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Kevin Mitnick Hacked California Law in 1983
- barathr 4y agoIt's been fascinating to see the collision of security and smart contracts. Smart contracts in some ways represent an idealized view of the law, of law as code divorced from the messiness of reality, and security and hacking has a way of circumventing and/or dismantling such constructs via unknown unknowns. This post is a reminder that legal hacking has probably always been a thing even if it wasn't called that.
- ozim 4y agoWell mobs had always their lawyers. Which were not like your regular lawyer “off the street” these were always “hackers” that would count minutes or specific holes to get their clients off the hook. I don’t think Mitnick was ever able to get such a lawyer because if he did, he would not be a hacker he would be just another gangster.
- tiffanyh 4y agoHe was an idol within the 2600 community, for those who remind that. 2600 was the original “hacker news”.
- notadev 4y agoFREE KEVIN
- RF_Savage 4y agoPUT KEVIN BACK
- fallowkevin 4y ago>>FREE KEVIN > PUT KEVIN BACK Registered a throwaway over Tor just for this thread. Kevin shouldn't be in prison, because prisons should be abolished, but be careful where you put... that. There's a notorious story about him being physically ejected from a fundraiser for refusing to pay the entry. (Redacting some details to stick to the fun parts) On my end, I was working my way up to maybe flirting with someone I'd had a crush on for years, because I was a widdle baby hacker at my first... con... and off in the corner there's some kind of disturbance. "What was that?!" I sputter, straining to see across the smoky room, and some multicolored cyberpunk dryly drops "Oh, some asshole getting bounced" If my timelines are correct, "some asshole" was Kevin Freaking Mitnick being physically ejected because when repeatedly asked to pay the door fee kept reiterating "I'm Kevin Mitnick!" and being repeatedly told "We know!" until one of the goons just... picked him up and carried him out into the hall. And me? I was in the corner being aggressively hit on by John "Cap N Crunch" Draper, who seemed annoyed I kept refusing to drink from his flask. I told him dude, I'm 21 I can just buy booze at the bar and he angrily spat back "Why would I tell you if she's single, then you won't ever let me give you a massage!" and stormed off to find someone dumber and younger than me to ply. (It was my first hacker convention, and it fully lived up to my expectations even if I didn't end up on the roof that year, lolllll)
- nibbleshifter 4y ago> I was in the corner being aggressively hit on by John "Cap N Crunch" Draper I recall being specifically warned about him early in my conference attending. Dudes creepy as all fuck. At later events he was eventually banned.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fallowkevin 4y agoHe was banned ten years after I interacted with him. I actually was asked to leave a vendor party I was trying to network at for "starting drama" when I told others not to be alone with him. (Fuck you, Duo.)
- 4y ago
- mindcrime 4y agoFunny you would mention that. To this very day I'm rocking one of those stickers on my laptop. It's an interesting conversation starters at times... https://fogbeam.com/phil_laptop.jpg https://fogbeam.com/phil_laptop.jpg
- nbk_2000 4y agoI regret losing my "Phreak Heaven" variant of that sticker
- stavros 4y agoI'll have two!
- thelittleone 4y ago2600 was amazing along with early phrack. @Efnet around that time was a lot of fun and learning.
- fallowkevin 4y agoIs IRC still a thing and if so what's a good one to join? (I always avoided it for... uh... "opsec" but realizing I might be missing out on some things...)
- jack_pp 4y agoidk about black hat stuff but I owe a huge amount of gratitude to the freenode (now irc.libera.chat) community that helped me learn C++ 12 years ago and to the #linux / #debian / #arch-linux channels to which I go for help even to this day.
- fallowkevin 4y agoI feel like people dichotomize too much... I would never don a black hat, but the world is much grayer than some make it out to be. I simply wish to explore friend :-)
- jack_pp 4y agoI understand, but afaik libera.chat does not even offer grey hat channels, it's mostly above board but certainly alive and well
- fallowkevin 4y agoThe line between gray and black is so fuzzy it's best to keep such things offline, thanks for the lead on purely technical discussions :3
- wyclif 4y agoIRC is still a thing. There's a certain kind of IRC user who will never allow themselves to use Discord or Slack...
- anonymousiam 4y agoGhost in the Wires is a great book. It's full of fabulous stories like this, all true. Upon reading it years ago, I finally learned the explanation for why Netcom never billed me for years of continuous dial-up CSLIP service. Kevin had hacked Netcom and deleted their accounting records.
- captainkrtek 4y ago+1, a very fun read!
- ricktdotorg 4y agowow, would that have been 90/91? while at UK uni a few of us had a shell account at Netcom. we'd X25 from our uni to a telnet relay in london and used netcom for unix/shell access. we did not get reliably billed for a long time! thought at the time it was just UK/US banking issues. i wonder if Mitnick was why! will have to re-read the book. thanks for the memory!
- anonymousiam 4y agoNot sure if Kevin's Netcom escapades are responsible for you not getting billed for a shell account. I had two Netcom accounts (actually one account with two services). I was continuously billed ($19/mo?) for the shell account, but I was never billed ($6/hr) for the CSLIP account. Somewhere I read that Kevin had wiped the accounting records for CSLIP. I'm not sure of the level of detail described in his book. Maybe I'll read it again. I ran that CSLIP connection continuously for many years. I would have paid them if they had ever billed me.
- moremetadata 4y agoNatwests main security limitations was a few seconds to a dial up account in order to upload a batch file of bank accounts to transfer money around.
- Overtonwindow 4y agoIf you send him $10 cash in the mail with a self-addressed stamped envelope, he will send you back one of his business cards, which is a lock pick set. One of my most prized possessions.
- baremetal 4y agowhat is his address
- Overtonwindow 4y agohttps://www.mitnicksecurity.com/kevin-mitnicks-famous-lockpick-business-card https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/kevin-mitnicks-famous-lockpi...
- baremetal 4y agoNeat. Thanks!
- pfarrell 4y agoOne of my former co-workers had one of those business cards as our company had used Mitnick Security to evaluate our processes. I can confirm it's a really cool business card.
- cryptoz 4y agoI also have that business card and also it is a prized possession haha. I met him at The Last HOPE in nyc about 10 years ago ( it wasn’t the last hope in the end) and got one there. Almost lost it at airport security once so I keep it at home now.
- fallowkevin 4y ago>Almost lost it at airport security once so I keep it at home now. You can bring tools under a certain size through the TSA. "What's this?" "My lock pick set" "Why do you have lockpicks in your bag?" "For work. They're not sharp." And with that, after a brief eyebrow raise, I was on my way. (Though I got the sense they thought I was with the men in black or something, but hey, uh -- be the change you wanna see in the world.)
- Eleison23 4y ago[dead]
- hrunt 4y agoAs someone with a software development background, I always found legal language very interesting. It is like a very verbose, programming language. All sorts of words and phrases have very specific meanings that, when arranged in a certain order, produce specific, reproducible outcomes. Sections of contracts and laws reference other sections by name and reference, and the whole document (or set of documents) gets interpreted in a semi-rigid way. Just like computer programs, mistakes happen with legal languages, and when they do, they are typically have unintended consequences. (edited for a couple of missing words in the last sentence)
- noman-land 4y agoI have felt this way as well and wonder why we can't encode laws into some sort of machine code and study it, test it, iterate it, debug it, and optimize it like we do with computer programs.
- rastamutta 4y agoThe space of things that can happen is just too large. You need a human, or some other neural network, to make judgment calls.
- noman-land 4y agoBut perhaps we can study the past judgement calls and relate them to which words were chosen.
- blep_ 4y agoPeople tried that. Unfortunately, it was immediately doomed because it was a blockchain thing. More seriously, this means you also have to accurately encode all the things the laws refer to, even when those things are vague judgement calls. It's easy to say "you can only have a noncompete agreement if it doesn't make it unreasonably difficult to find another job in the same industry", but hard to express "unreasonably difficult" or "same industry" with the kind of precision we expect from code. A sufficiently evil company would just pay a lawyer for a few days to find a loophole in whatever definitions you can think of. There's a reason the primary use of this is cryptocurrency conversion - it's a lot easier to enumerate all the failure modes in "give me n of A and I will give you m of B".
- nosmokewhereiam 4y agoHis business card was a lockpick set, this was years ago...but I still remember someone showing it off!
- ganoushoreilly 4y agoI'm pretty sure it still is, I saw a variation of it with the KnowBe4 branding a few years after I snagged the first one. Kevin is a bit of a polarizing figure in the "scene" more so now than he used to be, still he was one of the first people I saw with this unique card (though it's since been replicated).
- danbmil99 4y agoKevin, if you're reading this you still owe me $500
- lupire 4y agoWhat about the adult fugitive from justice charges from when he was 21 and hiding?
- lupire 4y agoDid Mitnick ever pay restitution for his decades of crimes?
- kurisufag 4y agoonly by defacing the public image of hackers for the rest of time.
- h2odragon 4y agoDecades of "sovereign citizens" trying the same thing get less respect. It's all in the public relations. Fellate the right reporters and you're set for life.
- stephen_g 4y ago“Sovereign citizens” at least at the moment mostly seem to be basing their arguments on false and ridiculous ideas like “the country has been secretly turned into a corporation so can’t legally enforce the law” or “An agreement between King John of England and some rebel barons in 1215 overrides the law in the US or Australia etc.” Exploiting a technicality in the actual, existing, applicable law is very different from basically trying to completely make up your own laws…
- jancsika 4y agoAlternative rank speculation: Kevin's parole officer liked him and knew that his superiors in an overworked system wouldn't bat an eye at his wrong interpretation of the law. So he played along, and his superiors didn't ask any questions. One less kid to keep up with (and a nonviolent one at that). If on the other hand Kevin's parole officer had been a dick, he would have told Kevin he wasn't allowed to do this. And when Kevin did it anyway, he would have brought it to the attention of his supervisors who would use the right interpretation of the law to hold him accountable and keep the warrant out for some longer amount of time. Since there isn't a series of human-based gates running inside Chromium, this has very little if anything to do with finding exploits in software. Edit: clarification
- stephen_g 4y agoIf the description in the article is correct (I don’t know much about US law), it seems like a pretty solid argument and technicality. If the jurisdiction of the Youth Authority expires, there doesn’t seem to be much they can do. The gamble is whether the regular prosecutor could charged him afterwards for something given what he did, and whether they would bother.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gamblor956 4y agoJuvenile courts (in CA) only have exclusive jurisdiction over crimes committed while a defendant was under 18 (except for those enumerated crimes for which juvies can be tried as adults), and maintain that jurisdiction for all proceedings related to that crime until the defendant turns 21, at which point the juvenile court proceedings terminate by law. Adult courts have jurisdiction over defendants for crimes committed as an adult (generally 18, though as young as 16 for specific crimes). The arrest warrant was issued when Mitnick was 21 and on parole, or in other words, for a violation committed as an adult. While the arrest warrant was issued by the juvie court, it could have been issued by the adult court, as both courts would have had jurisdiction over the crime for which the arrest warranted was issued. So the lawyer was right, because the statute of limitations for the adult court was tolled while Mitnick fled the jurisdiction. And the parole officer was also right, because the juvie court which issued the warrant would have lost jurisdiction over Mitnick once he turned 21. Juvie court is way nicer than adult court. Mitnick "hacked" the system and only got away with it because prosecutors decided to focus their efforts on more serious crimes. But he could easily have ended up in prison for a few years.
- blindriver 4y agoGreat story but ultimately Kevin Mitnick got fucked by the law and unjustly served years in jail. They made ridiculous statements like he could start a nuclear war by using a telephone. I think he's unfortunately an example of what happens when you push too far, a.k.a. FAFO.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- raldi 4y agoSee also: the Yellowstone Zone of Death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_Death_(Yellowstone)
- rendaw 4y ago> Belderrain cited Kalt's paper "The Perfect Crime" to explain why he believed it was illegal to have his trial with a jury from a state other than where the crime was committed. The court dismissed this argument. There's a lot of argument going on about what side of the line this is on, but in the end it seems like courts can just say "we don't care" and do whatever they want?
- goodcanadian 4y agoWell, yes and no. The Supreme Court gets final say should it be appealed that far and they agree to hear the appeal. I am no legal expert, but I think they would hear this case if it got to them.
- causality0 4y ago"Hacking the law" seems like a very flowery way to describe "noticing the court has a statute of limitations."
- pseingatl 4y agoNo on-line legal research in 1983? Nonsense. It was called "computer-assisted" legal research and at a minimum, there was the following: Lexis Westlaw Juris (DoJ only) FLITE (Air Force servicing other agencies) and law review articles were indexed on laserdisc.