Freedom Downtime Page #12

and had never talked about before.

But one interesting thing

that hasn't been made public.

You know, so much was made of the fact

that the credit cards were never used.

They were used.

An American Express card,

part of the Netcom collection...

was used in Raleigh within two days

after Kevin was arrested.

So who used it?

-How did you find this out?

-l've just known it for a long time.

You're saying the credit card

was used in Raleigh...

and it was used after he was arrested?

There are indications that there was

someone Kevin was in contact with...

who knewthis and may have been

active in the Raleigh area.

All l'm saying is there's some evidence.

How come this wasn't in the book?

How come it wasn't in the book.

Good question.

l don't know why

we didn't put it in the book.

This was really getting annoying.

He didn't follow up on

the most interesting part of the story..

and he didn't mention the fact

about the credit cards until now?

One more remark like that

and it's all over for Markoff.

Look how many people are standing here

and not one person took my brochure.

Look at all these people.

Not one of them took this.

Valuable coupons!

What are they doing now?

Oh, Kevin Mitnick!

He's the computer wizard.

The way that the Japanese wizard

found him was very interesting.

Mitnick respected the Japanese wizard

for tracking him.

On the other hand...

since the whole computer business

is stupid and ridiculous to begin with...

why should Mitnick suffer

for a ridiculous assault on the culture...

namely the computer. So that's it.

-What do you think of computers?

-l hate them.

Why?

Because they're not like feeling skin,

and they're not like walking in the forest.

And one can get lost deeply in them.

My son, of course, is in that world.

These people are computerphiles

and he's a computerphobe.

Hackers are all right

because they're anarchists, that's fine.

But the rest of it....

-This is bullshit.

-lt's pornography!

This is such bullshit!

l like Chaos Computer Club, l like anarchy.

-You know Chaos Computer Club? -No, but l like the

whole idea.

He's never heard of it.

He's saying this because--

No, it's great. But Mitnick, it's ridiculous.

Look, an activist.

Look, a bag of artificial intelligence.

They're from the '80s but l still bought them.

Just to get back to my roots.

lt's like the government's

making him look like....

lt's to create a hacker mythology so

they can deprive other people of privacy...

and other stuff like that.

He hasn't done anything wrong. He hasn't

done any financial damage to anybody

He's basically just like a scapegoat.

l think most of the kids that l hang out with

are cool, geeky, hacker types.

They understand.

Then there's my mom and everybody else.

Why would they have any reason

to believe anything...

other than he's a total scumbag who....

You know, like WarGames, the hacking.

That guy! Didn't he break into

massive computer systems?

He's not accused of selling information,

of destroying computers...

he's just accused of copying files.

Three-and-a-half years in prison for that.

How does that sound?

Yeah, cool, wow, all right, great. Register to vote?

You're an activist, too?

lmagine if somebody made a film

about you...

and they get this totally evil kind of guy

to play you...

and take everything that you ever did and

make you look like you're really terrible?

Look, there he is cheating

on a crossword puzzle, too!That guy!

Many interesting items

relating to Telegraph Street.

Street scene, one of the best places

for street scene material!

Here on the street scene...

we've got newspapers, we got novels...

we got documentary calendars,

nine calendars for nine years, man.

What sysadmin is gonna have dot slash

in their path before usr/local/bin?

lt was cool. lt's about using SUlD

and making a script called ls...

and keeping it in your home directory

and creating a file with escape characters...

pretending to be a lamer,

''l need help deleting this.''

And then they go and do an ls....

But what sysadmin is gonna have dot slash

in their path before usr/local/bin?

l don't know man, some of those hackers...

when l'm on my computer

send me all this sh*t all at once.

-Like what?

-l don't know.

All these messages. Makes my computer--

-Are you onAOL by any chance?

-No. Prodigy.

We've been bending over backwards

to help this guy..

and he's only one point away

from disqualification.

Let's do an easy one, the film.

Everyone hates the film, right?

When l read the screenplay...

l was mostly just disappointed because

it seemed like a crummy screenplay.

There we go. He's back in the running.

With one clip to go,

the best Markoff could hope for was a tie.

So l gave him a chance

to show some humanity.

l asked him to help us help Kevin

and sign a petition...

to get him released from prison

and end the nightmare.

He didn't want to sign the petition

but he had a better idea.

lf you could pass a message to Kevin...

and say if he'd be willing to sit down

and talk to me before his trial...

l would love to do a piece.

And l think that's perfectly fair.

lf nothing else,

you gotta give the guy credit for trying.

More than a decade of writing about Kevin

and he still had yet to talk to him.

lt was time for our last corporate visit.

lt was time for our last corporate visit.

Novell, who claimed Kevin

cost them more than $75 million.

We went to their corporate headquarters

in Provo, Utah.

Okay, nowthe road says ''180 East.''

All right, we want 122 East, 1700 South.

lt's like some locker combination.

Okay, here we are.

ls there somebody

in charge of security maybe?

The person in charge of security is....

He's just brand-new

Check that out.This guy is so worried

about us seeing his nametag...

that he went through this acrobatic act

to turn it over nice and casual-like.

But in the end,

it was just like everywhere else.

Nobody was allowed to say anything.

But, at least, we tried.

Hey, pal, look down. Whoops!

So the last corporate door

had been closed on us.

And now we had one last task...

And now we had one last task...

to head across the country

and stop the film.

We knew it wouldn't work.

We always knew it wouldn't work.

That's what hacking's been about

from the beginning.

Doing things that you knew wouldn't work,

just because you had to.

And trying to ignore the sh*t

happening to your friends...

and trying not to feel bad

when you couldn't change a thing.

As we drove from state to state...

l thought of how bad it could get,

how bad it had already gotten.

l remembered what they do

to people who piss them off.

l remembered what they did to Bernie.

The Bernie S. case,

as far as l'm concerned...

got blown out of proportion

by a lot of things.

lt got blown out of proportion

by the prosecution...

who knew what exactly he had done

and their representation of it...

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