The Bumper Sticker Stays
------------------------
   After reflecting on the long, strange case of Kevin Mitnick, I've
   decided that the "Free Kevin" bumper sticker's not coming off my car--
   not yet.

   By Kevin Poulsen  March 22, 1999

   After four long years in the house of many doors, 35-year-old Kevin
   Mitnick is ready to swallow a bitter pill, plead guilty to some of the
   twenty-five felonies on his indictment plate and accept a prison
   sentence a few months longer than the time he's already spent in stir.

   But I'm not scraping the Free Kevin bumper sticker from my car any time
   soon.

   The sticker stays because Tuesday's sealed plea agreement is now on the
   desk of Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, who may yet reject it as summarily as
   she refused to allow him the due process of a bail hearing.

   The sticker also stays because Mitnick is still facing a dusty
   California state charge from the early '90s which threatens to flip him
   out of the frying pan of federal lockup and into the fire of the
   notorious Los Angeles Country Jail-- better known as Hell.

   And even after his eventual release, Mitnick will spend up to three
   years in a technophobic virtual prison, barred from touching anything
   with a trace of silicon in it.

   So the sticker will continue to adorn my bumper as a reminder of the
   end of an era, and the dawn of a new and harsh morning.

    His rights were given the treatment normally reserved for accused drug
                                                                 kingpins.

   Kevin grew up-- to the extent that he did-- at a time when computers
   were still seen as mysterious and arcane, and exploring them was an
   innocent and joyful pastime for a few privileged youngsters. There was
   no talk of cyber-terrorism then; no suggestion that teenage
   technophiles were foreign operatives acting to overthrow the
   government. Kids who weren't old enough to drive were manipulating
   dizzying technology from their own bedrooms, and it was magic, pure and
   simple.

   Kevin Mitnick was already a legendary magician when I got my first
   computer in the early '80s. In today's Internet age, talentless
   teenaged taggers make national headlines by using pre-fab cracking
   tools to deface sitting-duck websites. So it takes some imagination to
   understand the genuine skill and artistry possessed by the likes of
   Kevin.

   He gained his knowledge from dumpsters and libraries and by tricking
   the guardians of technology with telephone con games. Applying that
   knowledge, doing things that weren't supposed to be possible, required
   creativity, resourcefulness, and tools that couldn't simply be
   downloaded.

   He was the archetypal trickster, sharing the joy of discovery with
   friends and loved ones through ingenious pranks; his hapless victims
   usually ended up too impressed with the magic to be overly annoyed with
   the inconvenience. While it seems inconceivable now, Mitnick didn't
   even cloak his efforts under a pseudonym. He was simply Kevin Mitnick.

   There was no reason to hide because what he was doing wasn't a crime.
   Nobody even minded much at first. It was all good clean fun.

   The Playground's Closed

   Then the world began to change, while Kevin remained the same.
   Communism died, and a notional hacker threat replaced the red menace as
   the enemy of everything good, decent, and American.

   The Internet took off in the early '90s, and pressure grew in Congress
   to make cyberspace safe for shopping. Computers were no longer the
   billion-dollar brains controlling our lives; instead they were on our
   desks and in our homes, and no one liked the idea that people like
   Kevin might get into them and muck around.

   Suddenly, the hacking that everyone around him thought was clever,
   amusing, and harmless during Mitnick's formative years became "computer
   fraud and abuse." Examining computer source code became "theft of
   proprietary information," and was equated to stealing money from a
   bank.

   Before he knew it, Kevin was a "danger to the community," held without
   bail like a murderer. And his rights were given the treatment normally
   reserved for accused drug kingpins. He was soon in front of an openly
   hostile court, facing the full brunt of a federal prosecution, as he
   watched the seasons change through the semitransparent polymer slits
   that pass for jailhouse windows.

   There was never any doubt that Kevin was guilty of at least some of the
   charges against him. There was never any doubt that he caused a lot of
   innocent people some serious hassles, and he needed to be slapped down.
   That was never really the point. The "Free Kevin" bumper sticker is on
   my car because every day that he spends locked up raises the punitive
   bar of zero tolerance another notch.

   Kevin Mitnick never damaged anything. He never stole a dime, never
   tried to profit from his efforts. He remained a laughing Peter Pan,
   while the world changed. I suspect he never really understood that his
   victims were no longer laughing along with him. He never lost his
   innocence.

   The sticker is there as a reminder of the new paradigm that punishes
   dumb innocence more severely than true guilt-- more harshly than fraud,
   theft, and robbery. The sticker is there because jail does a slow
   violence to a person, and Kevin Mitnick didn't deserve four years of
   that violence.