The Next Chapter (Spring, 2000) ------------------------------- It's over. And yet, it's just beginning. We've always known that the Kevin Mitnick saga was about so much more than one man's fight against injustice or even the future of the hacker world. With increasing intensity, events of the past five years have given us reflections of where our society is going and what we are losing along the way. Five years is a very long time. Consider where you were and what you were doing on February 15, 1995, the day Mitnick s ordeal behind bars began. So much has changed, especially in the world of technology. But five years doesn't even begin to tell the story. You would have to go back to 1992 if you wanted to include the years Mitnick spent on the run trying to avoid capture and as far as 1988 to include the case, which supposedly cast him in such a fearful light as to warrant eight months of solitary confinement obviously a motivating factor in later fleeing the authorities even when the alleged violation was trivial. When you add up the confinement and the supervised release, Mitnick has not had a truly free day since 1988 and won't again until 2003. Tha'ts 15 years of a life. And all for someone who never stole, caused damage, or made a profit through his crimes. What a tremendous waste of time this ordeal has been. And what a waste of talent when you consider what Mitnick could have contributed to our world over all these years. And still, there is a very definite case to be made for the significance of it all. Never before have we seen such awareness and education on the part of the hacker community. Word of Mitnick's case spread to schools all around the world, people protested outside federal buildings and embassies, and a major motion picture exploiting the Mitnick story was exposed and prevented from spreading most of its blatant lies. While this didn't alleviate the suffering and may not have shortened Mitnick's time behind bars, it at least focused attention on the unfairness rather than on the tabloid headlines. And it made us all the more wary of what the authorities were planning for the future. In our case, we didn't have to wait long. In fact, it was with the precision of a soap opera that one crisis was immediately succeeded by the next. On the very day before Kevin Mitnick's release, we at 2600 became the latest targets of a world gone mad with litigation and incarceration. It was only days earlier that a massive lawsuit had been filed against us by the Motion Picture Association of America. That's right, those people who give ratings to movies. Apparently, that's not all they do. Representing some of the most powerful entities in the world (Columbia/Tristar, Universal City, Paramount, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, and Time Warner), the MPAA targeted 2600 and a handful of others, claiming that we were somehow responsible for threatening the entire DVD industry and the future of motion pictures. What were they smoking? Good question. We still don't know. But this is the truth of the matter: In November, some enterprising hackers were able to figure out how to play the DVDs they had already purchased on their Linux machines. By doing this, they were able to bypass the access control that the DVD industry put on the technology, a draconian control, which had never been implemented in other consumer devices like CD players, VCRs, or walkmans. And it was this control that had made it impossible for computers not running an "approved" operating system (such as Windows or Mac OS) to play DVDs. By defeating this control, the hackers got around this absurd restriction. To the industry however, they had created doubt as to who was in control and, as we saw with the Mitnick case and so many others, people with power who fear losing control of it behave irrationally and will spare no effort or expense to neutralize the perceived threat. When the DVD encryption was defeated, hackers, as is their instinct, told the world and made the source code available. This resulted in threats being made against them for daring to figure it out. As a show of support, we posted the source code on our web site, as did many others. We actually thought reason would prevail until one day in late December webmaster@2600.com was served (via email) with legal papers from the DVD Copy Control Association. We thought it was pretty funny that a lawsuit could be emailed and even funnier still that they actually believed they could prevail in such a manner. We don't even have a working DVD player and here they were accusing us of piracy. Not to mention the fact that we weren't even involved in figuring it out in the first place. They sent out legal threats against all kinds of people all around the world using whatever bizarre alias the web sites might have been registered under. But there were also lots of people whose real names were used. We saw it as an incredible waste of money and effort on the part of the DVD CCA, which nobody took very seriously. For one thing, the court they filed the lawsuit with had no jurisdiction outside of California. But the humor was soon to wear off. On January 14, the MPAA stepped into the fray with guns blazing. Lawsuits were filed against four individuals including the editor of 2600 and the owner of an Internet Service Provider who wasn't even aware of the existence of the code that was on one of his customer's web pages. We saw this as a clear intimidation tactic - after all, is Bill Gates summoned to court every time Microsoft is sued? But intimidation was only the first part. We were about to learn a lesson about corporate manipulation of federal courts. The first clumsy attempt to serve us with papers was made after 6:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. (They never actually succeeded in serving the papers but apparently dropping them on the ground is good enough these days.) A second attempt was made to serve our post office box for reasons we'll never know. Perhaps they thought our offices were within the post office somewhere. Despite this non-serving of legal documents and despite the fact that the following Monday was a holiday, all of the defendants were ordered to have their entire defense submitted to the court by 7:00 a.m. Wednesday, leaving exactly one day to prepare. Even with the Electronic Frontier Foundation stepping in to help us, this was simply an impossible and extremely unreasonable feat for all of the defendants. On the following Thursday, January 20, a preliminary injunction was summarily granted against us which pretty much forced us to take the offending material off of our web site or face immediate imprisonment for "contempt of court." Hard as this was for us to accept, we complied, believing that we could fight the battle a lot more effectively without being locked away. Since then many hundreds of sites have mirrored the offending material in a demonstration of electronic civil disobedience. We have in turn put links on our site to these other locations. Methodically, the MPAA has threatened each and every one of the owners of these sites, which has led to even more new sites going up. While the court order against us does not prohibit our publishing links, we fear that, given the mood of the court, it will be expanded to include this in the future. If that happens, we will convert our links to a list. If that gets banned, we will mention the other sites in a paragraph of English text. In other words, we will stand against this kind of restriction until either they back down or we are stripped of our right to speak at all. That is how important this is. The MPAA is coming at us using a very scary piece of law that civil libertarians have been wanting to challenge since its inception. It's called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and it basically makes it illegal to reverse engineer technology. This means you re not allowed to take things apart and figure out how they work if the corporate entities involved don't want you to. With today's technology, you are not actually buying things like DVDs; you are merely buying a license to use them under their conditions. So, under the DMCA, it is illegal to play your DVD on your computer if your computer isn't licensed for it. It's illegal for you to figure out a way to play a European DVD on your TV set. And if you rent a DVD from your local video store, figuring out a way to bypass the commercials in the beginning could land you in court or even prison. It sounds absurd because it is absurd. And that is precisely why we're not going to back down on this and why others should take up the fight before things get any worse. The world the MPAA and the megacorporations want us to live in is a living hell. They are motivated by one factor alone and that is greed. If they can make you buy the same thing multiple times, they will. If they can control the hardware as well as the software, they will. If they can prevent equal access to technology by entities not under their umbrella, they will. And you can bet that if they have to lie, cheat, and deceive to accomplish this, they most definitely will. Let s take a look at what the MPAA has been saying publicly. When the injunction was granted against us, they called it a victory for artists and a strike against piracy. The newspapers and media outlets - most of them owned by the same companies that are suing us - dutifully reported just that. But anyone who does even the smallest amount of research can quickly surmise that this case has got nothing at all to do with piracy. It has always been possible to copy DVDs and there are massive warehouses in other parts of the world that do just that. But that apparently isn t as much of a threat as people understanding how the technology works. Sound familiar? It s the same logic that the feds have used to imprison those hackers who explain things to other people while not even prosecuting the individuals who do actual damage. The real threat, in their eyes, is people like us, who believe in spreading information and understanding technology. By painting us as evil villains out to rip off DVDs and ruin things for everyone, they are deceiving the public in a way that we ve become all too familiar with. Those of us who have been watching the ominous trends in this country might have been able to predict this battle. It was less than a year ago that Satellite Watch News was put out of business by General Motors' DirecTV because they didn't like the specific information they printed about the workings of satellite technology. We knew it was only a matter of time before one of these fantastically powerful corporations turned their eye on us. And now we have no less than eight of them lined up against us in a court where we are by default the bad guys. We've learned a lot over the last few years, much of it from the hacker cases we've been close to. From Phiber Optik to Bernie S. to Kevin Mitnick, we've seen how justice is manipulated and the heavy cost that is borne by individuals. And we've also learned how to respond to it. The demonstration against Miramax helped stop a truly unjust film from being made, at least in its original form. The Free Kevin movement focused attention on someone who might otherwise have been lost in the system. And we shudder to think what might have happened had people not rallied against the barbaric treatment of Bernie S. in the prison system. What we learned is that we do make a difference when we believe in our cause. In more than 100 cities on February 4, people affiliated with the monthly 2600 meetings and people in countless other towns and cities worldwide took part in a massive leafleting campaign to spread the word about the MPAA. Judging by the many accounts we received, it was extremely effective and successful. Once again we are in the position of getting the word out to the people who the mass media ignore. That is where we have to focus our efforts and not only because of the MPAA threat. Some of the things being planned are incredibly frightening and will have a profound impact on our community, not to mention what it will do to society. It would be a big mistake to assume that the battle has ended with Mitnick's release. Complacency will destroy us and freethinkers everywhere. On March 7, voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 21, which allows prosecutors to decide which youthful offenders are to be tried as adults. In other words, judges will now be entirely bypassed. While the measure was called the Gang Violence and Juvenile Crime Prevention Act Initiative, its effects will extend well beyond that. A kid hacking a web site would be tried and sentenced as an adult if the prosecution decides to go that route. That means we can look forward to more cases of hackers being put into prisons with dangerous offenders. Only now age won't matter. Combine this with California's "Three Strikes" law and it's entirely possible that the next Kevin Mitnick will be put away for life. That's the kind of sick society we're turning into. We see similar scenarios unfolding all over the country. In New York, Senator Charles Schumer has proposed a bill that would allow teenage hackers to be tried as adults and would eliminate the need to prove any damage was caused before the FBI steps in. Much of this hysteria has been caused by the recent Denial of Service attacks against some major corporate web sites. While this kind of thing has existed on the Net since Day One, when it started affecting the biggest moneymakers on the Web it suddenly became a major crisis. And, not surprisingly, hackers were targeted as the cause even when it became quickly apparent that there was virtually no way to track down the culprits. It also was pretty clear that this kind of thing is relatively easy to do. But the media didn't focus on that nor on the obvious fact that if hackers were so bent on destroying the Net then this sort of thing would constantly be happening on a massive scale. That simply wasn't the story they wanted to report. What was reported? Almost word for word: "This was a very easy thing to do. Anybody could have done it. We may never find out who was behind it. But hackers are responsible." In a response that was suspiciously quick and well-prepared, the Clinton administration came up with all kinds of new legislation and budget requests to crack down on hackers. 2600 and others began getting hate mail from people incensed that we would do such a horrible thing to the Internet. Once again, hackers had become the enemy without lifting a finger. In a somewhat bizarre twist, the government that helped lock Kevin Mitnick away then sought out his advice on the whole matter of hackers by inviting him to testify before the Senate. While no doubt struggling with the temptation to tell these lawmakers where they could go after the horrible way he was treated, Mitnick chose to take the high road and attempt to educate the senators. His subsequent visit to Capitol Hill seemed to have a real positive effect, as the senators saw someone who wasn't a dark and evil cyberterrorist but rather a warm and open individual with nothing to hide. It called into question not only his imprisonment but the absurd conditions of his supervised release, which forbid him from lifting up a cellular phone or having any kind of contact with a computer. Maybe it had an effect on them and maybe it didn't. What's important is that Mitnick didn't give up hope that things could be changed for the better if communication was allowed. And if anyone has earned the right to give up on the system, he has. We have what appears to be a long and difficult road ahead. Judging from the sheer size and determination of our adversaries combined with the indisputable significance of the upcoming trial, this may be the opportunity to put us out of corporate America s misery once and for all. The Mitnick case may have taught us what we need to know to fight this battle. That knowledge combined with the optimism that Mitnick himself personifies, is the best shot we have at getting through this.