Perhaps Brian Davis will comment with the latest but here's Littman on Mitnick (and scans of Shimomura/Media/Feds) through October, 1995: As Tsutomu Shimomura launched his new careers as pitchman, author, movie subject, and video game designer, Kevin Mitnick sat in a Southern county jail. Mitnick wrote to me nearly every week on yellow legal paper in longhand, bemoaning the lack of a word processor as he recounted the hardships of jail. He told me he had been attacked and robbed by two inmates and barely avoided fights with several others. When he complained that the vegetarian diet he requested was limited to peanut butter sandwiches, and that his stress and stomach medication prescriptions weren't filled, he was moved to a tougher county jail. His grammar wasn't perfect, but his writing was surprisingly frank and descriptive. Mitnick punctuated his letters with Internet shorthand, noting the precise minute he began each letter, as if he were still online. He was bitter, but he hadn't lost his sense of humor. When his jailers admitted they'd read the letter Mike Wallace wrote him, inviting him to appear on 60 Minutes, Mitnick admitted the irony of him, of all people, complaining about other people reading his mail. "Poetic justice, eh? ..." Once in a while he'd slip in a tantalizing comment about his case. One week he'd appear to trust me, the next he'd wonder whether I would betray him. It was strange corresponding with the man the media and our government had cast as a twenty-first-century Frankenstein. Mitnick himself didn't seem sure of who or what he was. He asked whether I felt he should be given a long prison sentence. Did I think he was evil? Dangerous? When he was sent to his second jail, as a matter of policy the U.S. Marshals confiscated his books, his underwear, his toiletries. Mitnick was doing the worst prison "time" possible, because the Eastern District of North Carolina had no federal detention center. That meant he would have to defend himself without access to a law library, required by law in federal institutions. The nurse in Mitnick's second county jail cut his medication again, and on June 18, his attorney filed a motion in federal court stating that Mitnick "was taken to the hospital and diagnosed with esophageal spasms." The attorney argued that the "deliberate indifference" to Mitnick's "serious medical needs" violated constitutional standards. Before a federal judge could order a hearing on the medical issues, Mitnick was transferred to his third North Carolina jail in as many months. "He [Mitnick] overextended his welcome," explained a deputy U.S. Marshal in Raleigh who preferred to remain anonymous. "It was time for a change of scenery. This happens with a lot of them. They get where they think they're running the place." Mitnick's third county jail was his worst yet. He shared a cell with seven other men. There was no law library, radio or television, and each inmate was allowed only two books at a time. Mitnick's were the Federal Criminal Code and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. The eight men in Mitnick's cell were forced to share a single pencil stub that was taken away in the afternoon. Mitnick was allotted one sheet of paper a day. On April 10, 1995, John Dusenberry, Mitnick's public defender, filed a motion to suppress evidence and dismiss the indictment. He argued that the blank search warrants and the warrantless search of Mitnick's apartment violated the Fourth Amendment, which specifically prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. In the government's response, John Bowler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Raleigh, defended the blank search warrants, not an easy proposition in a free country. Bowler prefaced his argument by claiming, despite evidence to the contrary, that Shimomura tracked Mitnick on his own until February I4, just hours before his capture. The government's response to the issue of the blank search warrants was to blame Magistrate Wallace Dixon. Bowler asserted that the FBI had wanted to execute the search properly, but the magistrate had "upon his own initiative" insisted on signing the blank search warrants. But a judge never ruled on these arguments. The twenty-three-count indictment the Associated Press had hypothesized could land Mitnick 460 years in jail fell apart. The government abandoned its case in Raleigh, dismissing all but one of the counts in accepting a plea bargain from Mitnick that would likely get him time served, or at most eight months. The tiny story was buried in the back pages of the New York Times. "Kevin is going to come and face the music in L.A., where, of course, the significant case has always been," David Schindler, the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, told the L.A. Times. The newspaper said the prosecutor believed Mitnick would receive stiffer punishment "than any hacker has yet received," a sentence greater than Poulsen's four years and three months. Mitnick's letters revealed how Schindler planned to win the record prison term. Schindler was claiming losses in excess of $80 million, the amount that would garner the longest possible sentence for a fraud case according to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Nor would Schindler have to substantiate his claim. The government only had to "estimate" the loss. Mitnick's attorneys said the figure was grossly exaggerated, and added that the case rested on source code allegedly copied from cellular companies. There was no proof that Mitnick had tried to sell the code, and there was no evidence it could be sold for an amount approaching $80 million. But under the guidelines the absence of a profit motive was no obstacle to a long jail term. David Schindler was seeking an eight-to-ten-year sentence for Kevin Mitnick, about the same prison time doled out for manslaughter. The jailed hacker wasn't the only one whose feats were being hyped. By August of 1995, the advertisement in Publishers Weekly for Shimomura's upcoming book featured Mitnick's New York Times photo stamped with the caption HE COULD HAVE CRIPPLED THE WORLD. Declared the ad, "Only One Man Could Stop Him: SHIMOMURA." The hyperbole made me flash on what Todd Young had done in Seattle. The bounty hunter had tracked Kevin Mitnick down in a few hours with his Cellscope. Unauthorized to arrest him, he'd kept Mitnick under surveillance for over two weeks as he sought assistance. But the Secret Service didn't think the crimes were significant. The U.S. Attorney's Office wouldn't prosecute the case. Even the local cops didn't really care. When I met Young in San Francisco a couple of weeks after Mitnick's arrest, he was puzzled by the aura surrounding Shimomura and his "brilliant" capture of Kevin Mitnick. We both knew from independent sources that Shimomura had never before used a Cellscope. Young asked why the FBI would bring an amateur with no cellular tracking skills to Raleigh for the bust. If Shimomura's skill was measured by his ability to catch the hacker, then he was on a par with Todd Young, a thousand-dollar-a-day bounty hunter who never had the help of the FBI. The simple, unglamorous truth was that Kevin Mitnick, whatever his threat to cyberspace and society, was not that hard to find. I tried to get the government to answer Young's question about Shimomura's presence. I asked the San Francisco U.S. Attorney's Office and they suggested I ask the FBI. But the FBI had no comment. I asked Schindler, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in L.A., and he didn't have an answer. I asked Scott Charney, the head of the Justice Department's Computer Crime group, and he said he couldn't comment. I asked the Assistant U.S. Attorney who would logically had to have approved sending Shimomura three thousand miles to Raleigh, North Carolina. But Kent Walker oddly suggested I ask Shimomura for the answer. The response reminded me of what John Bowler, the Raleigh prosecutor, had said when I asked him how John Markoff came to be in Raleigh. He, too, had suggested I ask Shimomura. Shimomura seemed to be operating independently. outside of the Justice Department's control. Or was he running their show? The media appeared captivated by Shimomura's spell. Except for the Washington Post and The Nation, most major publications and the television networks accepted John Markoff's and Tsutomu Shimomura's story at face value. Kevin Mitnick's capture made for great entertainment. Not one reporter exposed the extraordinary relationship between Shimomura and the FBI. Most seemed to ignore the conflict of interest raised by the financial rewards Shimomura and Markoff received by cooperating with the FBI. A Rolling Stone magazine story condoned Markoff's actions, saying he had merely done what any journalist would do when presented with the possibility of a big scoop. The media critic for Wired suggested only that Markoff should have advised New York Times readers earlier of his personal involvement in capturing Mitnick. The media functioned as a publicity machine for Shimomura and the federal government, quickly churning out a round of articles arguing for tougher laws and greater security on the Internet. But the fury over what Assistant U.S. Attorney Kent Walker described as Mitnick's "billion dollar" crimes simply distracted the public from the real issues. Privacy intrusions and crime in cyberspace were old news, and a series of Internet break-ins after Mitnick's arrest proved the capture of cyberspace's most wanted criminal had changed little. The real story was that Internet providers, the new equivalent of phone companies on the information superhighway, appeared naive about how to investigate break-ins while protecting the privacy of their subscribers. After an FBI computer child-pornography investigation was made public in September of 1995, the Bureau revealed that it had read thousands of e-mail correspondences, and invaded the privacy of potentially dozens of citizens in the course of its investigation. Privacy activists complained that constitutional rights were being bulldozed, but the FBI announced the public should expect more of the same. "From our standpoint, this investigation embodies a vision of the type of investigatory activity we may be drawn to in the future," said Timothy McNally, the special agent in charge. The government seemed to be promoting a hacker dragnet to make sure the Internet was crime free for the millions of dollars of commerce on its way. Kent Walker, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who left the Justice Department within weeks of Mitnick's arrest for a job with a Pacific Telesis spin- off, was one of the many government officials who claimed the FBI couldn't crack high-tech cases without people like Shimomura. Perhaps prosecutions would increase if the FBI bolstered its force with nonprofessionals. But where would that leave the law and the Constitution? (pp. 368-73)