The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick (46 page)

Shimomura must be talking about the FBI again.

"I left San Jose in the morning [Sunday], got here seven P.M-ish
probably. Anyway, on Sunday night, some Sprint technicians and
myself went out to the cell site and started our search there. . . ."

"You found that the feds and the phone companies were all very
happy to work with you throughout?" drawls a local reporter.

"Uh-huh," Shimomura concurs.

"I mean, there was no hesitation, no 'Who are you? What are you
doing?' "

"Not at all."

"Had you had any interface with them prior?"

"I've dealt with feds before.. .. And Sprint was amazingly helpful
here. Sprint guys met me at the airport, picked me up at the airport,
and we went out and did our thing.

"So, Sunday night we went out, acquired his [Mitnick's] radio
[signal] using some equipment they had and some I'd brought along,
and proceeded to track him and narrow him down to three apart-
ment buildings in the complex where he was arrested."

What was this equipment Shimomura brought along. His souped
up Oki?

"How long did it take from being picked up to finding the apart-
ment?" I ask.

"Oh, I got dinner.... The actual time ... hunting for him was
less than thirty minutes."

"You mean hunting for him in that apartment —" asks Johnson.

"In the car," Shimomura corrects him.

"And this was his car, the Sprint —" I say.

"Yeah," Shimomura replies.

"And what was the actual technical equipment in the car?" I ask.

"We had some cellular test equipment. You should contact them
for the details. He brought some equipment. I brought some equip-
ment."

For a technical guy, Shimomura is very vague about his equip-
ment.

"And how many people were driving around with you?" I ask.

"We had, I think two or three people."

"All from Sprint?" I ask.

Shimomura stumbles over his answer.

"Sprint and mostly — yeah."

What a strange reply. Shimomura was about to reveal someone
else, but then he caught himself. Sort of. Who does Shimomura mean
by "mostly"?

Who was the third man in the car tracking Kevin Mitnick?

"Were there federal agents with you?" asks a reporter.

"Not really. Well, we had a federal agent with us.... He disap-
peared that evening."

That gets chuckles, and makes nearly everyone forget about the
"mostly."

"What did the FBI agents do after you got here?" I ask.

"What do you mean?" Shimomura asks, staring intently at me,
perturbed by my question.

"What was their participation?" I repeat.

"You should go ask them about that," snaps the cybersleuth.

■ ■ ■

Shimomura wraps up his tale.

"So, continuing from Monday morning to Wednesday was ba-
sically getting all the legal work done, everything else done in order
to go find him. That's something the feds mostly did. That's what
they specialize in. He's in one of these three buildings. Go for it."

The feds "specialize" in paperwork and slapping on the hand-
cuffs? Something tells me the FBI might describe their work differ-
ently.

"What was the actual distance you'd narrowed it down to?" I ask.

"Less than one hundred meters," says Shimomura. ".. . As we got
closer, our vision got better."

"I saw a newspaper article that said he actually left some taunting
voice mail messages for you with a British accent," begins a televi-
sion reporter. "What was your reaction?"

"It seemed like a pretty silly thing to do.... If you're trying to get
away with something, leaving more trails like that really doesn't
help."

"How do you know it's him?" I ask.

"Well, we didn't know then."

"Are you sure it's him now?"

"Well . . . We suspected it was Kevin about... January thirtieth.
Sometime around the end of January.. .. This past Friday, we were
monitoring his activities. We managed to hear an exchange between
Kevin and one of his cohorts, where he was complaining about John
Markoff having put his picture on the front page of the
New York
Times.. ..
That was sort of a giveaway."

A giveaway to what? That Mitnick knew his enemy? But how
does this prove the voice mail was Mitnick? Or that he performed
the IP spoof attack for that matter?

The reporter continues. "Was he cocky, arrogant in the way he
approached you by going into your home computer?"

"My guess is I think he was after particular tools that he thought I
might have.... I'm a security researcher. That's one of my hats, and

so he thought that perhaps I had information on vulnerabilities he
could use to break into more systems."

"Was one of those tools for the NSA, a monitoring tool you were
developing for the NSA?" asks a reporter.

"It was not developed for the NSA," Shimomura declares. "But,
we can take that one offline."

Why doesn't he want to talk about it on the record? Could it be
because the program, contrary to the impression given by Shimo-
mura's assistant and the FBI, doesn't cost a dime?

"When he came into the courtroom today, it looked to me like
you guys met eyes for a second.. .. Does that make you feel good?"

"Not really."

"Why's that?

"He's caused a lot of people a lot of grief . . . and clearly this kind
of behavior is not acceptable and
we
will not tolerate it ... but I
wish there was something more elegant we could do about it."

"Do you think he has some skills that could potentially, if he
could be rehabilitated, that could be useful to some arm of the gov-
ernment?" I ask.

"I don't know," Shimomura replies curtly. "I don't know his
skills. From what I've seen, he doesn't have a whole lot of technical
expertise.. . . He gets tools from others and a lot of assistance from
others."

"If he doesn't have technical expertise, what's his technique?" I
ask.

"Persistence. A lot of persistence. We didn't really study Kevin
very much. You should ask John Markoff for details since he wrote
the book on Kevin...."

■ ■ ■

A local reporter is puzzled by how little evidence the government
seems to have of Mitnick's great crimes. "Looking at the search war-
rant that was turned in today ... [tjhere's no actual information,
other than the Toshiba.... Basically there's a lot of technical equip-
ment, a
News & Observer
[newspaper], a Yellow Pages, and a
Toshiba computer. I'm wondering what they really have on him."
Shimomura answers like a government official. "We have a fair

amount of evidence, but the details of that you should take up with
Justice."

"Did he eliminate any files before he opened the door?"

"We don't know."

"Speaking of that question, it seemed like Markoff's story today,
that he was zapping out files from the Well..." another reporter
asks.

Shimomura's girlfriend, Julia Menapace, steps in to answer this
one. She's been sitting dutifully at his side throughout the im-
promptu conference, hardly saying a word. "The Well lost their
customer billing information as a result of Kevin's actions," the
thin, longhaired woman declares.

"What does that mean, that they 'lost it?' " I ask.

"It was deleted," Menapace says definitively.

"All of their customer billing?" I ask, surprised.

"At least for that day____"

Shimomura jumps in to rescue his girlfriend.

"You should contact them for more information on that. Also,
John Markoff had this piece out this morning ... which may talk a
fair amount about this."

Eight times now. Eight times Shimomura has mentioned John
Markoff in his press conference.

"Has Hollywood called you yet?" Johnson of the
Los Angeles
Times
asks.

Shimomura hesitates for several seconds. It's his longest pause yet.
Everyone laughs.

"Umpteen hundred voice mail messages, right," Shimomura
jokes.

■ ■ ■

"What was it that would attract Mr. Mitnick to their [the San Diego
Supercomputer Center] work and your work?" a reporter asks.
"You said that you think he was just looking for new ways to pene-
trate security systems?"

"I think so. And to defraud cellular systems. We believe that he's
shown a great interest in cellular systems recently, like in the past
year or so."

Is the security expert saying Mitnick may now have learned about
defrauding cellular phones from Shimomura himself?

"How damaging can these tools be that he took from you?" asks
a reporter.

"Well, tools are tools. The same tools... that he took, that he
could use perhaps to sniff networks are the same tools that we used
to monitor him and to catch him."

A reporter asks Shimomura why he chased Mitnick in the first
place.

"I was asked to do this out of a personal favor by someone at the
Well."

"Someone at the Well? Who was that?" I ask.

"I, uh, Barlow."

How bizarre. John Perry Barlow is a legendary libertarian in cy-
berspace, a Wyoming native famous for his Grateful Dead lyrics and
battles for freedom and privacy in cyberspace. Barlow helped found
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that got its
start by defending unjustly accused hackers. And Barlow made a
name for himself a few years back when he wrote an amusing ac-
count of a befuddled FBI agent, clumsily searching for crime on the
Internet, who made the mistake of wandering onto his western
ranch. Could Barlow, a self-proclaimed crusty descendant of the
frontier men, a guy who wears cowboy boots, a ten-gallon hat, and a
red handkerchief around his neck, really have invited Shimomura
and the FBI into town?

Friday afternoon, the Well's
thread heats up, the focus
shifting to just how close the FBI got to the Well. Patrizia DiLucchio
asks,

#365

If Mitnick has been "reading the electronic mail of
users" and the FBI is now investigating this case, does this not mean
that the FBI can subpoena that mail as evidence. Further, since the
WELL has been cooperating with the FBI, becoming a little brother
to Big Brother as it were, has the FBI been reading the email for
weeks now?

Some begin to wonder whether the Well might have trampled the
rights of innocent bystanders in aiding Mitnick's capture.

Larry Persons (#427) asks why, if the government is limited in its
right to search or wiretap, it appears to be all right for the Well to let
the FBI potentially see, or for Well management itself to potentially
see, a subscriber's private information without a warrant.

He wonders if the Well is violating the Fourth Amendment. And
he's concerned about the FBI, Well management, or other parties
violating his civil rights and privacy in the name of Mitnick's

supposed threat. He asks why the Well isn't "proactive" about its
security. He's not so worried about Mitnick. What he really wants is
a place in cyberspace free from unwarranted "intrusion by private
and governmental agencies."

Has the frenzied hunt for Kevin Mitnick trampled the Fourth
Amendment? At least part of the answer is to be found in the Elec-
tronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. The legislation helped
adapt federal phone communications regulations for the electronic
age, and while nearly everyone agrees it's incomplete, the act is clear
about violations of privacy in cyberspace. Internet providers, just
like phone companies, must obey the statutes or be liable for crimi-
nal and/or civil penalties.

It's a crime to access stored wire or electronic communications
without legal authorization. 18 USCS 2701 of the Federal Criminal
Code states that electronic communications providers "shall not
knowingly divulge the contents of any communication" stored by
that service. Violations committed "for purposes of commercial ad-
vantage, malicious destruction or damage, or private commercial
gain" are federal crimes with jail terms and financial penalties.

In other words, neither the Well, the FBI, nor their agents can
disclose information about Mitnick's communications.

But the Well is busy with another issue: John Markoff's published
claim that the Well was "nearly destroyed" by a single hacker. Just
after 3 p.m., The Well uploads its official response to Markoff's
article. Mark Graham, who wrote the response, knew how greatly
the "damage" had been exaggerated. Only the backup for a third of
a day's accounting had been erased. No data was lost, and Graham,
who had watched the hacker's keystrokes when it happened, be-
lieved it was an accident.