Ghost in the Wires_ My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker - Kevin Mitnick [187]
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had appealed Judge Pfaelzer’s “no bail hearing” ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled in an unpublished opinion that I was a flight risk and a danger to the community, completely sidestepping the question of whether the government had to prove this in a hearing.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