Free The Art of Intrusion: The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders and Deceivers by Kevin D. Mitnick, William L. Simon

admitted it, I said, "I'm sorry, here's what

    I did, here's how to fix it, I won't do it again." They were like,

    "All right, we don't consider you a criminal, don't do it again.

    If you do it again, you'll leave in handcuffs." They packed up my

    computers, peripherals, and spare hard drives, and they left.

    Later on they tried to get Comrade to tell them the password to his encrypted hard drives. When he wouldn't tell, they said they knew how to crack the passwords. Comrade knew better: He had used PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) encryption and his password was "about a hundred char- acters long." Yet he insists it's not hard to remember -- it's three of his favorite quotes strung together.

    Comrade didn't hear anything more from them for about six months. Then one day he got word that the government was going to press charges. By the time he got to court, he was being nailed for what the prosecutor claimed was a three-week shutdown of NASA computers and intercepting thousands of email messages within the Department of Defense.

    (As I know all too well, the "damage" claimed by prosecutors and the real-life damage are sometimes quite different. Comrade downloaded software from the NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, used in controlling the temperature and humidity of the International Space Station; the government claimed that this had forced a three-week shut- down of certain computer systems. The Department of Defense attack offered more realistic cause for concern: Comrade had broken into the computer system of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and installed a "back door" allowing him access at any time.)

    The government obviously considered the case important as a warning to other teenage hackers, and made much of his conviction in the press, proclaiming him the youngest person ever convicted of hacking as a fed- eral crime. Attorney General Janet Reno even issued a statement that said in part, "This case, which marks the first time a juvenile hacker will serve 32 The Art of Intrusion

    time in a detention facility, shows that we take computer intrusion seri- ously and are working with our law enforcement partners to aggressively fight this problem."

    The judge sentenced Comrade to six months in jail followed by six months probation, to start after the end of the school semester. Comrade's mother was still alive at the time; she hired a new lawyer, got a lot of letters written, presented the judge what Comrade calls "a whole new case," and, incredibly, managed to get the sentence reduced to house arrest followed by four years of probation.

    Sometimes in life we don't make the best of opportunities. "I did the house arrest and was going through probation. Various things happened, I started partying too much, so they sent me to rehab." Back from rehab, Comrade got a job with an Internet company and started his own Internet outfit. But he and his probation officer weren't seeing eye to eye and Comrade was sent to prison after all. He was just 16 years old, incar- cerated for acts he committed at age 15.

    There aren't all that many juveniles in the federal system; the place he was sent turned out to a "camp" (apparently an appropriate word) in Alabama that housed only 10 prisoners and that Comrade describes as looking "more like a school -- locked doors and razor wire fences but otherwise not much like a jail." He didn't even have to go to class because he had already finished high school.

    Back in Miami and again on probation, Comrade was given a list of hackers he would not be allowed to talk to. "The list was like this guy, this guy, and ne0h." Just "ne0h" -- the federal government knew him only by his handle. "They had no idea who he was. If I had access to two hundred things, he had access to a thousand things," Comrade says. "ne0h was pretty slick." As far as either of them knows, law enforcement still hasn't managed to pin a name on him or pinpoint his location.

    Investigating Khalid Was Khalid the