Phone cops play hardball

Andy, I'll do anything, I'll play the Carpenters, just hide me, these phone cops play hardball!
-Dr. Johnny Fever

By now, stories about teen hackers are pretty dated. And they all arc the same. Bright young mind, gets hooked on learning stuff that know one else knows about, goes too far - gets brought down hard.

But reading this C|Net interview with orignal hacker Kevin Mitnick there was a very interesting angle you don't think much about - how having exclusive knowledge of computers cuts both ways.




Here's Kevin:

I ended up in solitary confinement for a year because a federal prosecutor told the judge that if I got to a phone I could connect to NORAD (North American Aerospace Command) and somehow launch an ICBM (Intercontinental Ballistic Missile). So the judge, reflecting on the movie War Games, put me in solitary confinement. I think it was a strategy they used to get me to plead out or cooperate. I was held for four and a half years without a trial.

So here you have a judge's technical ignorance being exploited to increase Mitnick's punishment. Now, I think we're way past judges being quite that stupid these days - but you can see that the limited number of people who understand the issues can frame the issue to lay persons however they want.

Kevin again:

[The government] claimed all my hacking into those companies was a huge elaborate fraud and that I caused $300 million of damage. They said the value of property I copied, the R&D development cost, was $300 million. The government tried to use the old (definition of) loss for tangible property. If I copied that code and they no longer had use of it, it would be a $300 million loss or whatever.

In other words - those with an interest in making an example out of Mitnick claimed that his hacking into their source code caused a loss equal to the total cost of developing the code. Given that Mitnick didn't publish the source code, it's proprietary value wasn't lost - but prosecutors could certainly press that argument with a good chance that their voice vs. Mitnick's attorney's could carry the day.

Here's the other bit of hardball that isn't tech related:

They told my attorney that if I didn't cooperate and plead out, not only would they take me to trial in Los Angeles, but they would put me in a revolving door of trials and put me on a bus and take me from federal jurisdiction to federal jurisdiction. So I signed the deal and admitted causing between a $5 million and $10 million loss. I signed it not believing it. I signed it to get out.

Nice.

There's sort of a pattern there, I'm just having trouble picking it out.