The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick (45 page)

"I believe I might have," Shimomura reflects. "I believe I had con-
tact with him in the past."

Mitnick's already revealed to me that he phoned Shimomura
months ago, trying to trick him out of information. Now Shimo-
mura seems to be admitting Mitnick approached him in the past.
Does that cast a new light on the Christmas hack story? If Shimo-
mura knew Mitnick was after his machine, why didn't the "keeper
of the keys" protect it?

"Do you think he had some kind of problem?" a reporter asks.
"Was he obsessed?"

"I think you'll have to ask him," Shimomura responds curtly.

"Do you think he was blamed for everything that happened on
the Net?" asks another.

The question irritates Shimomura.

"He was a pain, he caused a lot of people a lot of grief... a lot of
things we've seen him do . . . getting card numbers, reading files,
stealing software."

"Is there any evidence he sold the software or used the credit
cards?" I ask.

Shimomura looks at me critically. "I don't know. We don't
know."

"How did you feel about him reading your files?" another re-
porter asks.

Shimomura straightens up.

"It's not a very polite thing to do."

"Are you a hacker?" I ask.
Shimomura is caught off guard. He pauses a moment.

"What's a hacker?" Shimomura reflects.

"Old-style hacker," I reply. "Someone who creatively pursues
knowledge and information."

Shimomura hesitates again, staring at me as he stared from the
pages of
Newsweek.

"You'll have to ask someone else." Shimomura shrugs, glaring
at me.

"And what would they say?" I ask.

"It depends on who you ask."

"So, I guess all his cell phone
calls made it easy?" I say to
Shimomura as we walk down the hall to the Department of Justice
press conference after the morning courtroom hearing.

Shimomura turns to look at me. "That's sort of what he does,
isn't it?"

"Voice calls?" I ask, wondering if Shimomura heard Mitnick talk-
ing with me.

Shimomura shakes his head. "We didn't get any of those."

Shimomura and I enter the cramped, windowless room just as the
press conference is getting under way. Half a dozen middle-aged De-
partment of Justice officials crowd behind a podium and micro-
phone, smiling for the cameras and dozens of reporters from CNN,
ABC, the
Los Angeles Times,
the Associated Press, and countless
other news organizations and papers.

"Can you sort of put this case in perspective?" asks a reporter. "Is
this truly the biggest one that exists? It certainly seems like it today."

"I won't comment as to ranking . . . except to say that this cer-
tainly is a significant investigation with the FBI's program ..." re-
plies Jim Walsh, a local FBI agent.

"Is law enforcement still ill-prepared to deal with this type of
problem?" asks the reporter.

"To some extent, that's probably true," admits Walsh. "We're
probably trying to catch up as best we can."

"Do you think you would have been able to catch Mr. Mitnick if
this individual [Shimomura] had not, basically, taken it upon himself
to get people together and go after him?"

"I'm really not going to comment other than that I think Mr.
Shishomura's [sic] assistance and involvement is pretty well estab-
lished."

A TV reporter voice lobs a fat one for a sound bite. "It's been said
for a long time that hackers basically do this to prove that they could
do it, and, for the most part, cause little damage.. . . What is your
advice to people who think they may want to hack?"

John Bowler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, fields the question. "I
think there's been some perception that this was an adolescent crime
in the past and that it carried very little punishment. ... This is a
serious crime and it's going to be treated as a very serious crime,
both by prosecutors, officers, and, I would anticipate, by the
courts."

"Is the public behind you on that?" the reporter asks. "Is this
crime perceived as being in the same rank as drug crime or street
crime?"

"I wouldn't want to comment on how it compares to drug crime
or street crime, except to say the financial damage caused by this
crime is taken extremely seriously...."

"Was there financial damage caused by this particular crime that
you can point to?" drawls a local reporter.

But Bowler's got no comment. In fact, he and the other Justice
Department officials have got very little else to say. Just as the re-
porters start asking why Mitnick's telephone access is being mon-
itored and restricted, the Justice Department emcee cuts off further
questions.

But the press hasn't gotten what it came for. It's hungry for the
real story. A local reporter stands up.

"We have asked Mr. Shimomura, because of a great deal of press
interest in his activities, if he would join us. Would it be all right with
you if he answered a few questions?"

The Justice Department officials announce the end of their press

conference and the media heaves forward, circling their micro-
phones and cameras around Shimomura. Off to the side, John John-
son of the
Los Angeles Times
asks Shimomura's girlfriend more
about Markoff's assistance in the criminal investigation.

"Did you [Shimomura and Menapace] have an agreement with
John Markoff?" asks the reporter.

"I'm not sure what was agreed," Julia Menapace says. "Markoff
and Tsutomu are old friends."

The slender woman smiles knowingly and looks toward Shimo-
mura. "They ski together."

"What questions did you ask him [Markoff] when you wanted to
know something about Kevin?" the
L.A. Times
reporter asks her.

"When we wanted to know about his habits. If there was radio
silence, did it mean he'd gone out to eat?" Menapace continues out
of earshot of Shimomura. "We'd ask him, 'In this situation what
would you do if you were Kevin?' "

"Go out for fatburgers?" another reporter asks.

Menapace smiles. "I don't think he was eating fatburgers any-
more. I think he was mostly walking to local places."

Tsutomu Shimomura's girlfriend sums up the
New York Times reporter's role in the investigation of Kevin Mitnick:

"John essentially was our Kevin expert."

"Spread around. Right! Move your chairs. Relax!"

Shimomura invites everyone to gather round. No dull fed, this
cyberdude. He's making quite an impression, and nobody can be-
lieve how little clothing he's wearing.

"You thought it would be warm in North Carolina?" asks an
incredulous local reporter.

"Actually, I was wearing shorts yesterday."

"We noticed that." A couple of local reporters chuckle. "You left
in kind of a hurry."

"Yeah. I knew I wouldn't be here long." Shimomura glibly re-
minds the group of his speedy tracking abilities.

"Do you want to start?" prods another reporter.

"All of you basically know the story at this point," Shimomura

says into the microphone. "John Markoff, an excellent writer for the
New York Times ..
."

"Right," a few reporters respond in unison.

"Correct," says Shimomura.

"Thank you very much," a local reporter jokes, as if Shimomura's
press conference is over, as if everything that could be said about the
story has already been written by Shimomura's favorite reporter.

"So was it Christmas Eve?" another reporter encourages Shimo-
mura.

"The first phase of this was an attack on my systems starting
about 1400 hours on Christmas Day, 1994.... Andrew Gross and I
flew back to San Diego ... to go assess damage, figure out what
happened....

"By New Year's ... we had discovered there was basically a new
attack being used. The intruder ... had used IP spoofing ... IP
source address spoofing, which John Markoff wrote about.. ..

"IP address spoofing," repeats Shimomura to a confused local re-
porter's question. "John Markoff had a piece ... on it on the
twenty-third of January.... On the twenty-eighth, a bunch of my
files were discovered ... at the Well.... You guys heard about it.
Markoff has a piece on the Well in the paper
[New York Times]
this
morning...."

"His [Markoff's] second piece was on January 2.8, which coin-
cided with the day ... my files were found on the Well ... and .. .
many other files ... including source code for proprietary informa-
tion belonging to many companies... ."

"Did you say information or code?" I ask.

"Some password files off UNIX systems ..."

"At those corporations?" I ask.

"Correct.... I think John had Apple ... the telephone source
code intrigued us because we knew that Kevin ... had been after this
stuff... the past nine months.... I sent up a person, Andrew, again,
to investigate further at the Well...."

"And then you went skiing?" asks a reporter.

"I went to give a talk, it was a conference, then thought about
going skiing again, hoping that would be the end of it. It was not the
end of it. I got a phone call on Sunday, February sixth.... On the

seventh I came down to San Francisco. And on the eighth, we started
investigating the Well...."

"Did you meet with the U.S. Attorney there, Kent [Walker]?" I
ask Shimomura.

"We met with the [Assistant U.S.] Attorney on the eighth, I be-
lieve."

"Was that the first federal involvement that you're aware of in
this particular instance?" asks a local reporter.

"In this particular round, yes. Actually, I think FBI Washington
may have known something about this.... I think, LeVord."

"What was the purpose for your meeting with the U.S. Attor-
ney? ..." asks John Johnson of the
L.A. Times.

"We were deciding ... we would attempt to pursue and appre-
hend this person, now that we had a good idea as to who it was and
working out what support we would give them, what support they
would give us, and ground rules versus realities. ..."

Ground rules versus realities. What an odd choice of words.

"What were the ground rules?" asks the
L.A. Times
reporter.

"Ground rules were 'Don't do anything illegal,' " says Shimomura.

"What was illegal?" I ask.

"It's a long list," Shimomura dismisses my question. "It's not for
discussion here."

"We met with Justice, established our ground rules — what was le-
gal, whatever — start monitoring at the Well and proceeded to try to
figure out where he was coming from.... By Thursday .. . Netcom
was one. So Thursday afternoon, we moved our operations down to
Netcom in San Jose....

"We discovered there was a lot of traffic from Denver and from
RTP [Research Triangle Park in Raleigh]. And we attempted to get
trap and trace orders .. . for their dialins at Denver and RTP. We
never got the ones for Denver. We did get the ones for RTP. I think
those were in place Friday."

How does Shimomura get trap and trace orders? The phone com-
pany can't just reveal trap and trace information to ordinary civilians.

"We got a few traps and traces. We got one that appeared to be

valid. However, when we traced it down, it kinda just looped . ..
suggesting to us that Kevin had monkeyed with the switch."

"But the trap and trace, that was done by the federal people?"
suggests Johnson.

"It was done by the feds," Shimomura answers.
"And then they'd give you information . . ."

"Or they wouldn't give us information."

This surprises the
L.A. Times
reporter. "There were times they
[the feds] didn't give you the information?"

"Right," Shimomura responds. "But this was something they had
to do by going to get an order to allow them to do it like they would
with any sort of tap.

"We would go to them and say. .. . We think we can get a better
idea of what is going on by getting a trap and trace on this num-
ber. .. . Anyway, that didn't actually get us very far, except pointing
us, getting us in touch with Sprint Cellular here."

Not very far? In Shimomura's own words the federally ordered
traps and traces moved him all the way from California to Raleigh,
North Carolina. Why won't he give the FBI any credit?

"After spending about five hours just looking through records, we
determined that there was a particular phone number... . So, we
obtained a court order to append these records. That was late Satur-
day night, early Sunday morning."