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By Root 739 0

in a state of semishock after reading the article, trying to take in one statement after another that simply wasn’t true. With this one piece, Markoff single-handedly created “the Myth of Kevin Mitnick”—a myth that would embarrass the FBI into making the search for me a top priority and provide a fictional image that would influence prosecutors and judges into treating me as a danger to national security. I couldn’t help recalling that five years earlier I had refused to participate in a book Markoff and his-then wife, Katie Hafner, wanted to write about me and some other hackers, because they wanted to make money from my story while I myself would make no money from it. It also brought back memories of John Markoff telling me in a phone call that if I didn’t agree to an interview, anything anyone else said about me would be considered truthful since I wasn’t there to dispute it.

It was scary as hell to discover I had become such an important target for the Feds.

At least the photograph was a gift. The Times had used a copy of my mug shot from 1988, the one taken after I had been held in Terminal Island Federal Prison for three days without a shower, a shave, or a change of clothes—my hair a mess, me looking grubby and unkempt and like some homeless street person. The guy staring back at me from the front page of the newspaper was puffy-faced, weighing maybe ninety or a hundred pounds more than I did on that July Fourth.

Even so, the article ratcheted my paranoia level up more than a few notches. I started to wear sunglasses religiously, even indoors. If anyone asked, “What’s with the shades?” I just said that my eyes had become ultrasensitive to light.

After a quick run-through of the Apartments for Rent listings in the local paper, I decided to look for something in the “U District,” near the University of Washington, expecting it might be like LA’s attractive, lively Westwood area, adjacent to UCLA. I settled on a basement apartment, telling myself that even though it was dumpier than the motel I was in, it made sense for the time being because it was cheap. The building was owned by a single proprietor named Egon Drews and managed by his son David. Happily, Egon was a trusting soul who wasn’t going to bother with a credit or background check that a management company would have required.

The neighborhood turned out not to be a very good choice. This was no pleasant, sunny Westwood but instead a down-scale, seedy section of town, full of street beggars. Maybe I could do better once I had a steady job. But at least there was a YMCA nearby so I could keep up my almost daily workouts.

One of the few highlights of the U District for me was a clean and inexpensive Thai restaurant that offered tasty food and a cute Thai waitress. She was friendly, with a warm smile, and we dated a few times. But my old fear still lingered—the danger that in a close relationship, or in the glow after a few minutes of passion, I might let slip something that would give me away. I continued eating at the restaurant but told her I was too busy for a relationship.

No matter what else I was doing, I always had hacking to keep my mind occupied. That was how I discovered that Neill Clift, the finder of bugs in DEC’s VMS operating system, was using an email account on a system called Hicom, at Loughborough University in England.

Interesting! I had almost given up on Clift because I had discovered that DEC had given him a Vaxstation 4000 and was paying him 1,200 British pounds annually (that’s cheap) to find security bugs with it. After that, I hadn’t expected him to use any other systems except maybe at work or at home for email. Maybe this was my lucky break.

After a little digging around, I learned that Hicom was a public-access system and that anyone could apply for an account. Once I was set up with my own account, I exploited a security hole that Neill evidently didn’t know about, gaining full control of the system, with the same rights and privileges as a system administrator. I was very excited but didn’t anticipate that I would find