Chapter 1
Kevin's Story
by Kevin Mitnick

What Others Say

One book that examines the legal aspects of my case was written by a man who had himself been a prosecutor in the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, a colleague of the attorneys who prosecuted me. In his book Spectacular Computer Crimes, Buck Bloombecker wrote, "It grieves me to have to write about my former colleagues in less than flattering terms.... I'm haunted by Assistant United States Attorney James Asperger's admission that much of the argument used to keep Mitnick behind bars was based on rumors which didn't pan out."

He goes on to say, "It was bad enough that the charges prosecutors made in court were spread to millions of readers by newspapers around the country. But it is much worse that these untrue allegations were a large part of the basis for keeping Mitnick behind bars without the possi- bility of posting bail?" He continues at some length, writing about the ethical standards that prosecutors should live by, and then writes, "Mitnick's case suggests that the false allegations used to keep him in custody also prejudiced the court's consideration of a fair sentence."

In his 1999 Forbes article, Adam L. Penenberg eloquently described my situation this way: "Mitnick's crimes were curiously innocuous. He broke into corporate computers, but no evidence indicates that he destroyed data. Or sold anything he copied. Yes, he pilfered softwarebut in doing so left it behind." The article said that my crime was "To thumb his nose at the costly computer security systems employed by large corporations." And in the book The Fugitive Game, author Jonathan Littman noted, "Greed the government could understand. But a hacker who wielded power for its own sake ... was something they couldn't grasp."

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