The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick (49 page)

"I did not 'want to get Kevin,' " announces the reporter, strangely
adding that he had never told that to anyone. But Markoff told me
he was considering trying to capture him more than six months ago,
just before he put Mitnick's picture on the front page of the
New
York Times.

If Markoff didn't plan to "get Kevin" he certainly had to know
that if Mitnick was captured, his newspaper stories about Shimo-
mura's pursuit would make the beginnings of a riveting book. But
Markoff declares that too is false. He says he never discussed a book
about Shimomura's capture of Mitnick until after his articles were
published on February 16. I remember our lunch in Chinatown,

and Markoff's excitement about the idea of writing a book on
Mitnick.

Markoff's cryptic statements only seem to raise more questions.
He admits he was skeptical "it was actually Kevin" and that it was
only on the Saturday before his arrest that he became certain he
was after the right man. The reporter never clarifies whether the "it"
was the Christmas IP spoof or some other alleged Mitnick hack.

Finally, Markoff ends his post with a lengthy reference to his fif-
teen years of writing "realistically" and objectively about hackers.
But he writes that the years of reporting have made him "tired of
spoiled ... kids" who lack the patience to program themselves and
opt instead to take from others. He quotes from his new role model
and coauthor: "As Tsutomu likes to say, that's not acceptable be-
havior."

But while Markoff defends himself against charges raised by
The
Nation
and the
Washington Post,
nearly everyone skirts the larger
implications. Who is Tsutomu Shimomura, and how has he man-
aged to control the media?

After Mitnick's arrest, one of my hacker sources sends me an on-
line version of a surprising 1993
Communications Daily
article
about Shimomura.

IMMUNITY NEEDED:
MARKEY PANEL SEES DARK SIDE OF ELECTRONIC FRONTIER

Last year, Congress, concerned about cellular phone users' privacy,
passed legislation outlawing scanners that pick up cellular chan-
nels. ... At a hearing on privacy, computer cracking and related topics,
it took Tsutomu Shimomura about 2. min. to take a new cellular phone
out of its box, turn it on and set the device to test mode — thus turning
it into scanner that enabled those in House hearing room to hear
snatches of live cellular conversations.

Shimomura needed congressional immunity to conduct the demonstra-
tion, which otherwise would have been illegal. An FBI special agent
was standing by to make sure no other laws were broken. . . .

What an amazing story. Just a couple of years ago, Shimomura
needed immunity from prosecution to show the U.S. Congress that

he could transform a cellular phone into an illegal scanner and
eavesdropper.

I think back to my lunch in San Francisco with Markoff, when he
unmasked Mark Lottor as one of the two mystery hackers he pro-
filed in an old
Wired
article. Markoff stopped short before he named
his other source, but he had already let the cat out of the bag. I dig
up the article, and am immediately struck by its timing. "Cellular
Phreaks and Code Dudes: Hacking Chips on Cellular Phones Is the
Latest Thing in the Underground" was researched in late '92, and
published in January of '93, just months before Shimomura testified
under immunity before Congress about illegal eavesdropping.

Paradoxically, the article celebrates hackers. Markoff waxes
philosophical on the new cellular hackers, comparing them
to
the
first phone hackers, who tweaked the latest technologies for the
challenge. But there's plenty of technical description too. Markoff
talks about a "disassembler," a program that reveals nearly a hun-
dred secret commands for controlling the Oki phone and turning it
into a scanner. He also gets a firsthand demonstration of how
to eavesdrop on cellular calls at a location that sounds an awful lot
like the conference room of the San Francisco
New York Times bureau.

Markoff acknowledges that what he's watching and listening to is
"highly illegal." Congress recently outlawed the manufacture of cel-
lular scanners, writes the
Times
reporter, and the Electronic Com-
munications Privacy Act of 1986 makes it a crime to intercept
cellular calls. Perhaps that's why Markoff disguises the identity of
the hackers. But he's already told me one of the masked individuals,
"N.M.," is Mark Lottor. It's not too hard to guess who the other
might be:

Meet V.T. and N.M., the nation's most clever cellular phone
phreaks. (Names here are obscured because, as with many hackers,
V.T. and N.M.'s deeds inhabit a legal gray area.)...

V.T. is a young scientist at a prestigious government laboratory. He
has long hair and his choice in garb frequently tends toward Pat-
agonia. He is generally regarded as a computer hacker with few
equals....

... On a recent afternoon, V.T. sits at a conference room table in a
San Francisco highrise.... Suddenly, voices emerge from the
phone's ear piece....

What's going on here? V.T. and N.M. have discovered that every
cellular phone possesses a secret mode that turns it into a powerful
cellular scanner....

But free phone calls are not what V.T. and N.M. are about. "It's so
boring," says V.T. "If you're going to do something illegal, you
might as well do something interesting." ...

V.

Saul Katz, the recently re-
tired seventy-eight-year-old
founder of the Rockport shoe empire, is surfing the Well, the Inter-
net provider his son, Bruce, bought a few years ago. He reads in a
conference session that usage seems abnormally high. Katz phones
Bruce, the Well's Chief Executive Officer, and tells him that he too
has noticed the system seems to be slower than usual.

"Do you think somebody could have hacked in?" asks Saul.

"No, absolutely not," replies Bruce, who helped launch the family
shoe empire by selling pairs from the back of a VW bus.

But three days later, Bruce Katz gets an urgent call from the Well.
His father's hunch was right. A hacker had indeed cracked the Well
and gained root access. "I was in Aspen skiing with Bill Joy [the
founder of Sun Microsystems]," says Katz. "He had been talking
about Tsutomu's talents in security. Suddenly I said, 'I gotta find this

guy.'"

Other people had the same idea. On January 2.7, a Well techni-
cian had stumbled upon a bloated account belonging to the organ-
izers of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference and
alerted Bruce Koball, one of the group's organizers. Koball discov-
ered the account crammed with Shimomura's files. It meant nothing
to Koball until that evening's
New York Times
landed on his door—

step. Koball saw Markoff's Shimomura story and put two and two
together. He contacted Well technical manager Hua-Pei Chen and
Markoff. The reporter took over from there, putting Koball directly
in touch with Shimomura.

■ ■ ■

This is no ordinary breakin. The Well appears to have been used as
an Internet drop point for a hacker's treasures, hundreds of Shi-
momura's e-mail messages, code for the Oki cellular phone, and
tools for hacking, or perhaps security. How could the Well not call
in the government? Nobody really knew what was on Shimomura's
machine and how dangerous his files might be in a hacker's hands.
Shimomura's close friend Brosl Hasslacher, a physicist at Los Al-
amos National Laboratory in New Mexico, would later explain to
Rolling Stone
magazine: "Tsutomu has built software that can liter-
ally destroy an alien computer. They are essentially viruses that can,
for example, tell the computer to sit in one register until it literally
melts the circuitry in the chip or command the hard drive to hit the
same track 33,000 times — until it destroys the drive."

Katz quickly calls a meeting of his board of directors to debate
whether to hire Shimomura. The board knows it's taking a big risk
by inviting Shimomura to investigate. Even the slightest government
intrusion into cyberspace could be fiercely debated on the Well. A
champion of libertarian causes, the Well helped spawn the Elec-
tronic Frontier Foundation and organize the Computers, Freedom
and Privacy "civil rights" conferences. Its members consider them-
selves privacy advocates and staunch opponents of federal attempts
to regulate cyberspace.

But Katz sees the intrusions as a wake-up call, a warning that the
Well can no longer ignore its poor security. And even if the FBI
ultimately becomes involved, Katz wonders whether that would be
such a bad thing. His board members don't seem overly concerned.
CERT, the federal government's emergency response team, isn't
worried. Even the Electronic Frontier Foundation, that defender of
hackers and privacy, thinks Katz is doing the right thing.

"I wanted to keep the FBI out of the Well," says Katz. "I grew up
as paranoid as anyone in the 1960s. But you know it depends whose

ox is gored. If something happens to you, the police become your
buddy. It seemed like the FBI were going to be our ally in this. They
would help protect our interests."

Andrew Gross arrives at the Well February 1, and begins assisting
Hua-Pei Chen in monitoring the illegal intrusions. He's hired as a
paid consultant at less than fifteen dollars an hour. He, like Shim-
omura and Julia Menapace, Shimomura's assistant and girlfriend,
swears to maintain the confidentiality of the investigation. "We
didn't want our staff to know, and the staff didn't know [about the
investigation]," Katz says. "We kept it small. It was amazing, but we
kept it secret."

Mark Graham, the Well's president of networks, is in charge of
the monitoring. "We set up Andrew and Tsutomu in a technical staff
room. They brought in two laptops. We had to make fast decisions
how we were going to do this. I felt we should work with authorities
but we had to be responsible to our members, I decided to do seven-
by twenty-four [round the clock] monitoring. We had a high degree
of ability to monitor his activities. We brought Pete Hansen [a UNIX
expert] down from Oregon. We pulled shifts."

Shimomura arrives the evening of February 6. Shimomura's got
three powerpacked UNIX microSparC laptops with two gigabytes of
storage — over $30,000 of computing power. Two units are set up
to "snoop" on the Well, and the third is left free to develop monitor-
ing tools. "He was really into this thing," recalls Katz, impressed by
Shimomura's zeal. "He was here to catch this guy."

Law enforcement seems uninterested. Claudia Stroud, a Well vice
president, furiously calls the FBI in Los Angeles and Washington,
D.C., but they seem to be always playing telephone tag. The FBI
keeps telling her to just send them "the data." "We were begging the
FBI to come in and they couldn't have given a shit," says Katz. "The
problem was the FBI didn't know how to help."

When the investigative team discovers the contents of the in-
truder's files, Katz starts phoning up the corporations whose oper-
ating source code has ended up on the Well. He finds the experience
amusing. He gets an executive secretary on the line and she tells him
the CEO doesn't have time to talk. That's when Bruce Katz drops his
bombshell.

"Why don't you tell him that I'm in possession of the complete
source code to your new product and I don't know what to do
with it."

Kent Walker, the boyishly handsome San Francisco U.S. Attorney,
and the two middle-aged FBI agents sit around the crowded confer-
ence room table in Sausalito, California. The secret meeting is being
held across the street from the Well at its holding company, the
Rosewood Stone Group. The date is Tuesday, February 7. Shimo-
mura sits at one end in his usual shorts and Birkenstocks, his cellular
and Palmtop by his side. He's joined by Julia Menapace and Andrew
Gross. The Well has called in its San Francisco attorney, John Men-
dez, to advise vice president Claudia Stroud and technical manager
Hua-Pei Chen.

Mendez helped sell the Well on cooperating with the feds. It made
sense to him. He was a "fed" himself not too long ago, the former
U.S. Attorney in San Francisco and a onetime boss of Kent Walker.
But none of this eases Claudia Stroud's concerns. She feels a "certain
sympathy" with Mitnick, and knows she isn't alone. Part of her job
is gauging the mood of Well subscribers, and she knows if they ulti-
mately condemn the Well for straying from its traditional philoso-
phy, she'll have one big mess on her hands.

Sure, Mitnick and perhaps some other hackers may be traipsing
about the Well. But Stroud knows this is hardly big news. The Well
has been hacked on and off for years. When Katz bought the Well in
1991, he considered it no more than a big BBS, a computer bulletin
board system. There were 10,000 users and security was not a high
priority. By early 1995 neither the size nor security of the Well has
changed. At best, the small Internet provider has grown to 12,000
users.