The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick (48 page)

. .. Markoff's diligence may have paid off big time. His agent
reached an agreement in principle with Hyperion yesterday for
Markoff for a book on the case, and sources placed the deal in the
$750,000 range. Markoff would write the book with Tsutomu
Shimomura, the Japanese computer sleuth who cracked the case
and emerged as a hero in Markoff's coverage.

"It's a very compelling story and has number one bestseller written
all over it," said John Brockman, Markoff's agent. He sent 12 pub-
lishers a one-sentence fax when Markoff broke the story and "the
offers started pouring in."

Markoff's role in this whodunit has been controversial in some
circles because he also became part of the story.

"I don't know if I consider myself a victim," said Markoff, 45. "It's
a squishy thing. I was trying as hard as I could to be a reporter."

Hollywood calls. John Brock-
man, Markoff's agent, flies
to Los Angeles to sort out the offers in late February. Even Steven
Spielberg is fighting for the highly prized movie rights, according to
the
Hollywood Reporter.
Other big names are lining up. Oliver
Stone, of
JFK
fame, reports the
San Jose Mercury,
phoned the cyber-
sleuth at his San Diego office. After thanking the big time director
for the call, Shimomura reportedly asked a friend, "Who's Oliver
Stone?"

It's a lot of action for a onetime security expert and a newspaper
reporter whose movie option on
Cyberpunk
elapsed in December.
But the future is bright. Markoff's agent, writes the
Reporter,
now
wants "several million" for the rights to
Catching Kevin.

On March 9,
USA Today
announces that Miramax won the derby
for the movie rights to the Shimomura/Markoff book tentatively
titled
Catching Kevin: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most
Wanted Hacker.
That same day the
Daily Variety
says Miramax will
also develop a
Catching Kevin
CD-ROM video game.

■ ■ ■

Markoff and Shimomura's "million dollar" book, film, and video
deals have eclipsed the story of Mitnick's arrest. The March 10 fed-
eral indictment of Mitnick garners no more than a brief story on

page thirty of the
Times,
hardly the sort of follow-up one would
expect to a front-page scoop. And even stranger, Markoff doesn't
write the un-bylined report, though it includes at least one of the old
myths he helped propagate.

Raleigh, N.C., March 10 — Kevin D. Mitnick, the fugitive hacker
... was indicted Thursday on 2.3 counts of fraud involving
computer-access devices....

Mr. Mitnick first became known for his computer skills as a teen-
ager when he electronically broke into a computer of the North
American Air Defense Command.

If the
Times
appears to be suddenly cool about Mitnick's case, the
rest of the press is gladly picking up where it left off. On March 11
the Associated Press takes Markoff's articles and Mitnick's indict-
ment and weaves a colorful piece that makes the Raleigh case sound
as if Mitnick may spend the rest of his life behind bars.

CONDOR IS INDICTED ON 23 COUNTS

Mitnick, who was captured by federal authorities with the help of a San
Diego computer security expert, faces a possible maximum of 20 years
on each of the 23 charges in the federal indictment....

Thursday's indictment, which covers only Mitnick's alleged activities
during his 10-day stay in Raleigh, is in addition to parole violations
Mitnick faces in California and possible other charges in Denver and
elsewhere.

Four hundred and sixty years for ten days of computer hacking?
That's what the Associated Press seems to be saying — twenty-three
counts, twenty years maximum on each count. And the government
appears serious about collecting every possible bit of evidence, the
U.S. Attorney in San Francisco demanding that the Well produce
"all records, in whatever format (specifically including both hard
:opy and electronic formats) relating to unauthorized electronic ac-
:ess to The Well between Nov 1 1994 and Feb 15 1995...."

A strange thing is happening. The electronic community of the
Well is slowly beginning to question the story it read in the
New
York Times.
On March 10, one subscriber makes the far-fetched

allegation that Markoff never wrote
Cyberpunk
— his coauthor
wrote it all. The same day, Aaron Barnhart takes a blast at Markoff:

All I can say is it's been kind of interesting talking to Real Journal-
ists off-WELL (though I love all of you Journalists here, dearly) and
discovering widespread alarm that Markoff would wait till his
Week In Review piece to say, "I wanted Kevin Mitnick." And, be-
tween the lines, "I assisted the law in apprehending him."

But this is where the Bickersonian nature of WELL chat does not do
a service to this subject, so I'd best bite my tongue till I can better
state why it is that what Markoff did wrong troubles me more than
what Mitnick (plainly) did wrong. And actually I'm more interested
in Mitnick getting a fair trial and just sentencing than in ridiculing
or hurting Markoff's efforts.

On Saturday, March 11, Bruce Koball, the Computers, Freedom and
Privacy organizer who sparked the investigation on the Well, begins
to have second thoughts about the media monster he helped create.

Why has this story gotten such play? Because Mitnick's victims
were "sexy"?.. . No doubt about it.. . .

But these reasons have little to do with why this story is impor-
tant. .. . It's important because it has the potential to bring to the
public consciousness the incredible vulnerability of computer and
telecom networks at a time when great changes are afoot in their
technical and legal underpinnings. It's important because it provides
the opportunity to argue, in the public forum, that there are technical,
not legal, solutions to these problems . . . solutions (i.e., cryptogra-
phy) that are being actively suppressed by the government.

To the extent that this story gets told and understood, we all stand
to gain. To the extent that Mitnick and his ilk get demonized, and
the Net and cyberspace get painted as a sinister, anarchic, lawless
wilderness requiring legal intervention, we all lose.

The week of Monday, March 13, the March 2.0 issue of the political
journal
The Nation
hits newsstands and the Net. For hackers there is
a certain symmetry and justice in the article. First Mitnick was front-
page news in the
Times.
Now Markoff is front-page news in
The
Nation,
the headline proof that the reporter who chased after the
biggest scoop in cyberspace has crossed an invisible line and become
part of the news.

cyberscoop!

Andrew L. Shapiro

Times
man
cashing in on hype? Hackers are flaming the messenger.

The Establishment's Story. John Markoff earned the Mitnick scoop.
He's one of the best of the new breed of journalists bringing cyberspace
to the uninitiated. He deserved to be the only reporter there when they
nabbed Mitnick, the most wanted high-tech fugitive in the world. Was
he lucky to be in the right place at the right time? Sure. But he also
cultivated his sources. One of them was Shimomura, who brought
Markoff along for the bust. Now the two are reported to be writing a
book — for a price in the high six figures — to reveal just how the cy-
bercaper unfolded. Along with movie deals (sources say Spielberg is
interested), Markoff could make millions. Is he worth it? You bet he is.

The Critic's Version. John Markoff is cashing in. He's getting rich on
unethical journalistic practices and on unwarranted hysteria about the
danger of computer crime — at the expense of an arrogant yet harmless
young man who'll be behind bars for a long time. Markoff and the
Times
violated their readers' trust by failing to disclose from the start
that Markoff had assisted in the investigation, that he himself had been
a target of Mitnick's computer crimes, that he had a long-standing ri-
valry with Mitnick, and that he was friendly with Shimomura. Further-
more, Markoff overhyped the Shimomura-Mitnick showdown in his
February 16 story to create a sensational drama ripe for exploitation in
a print and screen sequel to his 1991 book,
Cyberpunk,
one-third of
which was about Mitnick. That's why Markoff described Shimomura
in the
Times
as a "brilliant cybersleuth" who has "an uncanny ability
to solve complex technical problems in the manner of Star Trek's Vul-
can Mr. Spock," not to mention "a deeply felt sense of right and
wrong." That's why he described Mitnick as a "chameleon-like grifter
who is a master at manipulating human beings."

The Reporter's Response. "I simply had a very good inside seat,"
Markoff tells me during a phone interview. "I am a reporter. It was a

chance to get a good story. I don't think I hyped it. I reported it as
straight as I could." Markoff shrugs off the claims about violations of
journalistic ethics. "Tsutomu and I are friends," he says, adding that
Shimomura has been a trusted source over years of reporting. Markoff
maintains that any information about Mitnick he gave the investigators
was available in
Cyberpunk.
He admits there were uncomfortable mo-
ments, such as when he first joined the investigators in Raleigh and
Shimomura did not immediately identify him as a reporter. "I became
very nervous," says Markoff. "I didn't run up to Agent Burns and say,
'I'm Markoff.' Tsutomu was vague; he said something like, 'He's with
me.' The F.B.I, was not pleased." Markoff says that he told his editors
at the
Times
everything about his role in the case, and that it was up to
them to decide what to disclose in his scoop. The editors ran a straight
news piece, and asked Markoff to tell the story of his own involvement
in a first-person essay for the February 19 "Week in Review." There he
revealed for the first time that he had been covering Mitnick since the
early 1980s, that his files had been "vandalized" by Mitnick and that
he had had an unusual role in the case. "I too became enmeshed in the
digital manhunt for the nation's most wanted computer outlaw," he
wrote. Was it wrong not to include this information in the breaking
story three days earlier? "I don't know if it was the right call," Markoff
concedes.

A Journalism Professor's Question. Why didn't the
Times
just add a
few lines to the first article, explaining Markoff's personal entangle-
ment in the case?

The Newspaper's Excuse. "It was an issue of space. We had ten pounds
of stuff that had to go into a five-pound bag," says
Times
assistant
managing editor Allan Siegal. "It would have been a useful full dis-
closure, but it was not a grave omission. If I had it to do over again, I'd
have found a paragraph to squeeze out." As for Markoff's desire to
continue covering the case despite his plan to write a book with Shi-
momura, Siegal says the
Times
has "explicit rules about people writing
about others with whom they have a commercial or business relation-
ship. We don't allow that." If Markoff's plan to help Shimomura tell
the full tale of the great hacker hunt predated the February 16 story,
these rules would have precluded Markoff from writing that scoop,
right? "I wouldn't want to speculate," Siegal answers.

There were problems with the
New York Times
defense of Markoff.
By the newspaper's own rules Markoff would have been precluded
from writing his February 19 article (in which he compared

Shimomura to Mr. Spock of
Star Trek),
since it came a full three
days after his agent began soliciting million-dollar deals with Shi-
momura, an individual with whom Markoff clearly "had a commer-
cial or business relationship."

Siegal of the
Times
confessed if he'd "had it to do over again,"
he'd have "found a paragraph to squeeze out" to mention Markoff's
personal role in the original February 16 story, but at the time "it
was an issue of space." The
Times
editor complained that there sim-
ply wasn't room.

He forgot to look at the bottom-right-hand corner of the page on
which Markoff's story ended. Underneath Markoff's thousands of
words was a six-and-a-half- by seven-inch filler advertisement for
the
New York Times.
Normally newspapers only run their own ads
as a last resort to fill up a space when a story comes in short. There
was plenty of room. So then what was the real reason why the
Times didn't reveal Markoff's personal involvement?

a ■ ■

John Markoff goes online with his side of the story. He promptly
dismisses the usefulness of the online dialogue, and then issues a
statement.

First, Markoff criticizes
Nation
writer Andrew Shapiro for por-
traying him as having assisted the government. While Markoff ad-
mits freely sharing information with FBI agents and Justice
Department officials, he says his "information" was all five years old
and taken straight from his book.