Freedom Downtime

All we can do is try to publicize the facts.

Not what the government is saying, but the facts.

And not simply parrot or regurgitate...

what the government's saying, because that's largely bullshit.

lt was the dead of winter.

l don't remember it ever being so cold.

And we were on a mission.

A bunch of us had volunteered to drive our good friend to his new home...

the Schuylkill Federal Prison in the middle of Pennsylvania.

He called himself Phiber Optik.

You'd have to look hard to find someone who didn't think he was brilliant.

Before we left, we had a night of fun...

in the streets of Philadelphia, in the middle of an ice storm.

Phiber learned by exploring.

He was never too busy to explain...

howthings worked to anyone interested.

l think that's what pissed of the authorities the most.

They never tried to prove that Phiber Optik hacked into any computers.

They got him for conspiracy...

for talking on a tapped phone line...

about howto hack certain sites.

There were people who broke into systems...

and fucked things up, and they never even got arrested.

The feds didn't care.

They wanted to shut down the teachers, the people who didn't knowto keep secrets.

There's Bernie S.

He's another guy who loves to explain...

howtechnology works to anyone who's interested.

He didn't know it, but hell was just around the corner waiting for him.

We made one last stop before we dropped Phiber off.

lt was a town called Frackville.

We thought it was funny because of a hacker newsletter called Phrack.

We thought it'd make a good picture for the hacker community.

But Bernie had the balls to get a Frackville cop...

to pose with Phiber.

These guys had no clue what was going on...

but they quickly got into the spirit.

lt was the last time we laughed that night.

We drove to the prison.

lt felt like it was 20 degrees below zero.

We didn't know they'd throw him in the hole...

for the entire weekend. Some kind of prison welcoming ceremony.

And like the gullible idiots we were...

we figured we'd have a chance to say goodbye.

We didn't.

They grabbed him.

And we had to run out of there to keep them from taking our camera.

Phiber came home 10 months later, a hero.

Everyone knew sending someone like that to prison...

was a big mistake.

After it was over, we were pretty sure it wouldn't happen again.

Were we ever wrong.

Bad boys gone to jail

Bad boys gone to jail

Look at you, boy, you've come of age

and now you're going around saying you're a bad boy

You say that you'll never go to jail

'Cause you're so bad and you cannot fail

Oh bad boy Oh rude boy

Oh bad boy Gots to believe me

Oh bad boy Here is how you fail

Gots to believe me one time

You went to town just to fool around

You met a girl who was wearing a frown

You going around, boasting, feeling bad

Now you're sitting in jail

don't you feel so sad

This is like the crudest form of communication l've ever had to do.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

l just saw something.

Was that you? Well, we can see your hand.

l doubt you can stick your whole head through the window

Splotch your face up against the window

We'll know it's the right one, we can at least zoom in on it.

We'll know it's the right one, we can at least zoom in on it.

Kevin Mitnick, the world's most dangerous computer hacker.

My regret about Cyberpunk is talking about Kevin...

and how he was always eating and how he was overweight.

People have really gotten on my case about that.

Some guy came up to me at anAustin book thing and said:

''Why did you go on and on about Kevin's weight?''

And he was right.

l did that to the point where it just wasn't tasteful.

Where it was sort of...

just beating an issue that didn't need to be beaten.

For a period after he was arrested, incarcerated...

and released into a halfway house...

l couldn't find a single article...

that talked about him without mentioning his weight.

And the real fascination with Kevin's body...

and its relationship to technology..

is one of the things that absolutely hooked me.

l found a number of articles in Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times...

written by people like Markoff and Joshua Quittner and so on.

And they would say Kevin was in a halfway house...

where he no longer touched a computer, and lost 100 pounds.

As if those two things were connected.

1988, USA Today...

put his picture on the front page...

morphed or superimposed with the image of Darth Vader.

And l thought this is a remarkable combination of two things...

and it's really picking up on the idea of the Dark Side hacker.

lf ever there was someone who fit that description, it was Kevin.

The mention of his name was enough to incur the wrath of the authorities.

Over the years, his reputation grew and so did the falsehoods.

ln numerous articles, Kevin was said to have broken into NORAD...

harassed actress Kristy McNichol...

and turned his friends' home phones into payphones.

His beginning was on ham radio.

And on ham radio, it's a close-knit community.

A couple of dozen people at the most on a particular repeater or channel.

And, you know, they would get into challenges.

And, of course, Mitnick would be the underdog.

''Let's challenge him, let's do this and that.''

When he met their challenges, they'd start crying and screaming...

as if they were innocentvictims of Kevin's.

This has been the case throughout.

And then people would start unfairly using...

other contacts that they had.

ln one case there was a lieutenant or commander in the LAPD....

One ham radio operator who was a friend of his...

got him to write a letter saying Kevin was interfering with LAPD communications.

And all sorts of crazy things in his past.

Cyberpunk was published in 1991...

Cyberpunk was published in 1991...

by Katie Hafner and then-husband John Markof...

and relied almost entirely on the words of people...

who Kevin had had a falling out with...

as well as those who didn't know him at all.

Hafner and Markoff never talked to Kevin, because he wanted to be paid for his time.

But it didn't take much to dispel the rumors.

NORAD denied any break-ins...

Kristy McNichol had no idea she was being harassed...

and no evidence ever surfaced of any payphone conversions.

But none of this ever got printed.

Kevin's name was enough to convict him, regardless of the actual evidence.

And then there was Security Pacific.

After being hired, Kevin had once again been terminated...

because of the stories that followed him.

And this resulted in yet another Mitnick myth being born.

There was a Newswire article coming out that stated...

that Security Pacific had lost billions of dollars or something...

in bad loans...

which would have affected their stock price.

That was actually tracked down to some error...

that someone made in entering the information.

lt had nothing to do with it not being true...

but it was an error that someone made in entering the information.

lmmediately, because there were employees at Security Pacific...

that knew Kevin Mitnick, including one ham radio operator...

immediately that was attributed to, ''Kevin Mitnick did this.''

And that's howthat rumor spread.

l'd seen this all before.

Hackers were always getting blamed for things they didn't do.

ln many cases for things that weren't even possible.

lt was obvious somebody had to set the record straight...

somebody who would command respect.

Hackers break into government and business computers...

stealing and destroying information...

raiding bank accounts, running up credit card charges...

extorting money by threats to unleash computer viruses.

Whoa, hold on a second.

What was this guy reading? The Weekly World News?

Hackers don't steal and extort, they play with all kinds of things.

Like those Simplex locks on the FedEx boxes.

ln typical corporate brainpower...

FedEx uses the same combination on every drop box in the country.

lt's fun to stick something really big in there...

that couldn't possibly fit in the chute just to fuck with the guy

And he got some cheap beer out of it too.

lf you go somewhere you're not supposed to be...

and bring something back to show people...

that always struck me as being a whole lot like a panty raid.

And you know, panty raids are really...

in the grandest tradition of this country

Try to make your way in there...

get the stuff, and get back out with it without getting your head cut of.

What we're doing here is we're talking...

on McDonald's external speaker for their drive-thru.

And what we're doing to do that...

is we have a modified ham radio...

meaning it transmits on frequencies other than the ones it was intended to.

ln this case, it's standard business band frequencies.

154.6 megahertz seems to be the standard McDonald's frequency

l'll take your order.

The blonde, would you please kneel down for a second?

Could one of you take off your tops? We'll give you the food for free.

You bastards, you better stop being smart.

-Here comes the manager. -Really?

While corporateAmerica would always be the playground of hackers...

it was mostly about fun and exploration, not damage or profit.

But try telling that to corporateAmerica.

Kevin Mitnick had already paid a heavy price for his curiosity.

He had served a year-and-a-half in 1988...

for logging into DEC computers without authorization.

By simply looking at the VMS operating system...

DEC claimed he caused millions of dollars in damage...

and was sentenced as if he had caused that amount of physical damage.

He was held without bail and was put in solitary confinement for eight months...

He was held without bail and was put in solitary confinement for eight months...