Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker

Freedom Downtime
.
Sometime later, the crowd started a demonstration across the street from
the detention center itself. I looked out the window of another inmate’s
room to see a parade on the street below: a chain of people holding up a big
yellow and black “Free Kevin” banner and “Free Kevin” picket signs.
Apparently this made the prison officials nervous. Shortly afterward, the
entire prison was locked down for “security reasons.”
With the growing public awareness of my case, nearly two years after
my attorney demanded that the government turn over discovery materials,
Judge Pfaelzer finally relented and allowed me to use a laptop computer to
review the evidence with my attorney. I never knew what made her change
her mind. Maybe another judge had pointed out that she risked being
reversed on appeal. Or perhaps someone had explained that without
connecting the laptop to a modem and phone line, there was no way I could
damage anything.
Whenever I was at the courthouse for a hearing, I realized the deputy
marshals would turn their badges around any time they had to be near me.
My attorney and I both wondered what that was about. Later when he was
visiting me in the courthouse lockup, he noticed some text blotted out on
the visiting form he had to sign. When he held it up to the light, he could
read the print through the paper. He shook his head and said to me, “You’re
not going to believe this.” Then he read me the blacked-out text:
Please be aware that if Mitnick is taken into custody, he possesses an
amazing ability to disrupt one’s personal life through his computer
knowledge, i.e., TRW’s, phone service, etc. Exercise extreme caution
in leaving anything about which would have personal information
about yourself.
Unbelievable! I guess they really were worried I had magical powers.

---

The Myth of Kevin Mitnick was about to take another really ugly turn.
Before my case could even go to trial, Markoff and Shimmy were cashing
in on the story. They had already written a book about it together in 1996;
now they had sold the movie rights to that book, for a film to be called
Takedown
.
Luckily, one of the costume designers working on the film leaked a copy
of the screenplay for 
Takedown
to 
2600
magazine. When I read the script, it
literally turned my stomach. The screenwriters had cast me as an evil villain
and portrayed me as doing things I had 
never
done in real life, such as
hacking into hospitals and endangering patients’ lives by altering their
medical records. I was horrified.
One particularly preposterous scene even showed me violently
assaulting Shimmy by grabbing a metal trash-can cover and slamming him
over the head with it. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine either one of us engaging
in such a ridiculous fight.
When he saw the script, Eric Corley wrote online that it was “far worse
than I had ever imagined.” If it were made into a film, he said, “Kevin will
be forever demonized in the eyes of the public.”
In an article for ZDTV, Kevin Poulsen wrote,
Nobody predicted that the script, supposedly based on the dry, but
inoffensive book of the same name, would be filled with so much
blatant fabrication. No one expected that Kevin Mitnick might become
the most feared and hated screen villain since Hannibal Lecter.
Appalled by the false portrayal of me in the movie script, my supporters
picketed Miramax Studios in New York on July 16, 1998. Eric Corley
brought international media attention to the fact that the script was filled
with blatant lies. Eric was also responsible for getting the word out about
the civil liberties issues its release would raise for my case. All of us were
concerned that the movie would prejudice my trial.
During a phone call we had around that time, while I was still in pretrial
detention, Alex Kasperavicius told me that Brad Weston, one of the
producers of