Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [180]
Typical of the tone of the coverage was a piece published in the February 27, 1995, issue of Time. The subhead began:
AMERICA’S MOST WANTED HACKER HAS BEEN ARRESTED
The news from my court-appointed attorney in Raleigh wasn’t good. I was indicted on twenty-three counts of access device fraud. Of these, twenty-one were related to calls made when my phone was cloned to someone else’s number. The other two counts were for possessing information, specifically the mobile phone number and electronic serial number pairs that could be used for cloning. The maximum sentence was twenty years for each free phone call. Twenty years for each call! I was facing a worst-case scenario of 460 years.
It did look bad for me—460 years was no walk in the park. I didn’t relish the idea of being locked away in prison for the rest of my life, unable to live a happy and productive life, and especially not being able to spend quality time with my mom and grandmother. They had me, hands down, for cloning cell phone numbers (the ESN’s were considered unauthorized access devices under Federal law). It was also true that I’d violated the terms of my 1989 supervised release by hacking into the voicemail of Pacific Bell Security Investigator Darrell Santos to gain information on the Teltec case, and also by associating with “computer hackers.” But 460 years for these “evil” crimes? Were there no war criminals left?
Of course, the Feds had also found Netcom’s customer database that contained more than 20,000 credit card numbers on my computer, but I had never attempted to use any of them; no prosecutor would ever be able to make a case against me on that score. I have to admit, I had liked the idea that I could use a different credit card every day for the rest of my life without ever running out. But I’d never had any intention of running up charges on them, and never did. That would be wrong. My trophy was a copy of Netcom’s customer database. Why is that so hard to understand? Hackers and gamers get it instinctively. Anyone who loves to play chess knows that it’s enough to defeat your opponent. You don’t have to loot his kingdom or seize his assets to make it worthwhile.
It always seemed strange to me that my captors had such trouble grasping the deep satisfaction that could be derived from a game of skill. Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe my motives seemed incomprehensible to them because they themselves would have found the temptation of all those credit cards impossible to resist.
Even Markoff, in his New York Times article, admitted that I was clearly not interested in the prospect of financial gain. The scale of what I’d passed up was brought home to readers by Kent Walker’s assertion that I “allegedly had access to corporate trade secrets worth billions of dollars.” But since I was never going to use or sell that information, what it was worth didn’t matter to me. So what was the nature of my crime? That I’d “allegedly had access”?
Now that I’d finally been caught, prosecutors in several Federal jurisdictions were frantically compiling long wish lists of counts and accusations against me, but I still had reason for hope. Despite the evidence, the government’s case was not airtight. There were legal conflicts that had to be resolved first. Shimmy, for instance, had been secretly working as a de facto government agent, and was intercepting my communications without a warrant, which smacked of gross government misconduct. My attorney had also filed a motion claiming that the government’s search warrant was flawed. If the court ruled in my favor, all the evidence seized in North Carolina would be inadmissible, not only in Raleigh but everywhere else.
To John Bowler, the young, up-and-coming Assistant U.S. Attorney assigned to my case, this must have seemed like a golden opportunity.