February 22, 2000

Memorable Interview: Kevin Mitnick

"Hacker" is a term of honour and respect. It is a term that describes a skill, not an activity, in the same way that "doctor" describes a skill. It was used for decades to describe talented computer enthusiasts, people whose skill at using computers to solve technical problems and puzzles was - and is - respected and admired by others possessing similar technical skills.

- Kevin Mitnick in "They call me a criminal"
Published in The Guardian on February 22, 2000

They call me a criminal

By: Kevin Mitnick

I am uniquely qualified to comment on the "hacker hysteria" we now see in the global media. A reformed hacker myself, I spent nearly four-and-a-half years in federal detention in US prisons awaiting trial. For 49 months I was denied a bail hearing (unprecedented in US history according to my defence team's research) and denied release on bail.

After learning of the prosecutors' "promise" to keep me in prison without bail and to retry me repeatedly in different jurisdictions until they obtained a conviction, I realised that pleading guilty to nine of the original 27 charges, eight of which I did not commit, was my only realistic choice.

The whole world's attention has been focused on the internet in general, and on "hackers" in particular, by the recent distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS), which disrupted big US internet operations such as Yahoo and Amazon.com. Whenever large multi-national corporations see their operations disrupted, they pressure American officials to "do something" about it.

And whenever the media sense a good story, they sensationalise it; to put it crudely, they want to attract more eyeballs that they can sell to their advertisers. Thus we witness the current media feeding frenzy on the term "hacker".

"Hacker" is a term of honour and respect. It is a term that describes a skill, not an activity, in the same way that "doctor" describes a skill. It was used for decades to describe talented computer enthusiasts, people whose skill at using computers to solve technical problems and puzzles was - and is - respected and admired by others possessing similar technical skills.

In the late 1980s the media began to use the term as a pejorative. The Los Angeles Times reported on my arrest in 1988 for computer fraud with dramatic bias, and repeated uncritically the remark of the magistrate in my case, Venetta Tassopolous, who displayed her own extraordinary bias when she labelled me - at my pre-indictment arraignment hearing as "dangerous when armed with a keyboard".

Bruce Sterling documented the early history of the vilification of hackers in his book Hacker Crackdown in 1990. Katie Hafner and her then husband and current New York Times technology writer John Markoff contributed to the demonisation of hackers as a group, and hacking as an activity, when they libelled me in their 1991 fictionalised narrative Cyberpunk with the label "darkside hacker" without reason, justification, or proof.

Read the entire article at The Guardian ...