He's listening to private phone conversations, reading email, penetrating systems at will. He's also telling jokes, laughing, and expressing his feelings and vulnerabilities in late-night phone calls to his friends and to Littman. Perhaps what is missing, then, is the "Dark Side" that has stigmatized Mitnick ever since Cyberpunk hit the stands. Or perhaps this malicious nature was never really there to begin with? In any case, the Mitnick of The Fugitive Game has little in common with the Mitnick of Cyberpunk, except, of course, for the hacking. What accounts for this difference seems to be that Littman actually talks to Mitnick, something the authors of Cyberpunk did not feel was worth the expense. And it is by listening to Mitnick that we begin to understand him, in ways that are far more comprehensive than Cyberpunk's "Dark Side" stigma can convey.
If The Fugitive Game was nothing more than a dry transcription of phone conversations between Mitnick and Littman, the book would still rank as the definitive work on this elusive hacker, easily ousting Cyberpunk for the coveted honor. But The Fugitive Game is much more than this. In The Fugitive Game, Littman reminds us that an investigative journalist's most powerful weapon is still to question. Question everything. Question the good guys. Question the bad guys. Question authority. The Fugitive Game is replete with questioning, most of which remains unanswered.
While loose ends are not usually considered praiseworthy for an investigative work, in this case, the kudos are indeed appropriate because Littman seems to be the only one doing the questioning. Certainly John Markoff, despite Cyberpunk and all of his New York Times pieces, has never bothered to scratch below the surface of Mitnick or acquire the true facts of his case. Littman spends entire chapters debunking the myths and distortions surrounding Mitnick, most of which originated from these very sources. And Littman's questions have a way of reminding the reader to remain skeptical, that things are never as simple as we would like them to be. We may never know, for example, exactly how it was that Markoff - a reporter - came to be tagging along with computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura and the FBI on their stakeout of Mitnick's Raleigh, North Carolina residence, but that won't stop Littman from asking.
Of course, the use of the rhetorical question is not lost upon Littman either, as when he asks Shimomura, "Are you a hacker?" knowing full well that Shimomura hacks all right - only he hacks for the Feds. Questions, then, in and of themselves, can make a point, and good questions can make for a fine piece of journalistic work.
The Fugitive Game, then, is as much a story about John Markoff as it is about Mitnick. Here we learn that Markoff has been obsessed with Mitnick for years. And Markoff had everything he needed to fulfill this obsession: he had the skills, the experience, the contacts; he had Shimomura and The New York Times. There's just one thing that he didn't have, and that was Mitnick. Markoff did not have Mitnick because Littman did, a fact that Littman shamelessly conveys to the reader through his careful balance of ponderosities and conversation.
By and large, the power of The Fugitive Game comes from the exchange of dialogue between Littman and Mitnick. Littman knows that this is the main attraction, and he does not disappoint. The Fugitive Game is full of interesting phone ironies, as when Littman puts a federal prosecutor on hold to take a call from Mitnick, whose whereabouts at that time were still unknown.
The Fugitive Game adds credence to the notion that people are indeed judged by their motives, and not merely by their actions. In The Fugitive Game, however, it is not Mitnick's motives that are being questioned, but rather those of Markoff and Shimomura. Together these "business partners" have sowed their involvement with Mitnick into a cash crop estimated at nearly $2 million. With a purported $750,000 book deal signed, along with a $200,000 Miramax movie option, and an estimated $250,000-500,000 for foreign book rights, Markoff and Shimomura have made more money off of Mitnick than anyone dreamed possible.
One wonders just what sort of criminal acts Mitnick could have perpetrated to deserve so much attention. When all the dust settles, one may very well wonder in vain.
Takedown, by Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff (Hyperion Press)
Regretfully, we're unable to devote as much space as we would have liked to Takedown, the Markoff/Shimomura endeavor, primarily because Hyperion Books did not want to send us a review copy. But a fleeting glimpse is really all that's necessary to come to some important conclusions.
Most of the book deals with Tsutomu Shimomura himself, a subject that won't exactly have you leaning on the edge of your seat. If you could distill from this book the actual parts that deal with Mitnick they would only amount to around three chapters, and those portions are chock full of inaccuracies ranging from simple spelling errors to major factual mistruths, such as the labelling of the escape.com Internet site as an apparent base of operations where the likes of Mitnick, Emmanuel Goldstein, and Phiber Optik plot their evil deeds.
If Shimomura puts the same effort into his system's security as he apparently put into his fact checking, his pager should be seeing quite a bit of activity in the months ahead.
For another more in-depth review, we recommend Computer Underground Digest Issue #795 (sun.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest).