Mitnick Hero

Okay, so Mitnick is a heretic and not a common crook, and he is about to go away for a very long time on a relatively minor beef. Should we cry for the man because an example is being made? Should we make him our Hero Protagonist, setting aside corporate lackeys like Shimomura and Clifford (The Policeman Is Your Friend) Stoll?

Come on. Mitnick is no Jerry Rubin. (Neither, of course, was Jerry Rubin.) The press right now is trying to portray Mitnick as the digital antichrist, the Truly Evil Hacker whom writers like Bruce Sterling and Katie Hafner warned us about. The first hackers, so the story goes, were just unruly young men who didn't care about authority -- wirehead descendants of McHale's Navy. But the Truly Evil Hacker will steal and crash and loot and burn. He will rape and pillage across all of cyberspace. He will not merely piss on the household deities, he will program them to piss on us!

So long, Kevin. See you on the talk shows in a few years.

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