"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Hacker Mitnick Freed
LOMPOC, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., 2000 JAN 24 (NB) -- After five years in prison, Kevin Mitnick, the world's most famous computer hacker, has walked free from a California state prison.
A spokesman at the Lompoc, Calif., federal prison where Mitnick was incarcerated, said the inmate was freed today at 6:45 a.m. Pacific Standard Time.
Mitnick, 36, whose case has been a cause celebre in the computer hacker community, was convicted last March on five federal counts. He was accused of causing millions of dollars of damages by hacking into computer systems of some of the nation's largest corporations and educational institutions.
Fujitsu, Nokia, Motorola, the University of Southern California and several others were all among his victims.
Terms of Mitnick's probation require that he keep completely free of the computer culture, said Christopher Painter, the assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the Mitnick case. Mitnick is barred for three years from using all computers, software, modems, cell phones, Internet-connected televisions and any other Net-accessing devices without permission from his probation officer, Painter said.
"The reason those conditions were imposed was that the judge decided that, given his past, he simply couldn't be trusted with a computer," Painter said. "I've heard a lot of things. 'He can't work at a McDonald's,' his supporters say. But that's not what the court has said. The court has applied these conditions reasonably, and they're appropriate conditions in this case."
The hacker's initial sentence called for five years in prison. However, he was given credit for four years served while awaiting trial.
Mitnick's many supporters have argued that his case was railroaded and that he was wrongly prosecuted because he had no intention of profiting from his activities.
However, Painter said, "That's essentially irrelevant to the (corporate) victims, who suffered millions of dollars in losses, and to the individuals who suffered invasion of privacy from stealing e-mails and stealing their passwords."
According to the indictment filed against Mitnick in Central California's U.S. District Court, Mitnick used aliases and lied to employees of the companies, convincing the employees to divulge user accounts and corresponding passwords. Mitnick got the information by saying he was himself an employee of the companies.
In other instances, the indictment states, Mitnick would call computer departments of various companies, pose as an employee working on a special project, and get system administrators to create for him his own user account that he could access remotely.
Mitnick violated probation in 1992 and went into hiding. He was captured by the FBI in 1995 in a Raleigh, N.C., apartment, after government computer consultant Tsutomu Shimomura traced the hacker's steps through the network.
Mitnick's attorney, Donald Randolph, could not be reached for comment.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com
Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly