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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

It amuses me to hear how middle-class people are baffled by the fetishization of criminality in hip-hop culture, when we fetishize the same type of assholes in our culture. Mitnick is a criminal and all the pro-hacking sympathies have been wasted on a very, very undeserving person. Funny how easily you can manipulate public opinion with the right PR and anti-government message. Everyone wants to be the rebel against "the system." Everyone seems to think they're the Ayn Rand hero amongst the idiots, when in reality, the rebels and the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically. The rise of libertarianism in geekdom seems to fall under the same dynamic.

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As far as I could ever tell, 90% of the sympathy for Mitnick was because of the excessive sentencing passed down by the government. It's less like hip hop idolizing gangsters and more like sympathy for Rodney King, who was drunk driving at 100 miles per hour and resisted arrest before he was beaten by the LAPD.

Yup. This is why people were upset about Mitnick:

   Mitnick served five years in prison—four and a half years pre-trial and 
   eight months in solitary confinement—because, according to Mitnick, law 
   enforcement officials convinced a judge that he had the ability to "start a 
   nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone", meaning that law enforcement 
   told the judge that he could somehow dial into the NORAD modem via a 
   payphone from prison and communicate with the modem by whistling to launch 
   nuclear missiles. He was released on January 21, 2000. During his 
   supervised release, which ended on January 21, 2003, he was initially 
   forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline 
   telephone. [1]

He committed a series of crimes, and prison was appropriate. Solitary confinement, however, was not.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick

I was fooled into this when his first book was released, "The Art of Deception". I think I read the first three pages and heart sank because it wasn't a book about computer stuff really at all and I started thinking this guy is a fraud. but mostly I was fooled by marketing. (I was 12 at the time). I just remember being very let down by the book and not being a fan of Mitnik for that reason.

The comment section of this post has an underlying anger towards the hi-jacking of the word 'hacker' as it was and is applied to kevin mitnik and thus misunderstood by the public waaaaay too often.

The first chapter (the one about random-number generator numbers and slot machines) was almost cool though (the rest was so-so, leaving that very impression you mentioned) -- read it in Russian, in translation, in a book store [and decided not to buy].

Interesting, I had the exact same reaction as you. Bought the book (along with Michal Zalewski's Silence on the Wire), got less than a chapter in, and put it down in frustration. I've since wondered if I should go back and give it another chance. Sounds like no?

For what it's worth, I really enjoyed Zalewski's book. He seems like a really smart guy.

Silence On The Wire is an excellent book: both a good read and also technically informative. I’d highly recommend it.

So you bought a book that's sold as "The world's most infamous hacker offers an insider's view of the low-tech threats to high-tech security"[0] and expected it to be about serious computer-based intrusion?

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Deception-Controlling-Security...

There's some poetic justice to feeling deceived by a book with that title.

Is a criminal, or was a criminal? If you claim he is (in 2014) a criminal, is it because of his crimes pre-1995, or some crime he committed in the past year? If your answer is the former, then you are essentially saying "once a criminal, always a criminal." And if you claim that, I will throw some counterexamples in your face, beginning with myself.

Mitnick probably falls inside the psychopathy spectrum though, so the parent might have used the word in a looser sense.

This gets into the mild ambiguity of the word... anyone who has been convicted of a crime is by definition a criminal [1]

Calling them a criminal does not necessarily invoke [2]

[1] a person charged with and convicted of crime

[2] a person who commits crimes for a living

I think you give them too much credit. I think they just want power. It's seductive.

Lawyers have power, Doctors have power, Hackers have power.

Really good point, and on a related note, guys with guns and swords have power. Doesn't Kevin worry about getting kidnapped?

Violence is short lived and easy to defend against. Knowledge is real power.

Sure, tell that to the lawyer that got eaten by the T-rex. Though what you say is probably the answer to why the threat of violence doesn't stop Mitnick. He seems to have good social skills or the knowledge of how to interact with people. He's probably selling shellshocked as a 0 day right now (though it's been out there a day or more already).

Your pro-government rant doesn't fit in this case because the government is one of the customers in the zero day market.

Governments are almost always the market for zero-days. Private security companies also buy them, but guess who their primary market is? Look at FinFisher's customer list.

There is nothing libertarian about the defense industry or their actors. Unless you mistake neo-liberalism as libertarianism as far too many people do.

> Your pro-government rant doesn't fit in this case because the government is one of the customers in the zero day market.

(Legitimate) governments generally are the only legitimate users of 0-days. Governments can legitimately and legally hack into your computer; nobody else can. Governments can legitimately and legally shoot you, but generally nobody else can.

One definition of government is that they have a monopoly on violence.

(I say "generally" above because there are exceptions, of course.)

So the premise here is that governments can hack into your computer but the people that sell the government the tools to do it are criminals?

Maybe it's because I'm pretty much in the libertarian/anarchist spectrum, but I think that if what he's doing is legal, it's for the best that it's done openly.

The alternative to free markets isn't "no markets" or some flowery hippie ideal world. It's mafia and black/dark markets operating in complete or partial secrecy.

One of the prime examples from my corner of the world:

The Finnish software house Reaktor recently invited Mr. Mitnick as a "keynote speaker" into their popular event for software developers:

http://reaktordevday.fi/2013/

To be honest, I didn't understand the relevance at all. The idolization seemed quite childish.

Most people don't fetishize this asshole

Agreed. Most people I know look at him with amusement. He's hardly an idolizing figure, besides some alright books about past exploits long ago.

> the rebels and the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically.

and

> The rise of libertarianism in geekdom seems to fall under the same dynamic.

I can agree to the first, the second can be simply attributed to an understanding of the first. It is unfortunate that you don't see the connection.

The corruption of traditional causes and activism is what leads people toward libertarianism.

Why do you say he can't see the connection? The sentence you quoted explicitly points it out.

> Mitnick is a criminal and all the pro-hacking sympathies have been wasted on a very, very undeserving person.

Wow, he hacked into some corporation's computers, that's just so awful. Pacific Bell - a shady monopoly who is granted a monopoly by the government, and in return showers politicians with bribes, I mean donations, and sends our calls and web history off to the NSA for monitoring and permanent storage.

> in reality, the rebels and the intellectually vain are easily co-opted politically

In reality, he has been doing security consultations for corporations, so he has already been co-opted. "The service has offered to sell corporate and government clients high-end 'zero-day' exploits". That doesn't really smell of rebel. Of course, everyone has to grow up and make a living.

I can think of a number of IT companies that were founded in the past 20 years, sold for billions of dollars, or worth billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars, that were founded by ex-hackers, or at least people very associated with the hacker scene and whose first technical hires were ex-hackers. It's mentioned in the tech press, in interviews, in blogs etc. It's easy enough to look up if you want to. I mean, one of YC's founders is rtm, and he was around back in Viaweb days.

It's difficult for me to perceive of a modern working class kid interested in technology today, it seems he has more resources at his disposable (although not many - a dinky Vic 20 booted people right into a programming environment, whereas a kid with an iPad and iPhone today would find it very difficult to program his own device - it is pretty much that definition of an embedded system of a device that can't program itself). Back in the 1980's a working class kid with a Vic 20 and 300 baud modem could only call people locally, call local BBS's, and be stuck with poor computing power.

If he hacked and phreaked, he could call around the country, access teleconferences, call BBS's around the country, access powerful Unix, Vax/VMS etc. systems, access the Internet, access x.25 networks and x.25 chat networks in Europe etc. He could follow the law and accept his straitjacket of being designated by the Relations of Production to be one who works a menial job, and for the privilege of being allowed to work he can kick up his expropriated surplus labor work time to the idle class job creator heirs who own his company. Or he can bend the rules, see new vistas, and somewhere down the line maybe co-found a billion dollar company, or a hundred billion dollar company. Then he, or his apologists like you, can then go around complaining about the kids hacking into his company's computers.

-deleted misread original comment :/-

How exactly does "pioneered what Russian crime rings are doing today" make someone deserving of support & sympathy?

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