Mitnick served five years in prison—four and a half years pre-trial and
eight months in solitary confinement—because, according to Mitnick, law
enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to "start a
nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone", meaning that law enforcement
told the judge that he could somehow dial into the NORAD modem via a
payphone from prison and communicate with the modem by whistling to launch
nuclear missiles. He was released on January 21, 2000. During his
supervised release, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially
forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline
telephone. [1]
The comment section of this post has an underlying anger towards the hi-jacking of the word 'hacker' as it was and is applied to kevin mitnik and thus misunderstood by the public waaaaay too often.
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed Zalewski's book. He seems like a really smart guy.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Deception-Controlling-Security...
Calling them a criminal does not necessarily invoke [2]
[1] a person charged with and convicted of crime
[2] a person who commits crimes for a living
Lawyers have power, Doctors have power, Hackers have power.
There is nothing libertarian about the defense industry or their actors. Unless you mistake neo-liberalism as libertarianism as far too many people do.
(Legitimate) governments generally are the only legitimate users of 0-days. Governments can legitimately and legally hack into your computer; nobody else can. Governments can legitimately and legally shoot you, but generally nobody else can.
One definition of government is that they have a monopoly on violence.
(I say "generally" above because there are exceptions, of course.)
The alternative to free markets isn't "no markets" or some flowery hippie ideal world. It's mafia and black/dark markets operating in complete or partial secrecy.
The Finnish software house Reaktor recently invited Mr. Mitnick as a "keynote speaker" into their popular event for software developers:
To be honest, I didn't understand the relevance at all. The idolization seemed quite childish.
and
> The rise of libertarianism in geekdom seems to fall under the same dynamic.
I can agree to the first, the second can be simply attributed to an understanding of the first. It is unfortunate that you don't see the connection.
The corruption of traditional causes and activism is what leads people toward libertarianism.
Wow, he hacked into some corporation's computers, that's just so awful. Pacific Bell - a shady monopoly who is granted a monopoly by the government, and in return showers politicians with bribes, I mean donations, and sends our calls and web history off to the NSA for monitoring and permanent storage.
> in reality, the rebels and the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically
In reality, he has been doing security consultations for corporations, so he has already been co-opted. "The service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end 'zero-day' exploits". That doesn't really smell of rebel. Of course, everyone has to grow up and make a living.
I can think of a number of IT companies that were founded in the past 20 years, sold for billions of dollars, or worth billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars, that were founded by ex-hackers, or at least people very associated with the hacker scene and whose first technical hires were ex-hackers. It's mentioned in the tech press, in interviews, in blogs etc. It's easy enough to look up if you want to. I mean, one of YC's founders is rtm, and he was around back in Viaweb days.
It's difficult for me to perceive of a modern working class kid interested in technology today, it seems he has more resources at his disposable (although not many - a dinky Vic 20 booted people right into a programming environment, whereas a kid with an iPad and iPhone today would find it very difficult to program his own device - it is pretty much that definition of an embedded system of a device that can't program itself). Back in the 1980's a working class kid with a Vic 20 and 300 baud modem could only call people locally, call local BBS's, and be stuck with poor computing power.
If he hacked and phreaked, he could call around the country, access teleconferences, call BBS's around the country, access powerful Unix, Vax/VMS etc. systems, access the Internet, access x.25 networks and x.25 chat networks in Europe etc. He could follow the law and accept his straitjacket of being designated by the Relations of Production to be one who works a menial job, and for the privilege of being allowed to work he can kick up his expropriated surplus labor work time to the idle class job creator heirs who own his company. Or he can bend the rules, see new vistas, and somewhere down the line maybe co-found a billion dollar company, or a hundred billion dollar company. Then he, or his apologists like you, can then go around complaining about the kids hacking into his company's computers.