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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

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.

mc_hammer 12y ago
-deleted misread original comment :/-
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  How exactly does "pioneered what Russian crime rings are doing today" make someone deserving of support & sympathy?
guelo 12y ago
Your pro-government rant doesn't fit in this case because the government is one of the customers in the zero day market.
- melville_X 12y ago
  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.
- hackuser 12y ago
  > 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.)
  - guelo 12y ago
    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?
maratd 12y 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.
- apetresc 12y ago
  Why do you say he can't see the connection? The sentence you quoted explicitly points it out.
nickthemagicman 12y ago
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.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
  Really good point, and on a related note, guys with guns and swords have power. Doesn't Kevin worry about getting kidnapped?
  - nickthemagicman 12y ago
    Violence is short lived and easy to defend against. Knowledge is real power.
    - 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
      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).
steveeq1 12y ago
Most people don't fetishize this asshole
- melville_X 12y ago
  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.
rickdale 12y ago
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.
- mlvljr 12y ago
  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].
- malexw 12y ago
  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.
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    Silence On The Wire is an excellent book: both a good read and also technically informative. I’d highly recommend it.
- CWilliams1013 12y ago
  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/dp/076454280X/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Deception-Controlling-Security...
- 12y ago
kyberias 12y ago
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/ http://reaktordevday.fi/2013/ To be honest, I didn't understand the relevance at all. The idolization seemed quite childish.
philwelch 12y ago
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.
- x0x0 12y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick
firstOrder 12y ago
> 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.
clamprecht 12y ago
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.
- hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
  Mitnick probably falls inside the psychopathy spectrum though, so the parent might have used the word in a looser sense.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  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
muyuu 12y ago
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.

mc_hammer 12y ago

-deleted misread original comment :/-

sliverstorm 12y ago
How exactly does "pioneered what Russian crime rings are doing today" make someone deserving of support & sympathy?

guelo 12y ago

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

melville_X 12y ago
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.
hackuser 12y ago
> 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.)
- guelo 12y ago
  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?

maratd 12y 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.

apetresc 12y ago
Why do you say he can't see the connection? The sentence you quoted explicitly points it out.

nickthemagicman 12y ago

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.

0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
Really good point, and on a related note, guys with guns and swords have power. Doesn't Kevin worry about getting kidnapped?
- nickthemagicman 12y ago
  Violence is short lived and easy to defend against. Knowledge is real power.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 12y ago
    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).

steveeq1 12y ago

Most people don't fetishize this asshole

melville_X 12y ago
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.

rickdale 12y ago

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.

mlvljr 12y ago
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].
malexw 12y ago
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.
- robin_reala 12y ago
  Silence On The Wire is an excellent book: both a good read and also technically informative. I’d highly recommend it.
CWilliams1013 12y ago
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/dp/076454280X/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Deception-Controlling-Security...
12y ago

kyberias 12y ago

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/ http://reaktordevday.fi/2013/ To be honest, I didn't understand the relevance at all. The idolization seemed quite childish.

philwelch 12y ago

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.

x0x0 12y ago
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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Mitnick

firstOrder 12y ago

> 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.

clamprecht 12y ago

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.

hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
Mitnick probably falls inside the psychopathy spectrum though, so the parent might have used the word in a looser sense.
sliverstorm 12y ago
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

muyuu 12y ago

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.