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

Takedown
, was very eager to talk with me. I agreed to let Alex
three-way Weston onto our call. Brad said he wanted my cooperation on the
film. He also said that Skeet Ulrich, who had been cast to play me, wanted
to speak with me.

---

I told Brad that I had read the script and found it to be mostly false and
defamatory. I said I was planning to hire an attorney. Brad said the
production company would gladly pick up my attorney’s fees; they would
prefer to settle with me as soon as possible, rather than run the risk that a
court case might delay the release of the film.
Two well-known Los Angeles libel attorneys, Barry Langberg and
Debbie Drooz, saw that some, though not all, of the absurdly false stuff was
removed from the script. They also secured a decent settlement for me,
though I’m not allowed to disclose the details.
Because that settlement came in before my criminal case was resolved,
there was some concern that the judge might seize the money as part of a
restitution payment. My attorney declared the income in camera (meaning
for the judge’s eyes only), and the judge allowed me to keep it private. So
the prosecutors never learned that I had received money from the producers
of the film.
In the end, the movie version of 
Takedown
was so widely panned on its
own merits that it was never distributed theatrically in the United States. As
I understand it, after a few faltering attempts in French theaters, it went
straight to DVD.
Meanwhile, my attorney had appealed Judge Pfaelzer’s “no bail hearing”
ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in an unpublished
opinion that I was a flight risk and a danger to the community, completely
sidestepping the question of whether the government had to prove this in a
hearing. We then took it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with my
attorney sending the brief to Justice John Paul Stevens. He took an interest
and recommended that my case be heard, but when he sent it to the full
Court for a decision about putting it on the calendar, his colleagues
declined.
Not long after that, I was alarmed to hear that the government prosecutors
were alleging I had caused damages in the mind-boggling amount of over
$300 million. Of course, there was absolutely no foundation for this figure.
My lawyer quickly pointed out that corporations are required by the
Securities and Exchange Commission to report material losses to their
stockholders, but not one of the companies in any of its quarterly or annual

---

reports had ever claimed the loss of a single penny as a result of my
hacking.
Just a few weeks after I was arrested, FBI Special Agent Kathleen
Carson had been working to come up with these greatly exaggerated loss
numbers. An internal Sun Microsystems memo showed she had told Lee
Patch, vice president of Sun’s Legal Department, that the Solaris source
code I had copied could be valued at $80 million, which would have called
for the harshest sentence for fraud under the Federal sentencing guidelines
—so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how she came up with that
number. When she asked Sun to put a dollar value on the loss associated
with the break-in, she advised that the figures should be based on the value
of the source code.
This was like nabbing someone for stealing a can of Coke and
demanding that he repay the cost of developing Coca-Cola’s secret formula!
Someone at the FBI had decided that the best way to inflate the claim
for damages was for the companies to report how much it had cost them to
develop
the software I copied. But they still had their software. They were
not deprived of it, so it doesn’t justify claiming a loss equal to the value of
developing the source code. A reasonable figure would have been the value
of a source code 
license
, which was probably under ten thousand dollars.
However much they wanted to punish me, we all knew that the
companies’ actual losses were far, far less than alleged. If anything, they
amounted to the man-hours spent investigating my intrusions, reinstalling
the operating system and application software in any system I had
compromised, and whatever licensing fees they charged customers to
purchase a source code license.
The $300 million claim against me for damages was so outrageous that
it motivated my supporters to ramp up the “Free Kevin” movement. Every
time the government did something that reeked of unfairness, the numbers
of my supporters only grew. “Free Kevin” was now a growing grassroots
movement that had spread across the country—and even reached as far
away as Russia!
When Eric organized a protest, the television news showed crowds
parading with “Free Kevin” picket signs outside Federal courthouses in
fifteen different cities, from Portland, Maine, to Los Angeles, from Spokane
to Atlanta, and in Moscow, near the Kremlin. Eric recapped the unfairness
in 
2600
magazine:

---

Since February 15, 1995, Mitnick has been held in a pretrial
facility with no bail hearing for possession of software allegedly
worth millions of dollars. But the companies asserting this have
never proven these claims nor have they reported these “losses”
to their stockholders, as is required by law. Computer and legal
experts generally agree that it’s very unlikely there really was any
real damage and that the high numbers assume every file and its
associated research were wiped from existence. In actuality, no
such damage was ever reported. Yet, Mitnick remains imprisoned
as if this was what happened.
My supporters wanted the government to respect my constitutional right
to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial within a reasonable time.
As I understood it, the “Free Kevin” demonstrators in these cities around
the world didn’t necessarily think that all the charges should be dropped and
I should be allowed to walk out of prison scot-free. But they objected to the
obvious unfairness in the case: the denial of a bail hearing; the illegal search
and seizure; the defense’s lack of access to evidence; the court’s refusal to
pay my court-appointed attorney’s fees, which effectively denied me
representation for four months; and the claims of hundreds of millions of
dollars in damages for copying source code.
When people realized what was happening, momentum started to grow.
The press was writing about the protests. People were putting “Free Kevin”
bumper stickers on their cars and in shop windows. There were even people
walking around in “Free Kevin” T-shirts and wearing “Free Kevin” badges
and pins.
During the court protests, I looked out the small window of my prison
cell and actually saw an airplane dragging a “Free Kevin” banner. I had to
pinch myself. I couldn’t believe it was really happening.
Over the previous four years, I’d had to deal with libelous reporters,
uncomprehending judges, superstitious Marshals, manipulative friends, and
exploitative filmmakers fanning the flames of the Myth of Kevin Mitnick
for their own agendas. The idea that there were people out there who could
finally see what I’d been going through brought me much comfort.

---

The support was so encouraging, in fact, that it motivated me to gear up
for the fight. I’d found a recent case in the prison’s law library that had
convinced me I might be able to beat the most serious charges.
When I told my lawyer Donald Randolph that I’d found a legal
precedent that could change everything, he said, “Let me worry about that,
Kevin. I’m the lawyer.” But when I showed him the case, his eyes widened.
In 1992, an IRS agent named Richard Czubinski had used his access to
IRS computers to snoop into the tax returns of various political figures,
celebrities, and other government officials. He did it out of curiosity. He
was charged, like me, with computer and wire fraud, and convicted in
December 1995. After being sentenced to six months in prison, he
successfully appealed his case. The Federal appellate court held that
Czubinski, like me, had never intended to either use or disclose the
information but had simply accessed it