The Fugitive Game: Online With Kevin Mitnick

The bestselling, true story of Kevin Mitnick, the man the
New
York Times
called "the greatest computer criminal in the world"
— by the journalist Mitnick confided in while on the run.

When the FBI finally arrested Kevin Mitnick in 1995, front-page news stories portrayed
him as a world-class hacker who pirated the Internet at will. Now, Jonathan Littman
takes us inside Mitnick's world. Drawing on dozens of conversations with Mitnick,
Littman captures the master hacker's frenetic life on the run: his narrow escapes, his
Internet breakins, and his intricate plans for revenge. Liftman's detailed reporting
examines the surprising motives of the fugitive and his pursuers, and what their con-
flict reveals about our legal system and the media. In a new epilogue featuring the
first interviews with Mitnick since his arrest, Littman details the hacker's surprise
rejection of a government-proposed plea bargain and the resulting federal indictment
that prosecutors threaten could land him a two-hundred-year sentence.

A fast-paced, compelling narrative,
The Fugitive Game
is a must-read for anyone who
wants a window into the power of unauthorized forces shaping our electronic future.

is an award-winning San Francisco-based
author and journalist who specializes in
cyberspace. He is also the author of
The
Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes
of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen.

Copyright © 1996, 1997 by Jonathan Littman

ISBN 0-316-52.858-7 (he) 0-316-5Z869-Z (pb)
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 95-81109

For Sherry Lue
and Elizabeth Claire

Author's Note /
ix
Prologue /
3

I.
Agent Steal / 11
The Call / 15
Pending Investigation / 25
The Tap / 33
Summer Con / 41
Private Eye / 45
Wipe / 51
Early Departure / 57

II.
The Garbage Man / 65
Fresh Air / 76
The Other Half / 80
Career Counseling / 87
Three-Way / 93

Dear Janet / 100
Press Tactics / 106
Seattle / 111
The Well / 113
The Hunt / 116
Data Thief / 121
Natural Born Killers / 127
Cut Off / 131
Last Call / 138
Overseas / 150
Skip Jacker / 156
Suitcase / 163
The Raid / 169

III.
December 27-30, 1994 / 179
January 8, 1995 / 186

January 17, 1995 / 190

Morning,

January 19, 1995 / 194

Afternoon,

January 19, 1995 / 206

Night,

January 19, 1995 / 214

Morning,

January 20, 1995 / 221

Night,

January 20, 1995 / 228

January 21-23, 1995 / 235

January 29, 1995 / 242

February 1-2, 1995 / 248

February 5-9, 1995 / 263

February 12, 1995 / 273

IV.

February 15, 1995 / 283
The Front Page / 292
The Evening News / 299
The Show / 304
Meet the Press / 310
Big Time / 321
The Silver Screen / 330

V.
The Well / 341

Emmanuel / 349

Probable Cause / 359
Afterword /
367

/
377
Notes /
391

Author's Note

This story grew out of a book that
I was writing about another Kevin. His name was Kevin Poulsen and
he, like Kevin Mitnick, was a computer hacker. The stories inter-
twined. In the spring of 1994, I began receiving phone calls from
Kevin Mitnick. He was a fugitive, the FBI's most wanted computer
hacker. Sometimes he called me at pay phones. Eventually he called
me at home. Mitnick phoned me dozens of times over the next nine
months. I suspected he was in the United States but I never knew
where he was.

Within a month of his arrest in February of 1995, I began writing
this book. I had already interviewed many of the key participants:
the FBI informant sent to develop a case against Mitnick in 1992., the
Assistant U.S. Attorney in charge, fellow hackers, a phone security
officer, John Markoff of the
New York Times,
and numerous minor
characters, including a pimp and an exotic dancer.

In the next few months I interviewed cellular phone investigators
who had tracked Mitnick in Seattle, Washington, and Raleigh,
North Carolina; an FBI agent; a U.S. Marshal; a second Assistant
U.S. Attorney; the owner and managers of the Internet provider the
Well; Tsutomu Shimomura; and many other individuals in the story.
Several scenes in this book include dialogue. The dialogue is based
on my interviews. The sources are listed in the back of the book.

My wife's faith made this book possible. She reminded me why I've
spent a good portion of my life chasing and telling the stories of real
people. You never know where a story may lead.

In the days after Mitnick's arrest, I was on the phone with my
editor, Roger Donald, Little, Brown's editorial director. Roger had a
tough choice. He'd already commissioned my book on Kevin Poul-
sen. He made a strategic decision. He put my Poulsen book on hold,
and signed me up to write the Mitnick story as fast as possible. With-
out his support and that of Dan Farley, Little, Brown's publisher, the
book would not have been written. My agent, Kris Dahl of ICM,
helped me focus and ignore the hype.

I was ably assisted in interviews by Deborah Kerr, a journalist and
writer. My friend Rusty Weston offered sage advice. I was lucky to
be surrounded by skilled editors, chiefly Roger Donald, but I also
benefited greatly from suggestions by Geoffrey Kloske, my wife,
Rusty Weston, Rik Farrow, Deborah Kerr, David Coen, and
Amanda Murray. My father provided sound counsel and perspec-
tive.

It is a journalist's job to make contact with the characters who
bring a landscape and culture to life, and although this story pre-
sented unusual obstacles, I've found the journey exciting. I would
like to thank Kevin Mitnick and the hackers, phone company inves-
tigators, federal prosecutors, and other individuals who gave gener-
ously of their time. They opened the doors to their worlds.

Mill Valley, October 18,
1995

Jonathan Littman,
[email protected]

THE

FUGITIVE

His straight black hair sweeps
behind his ears past his
shoulders. His face reveals a perfect Eastern mask: the broad nose,
the full lips, the black eyes impenetrable even without the Oakley
sunglasses balanced on his head. He wears khakis, a T-shirt with the
name of a cross-country ski race, and Birkenstock sandals. It's
around forty degrees, windy, the time shortly after 7 p.m. on Sunday,
February 12, 1995. He walks through the airport concourse, carry-
ing his Hewlett Packard palmtop computer with the custom inter-
face that plugs into his modified Oki 900 cellular phone. He doesn't
need to stop at baggage claim.

One of the Sprint technicians waits curbside at Raleigh-Durham
Airport in the company Ram Charger. The other tech finds the man
where he said he'd be, standing next to the bank of telephones.

His name is Tsutomu Shimomura. His press clippings speak for
themselves. The
New York Times
has dubbed him one of the na-
tion's "most skilled computer security experts." Attacked on
Christmas Day by a mysterious hacker, Shimomura took it upon
himself to solve the crime as a "matter of honor." He's been tracking
the hacker virtually nonstop for the last five days.

The
New York Times
article that thrust Shimomura into the na-
tional spotlight less than two weeks ago is vague about his identity.

Shimomura has lived most of his life in the United States, but he is a
Japanese citizen, a foreigner with extraordinary U.S. military and
intelligence contacts. "Until last week, Mr. Shimomura, a 30-year-
old computational physicist at the federally financed San Diego
Supercomputer Center, was primarily known only to an elite circle
of the country's computer security specialists." The
Times
reported
that Shimomura writes software security tools that have "made him
a valuable consultant to the FBI, the Air Force and the National
Security Agency." What exactly Shimomura does, and for whom, is
unknown.

In twelve days Shimomura has rocketed from relative anonymity
to media darling, his press all the more remarkable because he was a
victim, the latest target to be compromised by a brilliant, "dark-
side" hacker employing a novel attack that the
Times
warned puts
the entire Internet at risk. The story is a trendy twist on Sherlock
Holmes and Dr. Moriarty. It's followed by a quarter-page, neon-lit
close-up of Shimomura in
Newsweek.
In the image superimposed
above his own face, he sits cross-legged, Buddha-style, his eyes
boring into the laptop on his knees: "Shimomura doesn't resemble
your typical cybercop," wrote
Newsweek.
"With his shoulder-
length hair, wraparound sunglasses and rollerblades, he's as creative
in building and maintaining security as dark-side hackers are in
breaking it."

Neither the
New York Times
nor
Newsweek
hints at the iden-
tity of Shimomura's opponent, but to those in the know there's a
likely suspect. Someone talented and obsessed. Someone capable
of cracking Shimomura's vaunted security. Someone like Kevin
Mitnick, a grossly overweight demon hacker, who stared out
from the front page of the
Times
the previous Fourth of July, a
scruffy mass of dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses, heavy, remorse-
less face, and blank eyes.

cyberspace's most wanted: hacker eludes f.b.i. pursuit

Combining technical wizardry with the ages-old guile of a grifter,
Kevin Mitnick is a computer programmer run amok. And law-
enforcement cannot seem to catch up with him... .

The front-page placement was proof of the enduring power of Kevin
Mitnick's legend. The hacker had not yet been captured or even
sighted. Indeed, it was unclear that he had committed any new crime
to justify the front-page story. But reading further in the article it
was clear that Mitnick was a serial hacker, in and out of trouble
since 1981. And now, Mitnick had crossed the ultimate line: "Last
year, while a fugitive, he managed to gain control of a phone system
in California that allowed him to wiretap the FBI agents who were
searching for him."

But it was more than just the mockery Mitnick made of the FBI. In
the same article, the
Times
declared Mitnick a one-man threat to the
worldwide cellular phone revolution, and set the stage for a digital
joust of immense proportions.

Mr. Mitnick is now a suspect in the theft of software that com-
panies plan to use for everything from handling billing information
to determining the location of a caller to scrambling wireless phone
calls to keep them private. Such a breach could compromise the
security of future cellular telephone networks even as their mar-
keters assert that they will offer new levels of protection.

Tsutomu Shimomura has barely slept the last hundred hours or so,
moving rapidly from one Internet site to another, conferencing with
the Assistant U.S. Attorney and FBI agents, logging intrusions to the
Net, comparing the results of phone company traffic patterns, traps,
and traces.

The Sprint techs whisk Shimomura from the airport, past the bill-
boards hawking computers and cellular phones, to meet the local
FBI agents at the Sprint cellular switch, where local airborne Sprint
calls are switched to land phone lines. But the agents don't stay long.

About 11:30 p.m., Shimomura and one of the techs arrive at the
Sprint cell site, a tiny one-room prefab building crammed with relay
racks and radio gear. The cell site is a small hub, a local Sprint cellu-
lar link serving customers within a few square miles, logistically the
best place to base their tracking operations. Phone records show
Mitnick's calls originated in this sector of cellular airspace. He's
probably just a few miles away.

The hunt begins with the Sprint tech's Cellscope, a high-quality
scanner controlled by a laptop that only law enforcement, cellular
providers, or licensed detectives can legally operate. By pressing a
couple of keys on the laptop the tech can command the scanner to
jump through the local cellular channels. He can also enter the
unique identifier every cellular phone has: a mobile identification
number, or MIN, and an electronic serial number, or ESN. The
Cellscope picks up the portion of the call broadcast by the caller and
received by the nearest cell site.