May 8th, 2007
So Kevin Appeared in Playboy…
I got a chance to review a [uh, text only] copy of the Playboy article about Kevin Mitnick and was quite surprised with how captivated I was reading it. The author makes an excellent point in the article—not through what he says but how he makes you feel—that hacking is cool.
The article brought back some feelings that I myself haven’t felt in quite a long time. I realized that the security industry has changed me. I spend my time evaluating software, testing updates, writing how-to articles, and digging through an endless buffet of RSS feeds trying to keep up with who has acquired who. I forgot that I’m a hacker.
The Playboy article tells Kevin’s story—not the distorted and overtold Shimomura/Markoff version—but as Kevin himself tells it. You can’t help but cheer him on as he evades the FBI and even listens in on the phone conversations they have about him. Not because we want to encourage criminal behavior but because we love the hack.
That’s what hacking used to be all about—not the end but how we got to that end. A decade or two ago very few hackers were interested in getting your grandmother’s bank account number. A decade or two ago we laughed when the feds accused a hacker of wanting to launch missiles from NORAD. The movie War Games underscored that by showing how lame it was that the feds got all hyped up about a kid just looking for a game.
When I was a teenager I could sit for hours with one of those twisted iron puzzles where you have to separate two pieces of entangled metal. I always solved them and I always knew I would solve them but it still was so satisfying when I solved them. It was something I could do that no one else could do. Now I can sit for hours hacking—or as we call it in the security business—penetration testing.
In 1994 I read this from an article in Wired Magazine:
“Sounds like Corrupt,” Chris [Goggans] says, recounting his suspicions that John Lee has also been pranking him in Houston. “It sounds like something he would do.” At that moment, a second phone line rings in Houston… the voice on the second phone line says to Chris, “Yeah, that does sound like something I would do.”
I thought that was so cool.
In 1995, while trying to pursue a career as a programmer I saw the movie Hackers. Who could resist the coolness and power of being a hacker with the line “there are worse things than death and I could do all of them.”
Cool again.
Like so many hackers, Kevin wasn’t a hacker to steal your Grandmother’s Social Security money or send out spam on the latest male enhancement product or spread child pornography. He was a hacker because being a hacker is power and power is addicting. Ira Winkler is so quick to condemn Kevin for not acknowledging the malicious nature of his crimes but duh, Kevin didn’t commit the crimes with a malicious intent. He wasn’t out to hurt anyone, at the time he just loved breaking in.
If you look at the stuff he actually did steal, it was just stuff to make him better at his craft. He wasn’t out to sell the source code he acquired to the highest paying competitor. He just wanted the source code because the source code gave him more power.
And that’s really not that different from many of us now. We want power over record companies and we have it. If we really want a free copy of photoshop we can find it. If we want to make money by filling someone else’s inbox we can. It’s all out there for the taking and most of the time it’s up to us to decide if it is moral or not.
He ran from the FBI but that was, to him, nothing more than the instinct of survival. Kevin told me that when he heard the knock on that door he instinctively responded—without noticing the late hour—with “Who is it?” When the FBI identified themselves his instinct was to flee and he seriously considered jumping out his second-story apartment window. He weighed the decision of being caught or breaking a leg, and almost went with the option of breaking his leg.
So yeah he committed crimes. He broke in to systems without permission. He stole source code. He listened in on phone calls. And he ran from the FBI. But we love hearing about it.
We have always been fascinated with the classic hacker stories because the stories not only empower the hacker but they empower us all. Who isn’t fascinated with the fact that Kevin actually taught one of his victims how to use Tar and GZip so that she could send him some private source code he tricked her into obtaining for him? Who couldn’t love the fact that after a segment about Kevin Poulsen appeared on the show Unsolved Mysteries that their phone lines mysteriously stopped working? Or how about John Draper, AKA Captain Crunch, who once discovered that a whistle in a cereal box could get you free calls at a pay phone?
The Playboy article quotes a psychiatrist to a juvenile court judge who says, “Kevin’s preoccupation, if not obsession, is derived in part from the sense of power he gains, power which offers a sense of security and power which enables him to get even if he chooses.”
Couldn’t that describe any one of us?
