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It’s a challenge to describe my life since walking out of prison, but the story would not be complete without this update.
In March 2000, two months after my release, a letter arrived from Senator Fred Thompson, asking me if I would fly to Washington to testify before the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. I was surprised, delighted, and flattered that they recognized and respected my computer skills enough to want to hear my ideas about how to protect the government’s computer systems and networks. I had to ask the Probation Office for permission to travel to Washington, DC; I imagine I must have been one of the few people under the Office jurisdiction, if not the only one ever, who gave “testifying before a Senate committee” as a reason for requesting travel permission.
The topic was to be “Cyber Attack: Is the Government Safe?” My close friend and supporter Jack Biello had a good way with words and helped me craft my written testimony.
We’ve all seen committee meetings on C-SPAN, but being ushered in and sitting there, in front of that raised platform, with the familiar faces of nationally known political leaders peering down at you, ready to soak up your words—well, the experience has a magical quality about it.
The room was packed. I was the lead witness in a hearing chaired by Senator Fred Thompson, with a panel that included Senators Joseph Lieberman and John Edwards. Though nervous at first when reading my testimony, I felt a flood of confidence surge through me when the Q&A started. Much to my own surprise, I apparently did an impressive job, even offering some jokes and being rewarded with laughter. (The text of my remarks is available online at http://hsgac.senate.gov/030200_mitnick.htm.)
Following my testimony, Senator Lieberman asked a question about my history of hacking. I responded by talking about how my motive had been to learn, not to profit or cause harm, and mentioned the case of that IRS agent, Richard Czubinski, whose conviction had been overturned when the court accepted his argument that he had accessed information only out of curiosity; he never intended to use or disclose the information.
Lieberman, obviously impressed by my testimony and by my reference to a legal precedent I had myself uncovered, suggested that I should become a lawyer.
“With my felony conviction, it’s unlikely I’d be admitted to the Bar,” I said. “But maybe one day you’ll be in a position to pardon me!”
That drew a big laugh.
It was as if a magic door had opened. People started calling me for speaking engagements. My career options seemed to be so severely limited by the conditions of my release that I had been near despair. And now, after my congressional testimony, the possibility of a lucrative speaking career was suddenly taking shape.
The only trouble was, I had terrible stage fright! It took more hours than I’d like to remember, and many thousands of dollars paid to a speaking coach, to help me overcome this fear.
As part of my fearful induction into public speaking, I joined the local Toastmasters group. Ironically, their meetings were held at General Telephone’s main offices in Thousand Oaks, where I’d once worked ever so briefly. My Toastmaster’s visitor pass gave me unfettered access to the offices inside the building. I couldn’t help but smile every time I walked in, thinking about how completely freaked out the folks in Security would be if they only knew. One of the interview requests I received around this time was from the U.S. Commission on National Security in the Twenty-first Century, a think tank that presents security recommendations to Congress and the President. A pair of men from the Department of Defense, representing the commission, came to my apartment in Thousand Oaks and spent two days asking me how government and military computer networks could be made more secure.
To my surprise, I was also invited to appear on a number of news shows and talk shows. Suddenly I was a kind of media celebrity, giving interviews to leading international publications including the Washington Post, Forbes, Newsweek, Time, the Wall Street Journal, and the Guardian. The online site Brill’s Content asked me to write a monthly column. Since I wasn’t allowed anywhere near a computer, the people at Brill’s said they would be willing to accept my drafts in longhand.
Meanwhile, other unusual job offers came pouring in as well. A security company wanted me to serve on its advisory board, and Paramount Studios invited me to consult on a possible new television series.
On hearing about these offers, however, my Probation Officer, Larry Hawley, informed me that I could not write articles about computer technology or participate in any other kind of work in which the topic was even discussed. He insisted that the Probation Office considered all such work to be “computer consulting,” which I was not allowed to do without his express permission. I countered that writing about a subject didn’t mean I was a consultant. The articles were intended for the general public. I was doing essentially the same type of work that former hacker Kevin Poulsen had done while he was on supervised release.
Undeterred, I sought out legal counsel. Sherman Ellison, an attorney friend, agreed to represent me pro bono. Naturally, this meant that I would have to plead my case before Judge Pfaelzer. Our more recent three-year-long judicial relationship had not done much to improve our mutual regard. Neither of us was glad to see the other.
“The Court had no doubt that we would be getting together with Mr. Mitnick again,” Judge Pfaelzer said. What she meant, of course, was that she had been expecting me to be brought in on new charges, or for violating the terms of my supervised release. But in the end, she made it clear that the attorneys would have to work it out among themselves and stressed that she did not want to see me back in her courtroom. She was obviously tired of the Mitnick case.
The Probation Office got the message: “Be a bit more flexible in the Mitnick case so he doesn’t end up on the calendar again.” The Probation Office started being more reasonable and accommodating toward me.
In the fall of 2000, just after I finished an interview on Bill Handel’s very popular morning show on Los Angeles radio station KFI-AM 640, I spoke with the station’s program director, David G. Hall. He explained that internationally syndicated talk-show host Art Bell would be retiring soon and wanted to suggest me to the syndicator, Premier Radio Networks, as his possible replacement. What an amazing compliment! I was stunned. I admitted that I had no experience in hosting talk radio and in fact had hardly ever listened to those shows myself, but I said I was willing to give it a try.
A few days later, I auditioned as a guest host on the Tim & Neil show, and David offered me my own show, to be called The Darkside of the Internet. Later I brought in my close friend Alex Kasperavicius to cohost with me. We exposed the dark corners of the Internet, telling listeners how to protect their privacy, and answering listeners’ call-in questions on how to best secure their personal computers, among other things, and talked about all kinds of cool sites and services that were appearing online.
David Hall, a recognized leader in radio programming, gave me only three words of advice: the show must be entertaining, relevant, and informative. Right away, I invited on guests like Steve Wozniak, John Draper, and even porn star Danni Ashe, who took her top off in the studio to show us all how hot she was. (Listen up, Howard Stern, I’m following in your footsteps!)
Because I still wasn’t allowed to use a computer, the station was kind enough to provide me with a producer/screener who would go beyond that job’s typical duties and help me with my Internet research. The hour-long show aired every Sunday. During that hour, the station went from being fourteenth in the Arbitron ratings to second. And defying the assumptions that Judge Pfaelzer had used to calculate the dollar amount of my restitution, I earned $1,000 for each show.
During my stint as a talk show host, J. J. Abrams, the famous film and television producer, contacted me. He said he was a fan and had even placed a “Free Kevin” bumper sticker on a set in his hit television series Felicity. After we met at a studio in Burbank, he invited me to do a small cameo as an FBI agent on his show Alias, as an in-joke. In a script change, I ended up as a CIA agent working against the treacherous SD6.
The Federal government refused to give me permission to type on a working computer for the scene, so the prop master had to make sure the keyboard was disconnected. I appeared on camera with Jennifer Garner, Michael Vartan, and Greg Grunberg. It was awesome—one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had.
Around the summer of 2001, I got a phone call from a man named Eddie Muñoz, who knew of my past hacking exploits and wanted to hire me to fix a rather unusual problem. His highly successful service in providing “dancers” available on call in Las Vegas had dropped off very significantly. Eddie felt certain that the Mafia had hacked Sprint’s phone switch and reprogrammed it so that most of the calls to Eddie’s service would be diverted to other call-girl services run by the Mob.
Muñoz had filed a complaint with the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) against Sprint, claiming that his business was suffering because the company had not secured its infrastructure properly against hackers. He wanted to hire me as an expert witness for the commission hearing. Initially I was skeptical that Sprint was at fault for Eddie’s declining revenue, but I agreed to testify about the company’s vulnerabilities.
During the hearing, I described how I had been hacking into phone companies for years, including Sprint. I explained that the CALRS system Sprint used for testing was similar to Pacific Bell’s SAS, but with what I thought was even better security: anyone trying to access the remote CALRS test units in each central office had to give the correct response to a challenge in order to get access. The system was programmed with a hundred different challenges—double digits from 00 to 99, each of which had its own response of four hex characters such as b7a6 or dd8c. Hard to crack… except through wiretapping or social engineering.
The way I’d gotten around it, I told the commission, was by calling the manufacturer of the system, Northern Telecom, claiming to be with Sprint’s Engineering Department, and saying I was building a custom testing tool that needed to communicate with the CALRS test units in each central office. The technician faxed me the “Seed List” of all one hundred challenges and responses.
One of Sprint’s attorneys challenged my testimony: “Mr. Mitnick is a social engineer, lying was part of his stock-in-trade, and you can’t believe anything he says.” Not only did he absolutely deny that Sprint had been hacked or could be hacked in the future, but he pointed out that I’d literally written “the book on lying”: The Art of Deception (about which, more in a moment).
One of the PUC staffers confronted me, saying, “You have offered all these claims but haven’t offered a shred of evidence. Do you have any way of proving Sprint can be hacked?”
It was a long shot, but there was just a chance I might be able to prove it. During the lunch break, I went to a storage locker I had opened while in Las Vegas just before going on the run. It was crammed with cell phones, chips, printouts, floppy disks, and more—stuff I couldn’t take with me but didn’t want to lose and couldn’t risk leaving at my mom’s or Gram’s, where the Feds might show up with a search warrant and find it all.
Incredibly, in that big pileup of old goods, I found what I was looking for: a sheet of paper, by now tattered, dog-eared, and dusty, containing the CALRS Seed List. On my way back to the hearing room, I stopped at a Kinko’s and had enough copies made for the commissioner, lawyers, clerk, and staff.
Kevin Poulsen, who by this time had become a highly respected technology reporter, had flown to Las Vegas to cover the hearing as a journalist. Here is what he wrote about my return to the witness stand:
“If the system is still in place, and they haven’t changed the seed list, you could use this to get access to CALRS,” Mitnick testified. “The system would allow you to wiretap a line, or seize dial tone.”
Mitnick’s return to the hearing room with the list generated a flurry of activity at Sprint’s table; Ann Pongracz, the company’s general counsel, and another Sprint employee strode quickly from the room—Pongracz already dialing on a cell phone while she walked.
The fact that the two Sprint people were ashen-faced as they rushed out of the room made the situation clear enough: Sprint was probably still using the same CALRS devices, programmed with the identical Seed List, and Pongracz and her colleague must have recognized that I could hack into CALRS anytime I liked and gain the power to wiretap any phone in Las Vegas.
Though I was vindicated, Eddie didn’t fare as well. Proving that Sprint could be hacked wasn’t the same as proving that the Mob or anybody else had actually done any hacking to reroute Eddie’s flow of calls and steal business from him. Eddie was left empty-handed.
In the fall of 2001, a whole new chapter started in my life when I was introduced to literary agent David Fugate. David thought my story was extraordinary. He quickly contacted John Wiley & Sons and proposed that I author a book on social engineering to help businesses and consumers alike protect themselves against the kinds of attacks I had been so successful at carrying out. Wiley showed enthusiasm for the deal, and David recommended a seasoned coauthor named Bill Simon to work with me in developing the book, which came to be called The Art of Deception.
For most people, landing an agent, a credited coauthor, and a legitimate publishing deal is the most difficult part of getting a book published. For me, the question was: how could I write a book without a computer?
I looked at the stand-alone word processors everybody used before the introduction of personal computers. Since they weren’t even able to communicate with other computers, I thought I had a pretty solid argument. So I presented it to my Probation Officer.
His answer was completely unexpected.
He dismissed the word-processor idea and told me I could use a laptop computer, so long as I didn’t access the Internet and promised to keep it secret from the media!
While Bill and I were writing our book, Eric Corley released Freedom Downtime, the documentary about the “Free Kevin” movement. It went a long way toward counteracting the gross inaccuracies of Takedown. It even contained footage in which John Markoff admitted that his single source for claiming I’d hacked into NORAD was a convicted phone phreak known for spreading false rumors.
When it came out, The Art of Deception quickly became an international bestseller, published in eighteen foreign editions. Even today, years later, it’s still one of Amazon’s most popular hacking books, and is on the required reading list in computer courses at a number of universities.
Around February 2003, I was unexpectedly invited to Poland to promote the book. At my first stop in Warsaw, my host offered four security guys in suits with Secret Service–type headsets to handle security. I laughed, thinking it was ridiculous. Surely I didn’t need security.
They escorted me through the back of the building into a huge shopping mall. The chatter got louder and louder until we walked out into the mall, where hundreds of fans were pressed up against a rope. When they saw me, they tried to push forward, and the security staff had to hold them back.
Thinking they must have mistaken me for some international celebrity, I started looking around for the star myself. But amazingly enough, the crowd really was there for me.
My book had become the number-one bestselling book in the entire country, even beating out a new book by Pope John Paul II. One local offered an explanation: in ex-Communist Poland, if you beat the system, you were considered a hero!
After a lifetime of hacking, always working either alone or with one partner, with the main goals of learning more about how computer systems and telecommunication systems worked and being successful at hacking into anything, I was being mobbed like a rock star. It was the last thing I’d ever expected.
One of the most personally meaningful memories of this time, however, was when the book tour took me to New York and I finally got to meet the 2600 supporters who had cheered me through some of my darkest hours via the “Free Kevin” movement. When I was on my rough ride through the criminal justice system, it meant the world to me that there was an army of people working tirelessly to support me. It gave me more hope and courage than they could ever know. I can never express the true depth of my gratitude to these wonderful people.
One of the landmark moments in my life after prison had to be the day when I was finally allowed to use computers again, eight years after I was first arrested. It was a festive day filled with family and friends from all over the world.
A live cable TV show called The Screen Savers, with Leo Laporte and Patrick Norton, asked to televise my first interaction with the Internet.
On the show with me were Eric Corley, who had headed up the “Free Kevin” movement and repeatedly proved himself to be my staunchest supporter, and Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, who had become one of my closest friends. They both came on to “help” me navigate online after so many years away.
As a surprise, the Woz presented me with a brand-new Apple PowerBook G4 wrapped in paper covered with a funny cartoon of a guy trying to reach a computer with a stick through the bars of his jail cell. In many ways, getting that laptop from the father of the personal computer was the moment I knew my life was finally starting to turn around.
It has now been eleven years since I walked out of prison. I’ve built a consulting practice that provides a steady flow of business. It has taken me to every part of the United States and every continent except Antarctica.
My work today is, to me, nothing short of a miracle. Try to name some illegal activity that, with permission, can be carried out legitimately and benefit everyone. Only one comes to mind: ethical hacking.
I went to prison for my hacking. Now people hire me to do the same things I went to prison for, but in a legal and beneficial way.
I would never have expected it, but in the years since my release, I’ve served as a keynote speaker at countless industry events and corporate meetings, written for the Harvard Business Review, and addressed students and faculty at the Harvard Law School. Whenever some hacker makes the news, I’m asked to comment on Fox, CNN, or other news media. I’ve appeared on 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, and many, many other programs. I’ve even been hired by government agencies like the FAA, the Social Security Administration, and—despite my criminal history—an FBI organization, InfraGard.
People often ask if I’ve completely kicked the hacking habit.
Often I still keep hackers’ hours—up late, eating breakfast when everyone else has already finished lunch, busy on my computer until three or four in the morning.
And I am hacking again… but in a different way. For Mitnick Security Consulting LLC, I do ethical hacking—using my hacking skills to test companies’ security defenses by identifying weaknesses in their physical, technical, and human-based security controls so they can shore up their defenses before the bad guys exploit them. I do this for companies around the globe, and have been giving some fifteen to twenty corporate keynotes a year. My firm also vets security products for companies before new items are released to the market, to see if they live up to the claims being made for them. My company also provides security awareness training primarily focusing on mitigating the threat of social-engineering attacks.
What I do now fuels the same passion for hacking I felt during all those years of unauthorized access. The difference can be summed up in one word: authorization.
I don’t need authorization to get in.
It’s the word that instantly transforms me from the World’s Most Wanted Hacker to one of the Most Wanted Security Experts in the world. Just like magic.