bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1997) — Spring 1997 // Printemps 1997, pp. 43–44
TAKEDOWN — THE PURSUIT AND
CAPTURE OF KEVIN MITNICK, AMERICA’S
MOST WANTED COMPUTER OUTLAW —
BY THE MAN WHO DID IT, by Tsutomu
Shimomura with John Markoff, Hyperion,
New York, 1996, 324 pp. $24.95.
TakeDown is a dogged pursuit thriller in the genre of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing — and the comparison is not meant to be literary. It is difficult to get terribly worked up about the nature of the crime even if the catching of the perp, a computer phreak of some genius, demonstrates the awesome power of the digital universe.
Tsutomu Shimomura, a senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Centre, spirals into cyber shock when he discovers someone has been rifling through his treasured hard-disk memorabilia, e-mail and other personal software. The evil arch-enemy of Batman-Joker proportions is a magneto-charged magus named, oxymoronically, Kevin Mitnick. And the beginning-middle-end sequence captures all the creative tension of a radio broadcast of a ping pong match.
Briefly, Tsutomu goes skiing at Lake Tahoe; his system nanny calls to tell him his computer system has been penetrated; he analyzes the data on the break-in; tracks his missing files down to a secret cranny in the San Francisco Well web-site; sniffs out a trail of bits and bytes that leads to a traffic grouping around Netcom; correlates data with a Sprint Cellular engineer in North Carolina; and, obstructed by the inevitable delays in warrant-issuance, finally captures the Mitnick with the help of the trusty FBI, in Raleigh.
But are these 324 pages of rigorous pursuit worth it? What is the nobility-level of Mitnick in big-time crime? We know Kevin was a seductee of the dark side of the computer world. The product of a broken, lower-middle-class environment lacking in adventure, he was an underachiever until he realized the power he could exert over telephone networks. Not only could naughty Kevin negotiate free calls (one wonders of this loner “to whom…?”) but peer into the lives of people, eavesdrop on the social elite or irritate his own rivals.
Mitnick fell in with a crowd that met at a Hollywood pizza parlour. Gang members did bad things like taking over directory assistance and answering operator calls by saying “Yes, that number is eight-seven-five-zero and a half. Do you know how to dial the half, ma’am” or changing the class of service on someone’s home phone to pay-phone status, so that whenever the receiver was picked up a recorded voice asked for a deposit of twenty cents. Or, horror, programming outdoor speakers of fast-food restaurants so that the speakers could tell the customers bad words.
After three arrests and minimal time spent institutionally self-redeeming, Kevin hunted for bigger game. And this time he crossed techno-swords with Tsutomu Shimomura, a leading expert in areas as diverse as computational physics and computer security. Starting as a research scientist at UCSD in 1989, Tsutomu worked with Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology; and later with Thinking Machines Corporation, the Cambridge, Mass.-based massively parallel computer start-up company to design a disk system to support the rapid movement of vast databases. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory he architected advanced parallel computing; and with Brosi Hasslacher, one of the leading researchers in computational physics, developed a radical approach to simulating the flow of fluids based on a new model of computation, known as lattice gas automata. Japboy, as Kevin called Tsutomu in his e-mail exchanges with other shady baddies, is also an active inline skater and cross country skier. We would also infer from the story-line that Tsutomu is involved in what appears to be one of the world’s least passionate love-affairs, almost virtual in dimension.
Frankly these last three elements: skating, skiing and the Tsutomu-Julia-John love triangle are really red herrings in a story that should essentially stick to a focused line-of-attack. The reader doesn’t feel an affinity with nor cares much about roller-blading around while chatting on a cell-phone or the quality of this year’s cross-country wax buzz. And as for Julia, John and Tsutomu, get a life! — what a nasal, proletarian thread of mediocre craving; the sterile relationships are portrayed as it in a vacuum of vitality.
But the pursuit itself seems leveraged against personal insult more than consequence. Tsutomu resents the intrusion into his e-mail:
“These guys were using other people’s electronic mail the way most people use the library” and vows to track him down. The process uncovers one of the new-age crime phenomena: social engineering:
…a tactic used by people in the computer underground to access a computer by talking unsuspecting computer system administrators and telephone company employees out of valuable information. They rely on people wanting to be helpful. When someone calls as if they are a new employee in a company, who has misplaced a password, the socially-engineered’s natural inclination is to give out the information.”
As John Markoff says in a review of his own co-authored book:
“The technical sophistication of the pursued and his pursuer … was remarkable. But underneath the technological paraphernalia — the tracking software and the radio homing devices carried by the pursuer, the baffling telephone switching manipulations used by the pursued to cover his tracks — there is the interplay of two opposing personalities, who had little in common besides their considerable skills. Their meeting was a collision of two dramatically different minds that happen to share a fascination for cyberspace.”
The extent to which digital sleuthing, or the uncovery of IP Spoofing — a masquerading technique for gaining unwanted access to others’ data bases — is described in TakeDown does, in itself, justify the read if one is in the market to get acquainted with how fragile our networked world really is. In the absence of good firewalling – and even with it — the vulnerability of information’s integrity is truly frightening. Kevin and Tsutomu, in exchanging technoidtaunts, outline a world of perverse electronic corruption that lays open neural fibre for anyone to see. In the hot pursuit of Kevin, Tsutomu and his specialist posse of phone phreaks and counter-hackers are able to log into distant computers and read what is being typed, as it plays! This form of energized voyeurism is clearly symptomatic of the erosion of privacy that is directly linked, in exponential proportion, to the information revolution that envelops us like a storm gathering round an eye.
Is TakeDown great literature? No. But the casual reader is not looking for a George Eliot-like dissection of today’s version of the late 19th century invasion of the telegraph; and with that perspective in mind — only that perspective, nevermind the social relevance of inline skating, cross country skiing and techno-love-story – Tsutomu Shimomura and John Markoff have fashioned a chilling glimpse into the naked realities of the information highway and our privacy. For those who thirst for TakeDown trivia you may wish to track down Tsutomu’s own web-site http://www.takedown.com.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1997) — Spring 1997 // Printemps 1997, pp. 43–44. Read the rest of this issue →
