Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick

Social Engineering was my hobby horse as an undergraduate IT major; I say this as though I’m an old veteran of the IT industry, but I’m not—I’m a fresh-faced, startup-mentality programmer. One of the reasons I always focused on social engineering in my various papers and projects, however, is I was exposed early to the idea of Kevin Mitnick. This isn’t to say I was particularly familiar with his exploits, or even well-versed in the technology of his area, but the notion that you could con your way into systems without necessarily programming or “hacking” was easy enough to understand.

At the time Kevin David Mitnick dominated the national news, there was no first-person narrative available for consumption. Prior to his conviction, of course, Mitnick would not publish a book of his exploits; after his conviction, one of the restrictions placed upon him was an inability to profit from books or films about his hacking for seven years. In the meantime, several books came out from journalists of varying proximity to Mitnick himself. One was Jonathan Littman’s The Fugitive Game, a narrative crafted in part from Littman’s conversations with Mitnick while he was on the run from the FBI. The other is Jonathan Markoff’s Takedown, which is a largely sensationalistic work with as much fiction as fact; Markoff, as it happens, was a New York Times reporter who was responsible for most of the hysteria and a lion’s share of the misinformation about Mitnick in those years. The idea that Mitnick had access to secret NSA databases, or that he’d hacked into NORAD, or that—as one prosecutor actually said in court—he could launch nuclear missiles by whistling into a phone, was largely the invention of Markoff the Fabulist and the long trail of phone company stooges that Mitnick left writhing and thrashing in his wake.

zomg hacker!

Ghost in the Wires is the first attempt by Mitnick to tell the story of those turbulent years in his old words. On the one hand, this means that we can avoid any speculation and hearsay; on the other hand, it’s a convicted felon writing about his years performing felonies. I’m not familiar with all of the laws in this regard, but it’s possible—hell, likely—there are arrestable offenses that Mitnick committed that nobody knows about. It’s unlikely that Ghost in the Wires contains any revelations, but at least we can expect it to be better than Takedown.

Our popular conception of hacker emphasizes their technical skills; we picture strange men in dark rooms interpreting binary code and issuing cryptic commands into a command-line prompt; coding malware in C and Assembler; sniffing TCP/IP packets and cracking encryption keys. Certainly, there’s an element to hacking which involves all of these things. There’s also an element, at least in Kevin Mitnick’s case, which involves fraud and impersonation and blustering into order to trick and manipulate one’s way into systems, rather than managing the entire feat via technological skills alone. Many modern writers tend to forget, when writing about Kevin Mitnick, that he was a very skilled technologist; because so many of his “hacks” involved simple impersonation, it’s easy to forgot that he was an adept at hacking computer systems programmatically, especially when it came to the de rigueur enterprise system of that time, DEC’s VMS. Ghost in the Wires reminds us that, though social engineering was often used to acquire information, or access to a system, technical expertise was needed to do anything with that access.

It’s been hypothesized (see Douglas Coupland’s JPod for mention of the subject within a fictional narrative) that the programming or technical community has a higher-than-average incidence of autism-spectrum disorders, simply because of the way disorders like Aspergers tend to emphasize concentration and technical ability. For a hacker like Kevin Mitnick however, such a diagnosis is impossible; as he himself mentions, his real skill as a hacker came from his ability to speak boldly with strangers while impersonating system users and to modify his story on the fly. Stutterers and bashful speakers need not apply when it comes to calling Nokia in Finland and pretending to be one of their U.S. engineers.

I see three main points to take away from Ghost in the Wires that are interesting and/or important:

It sucks to be one of the first well-known hackers in popular culture. Preceding Kevin Mitnick’s rise to infamy was Kevin Poulsen, perhaps the first “hacker” in the modern, pejorative sense of the term, to be arrested with national attention. But Mitnick captured the media attention in a way that, I think, has yet to replicated. His exploits came at a time when our culture was just young and naïve enough to believe just about anything told to them about technology, but invested enough in this whole “Internet” thing to be frightened by the possibilities. He was a scapegoat, at the right time; I would say “with the right crimes”, but of course most of the public panic about Mitnick’s abilities was based upon fairy tales.

Technical expertise or no, the ability to bullshit well is paramount. Technical brilliance will only get you so far in life; to achieve anything truly impressive requires bridging the gap between what can be accomplished with computer code and the real-life (personnel security, physical security, security through obscurity) obstacles in the way. This is also a frightening proposition for CIOs and network administrators, because it underscores what is still the case just about everywhere you go: people are the weak link in your security. Forget about that unpatched Apache flaw, or SQL injection, or overly-broad permissions—actually, don’t forget about them: they’re still important—because even a perfect technical system is meaningless when employees distribute credentials without performing the same sort of identification, authentication, and authorization steps that any decent information system implies.

Kevin Mitnick without an FBI manhunt might still be a minimum-wage worker. What happened to Kevin Mitnick was ridiculous. I don’t mean that Mitnick should necessarily have escaped punishment for hacking, as technically he did commit fraud and intrusion; however, the charges levied against him were farcical and largely fabricated; his five or so accumulated years spent in prison, including a long stint in solitary confinement, an injustice. The hysterical hue and cry in the media who latched onto the salable story of Mitnick-as-terrorist is an indictment of the journalists involved and the slavering readership who pay money for salacious sensationalism. All of that being said, one could argue that without an FBI manhunt, high-profile court case, and front-page coverage, Kevin Mitnick might still be a poor loser working Tier 1 tech support by day and hacking for fun at night. Instead, he’s now at the helm of a thriving security consultancy and manages a busy schedule of corporate speaking engagements. A worthwhile trade-off? Hard to say, and though Mitnick recognizes the irony, he doesn’t make any easy statements as to whether he’d do anything different; as readers, we end up not being sure what we think, either. It’s not satisfying in that regard, but at least Mitnick respects our intelligence.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain

At some point during my teenage years (1997-1998, specifically), Fox aired a series of specials called Breaking the Magician’s Code: Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed; an anonymous masked magician performed all the old reliable magic tricks and then revealed how they were done. If you believed Fox, it was a big deal, except that of course it wasn’t. Still, the shows were ratings successes, because people would like to believe they are gaining firsthand knowledge of a heretofore inaccessible realm of knowledge—especially, I suppose, if there are pyrotechnics and showgirls involved.

In 1999, Tony Bourdain was a chef working in New York City, unknown outside of a small circle of NYC chefs and accomplished foodies. This began to change after he published an article entitled “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” in The New Yorker; a collection of helpful hints garnered from his time in the cooking industry, it was precisely the sort of insider knowledge that seems as though it should be clandestine but probably isn’t. Ordering beef well-done ensures you get the worst cuts; order fish on Monday means you get fish leftover from last week; the atmosphere in a kitchen is a little like a frat house, but with more French sauces.

Riding the success of this article, Bourdain published Kitchen Confidential the next year (and catapulted himself into stardom), essentially expanding the article into book length with extensive autobiography and even more lurid details. It still has that “Here’s what They don’t want you to know” sort of conspiratorial allure, but generally speaking you could save yourself no small amount of time and boredom by just reading the original article instead.

I am not known for gustatory adventurousness. I was a vegetarian for much of my life, and even then my extraordinary finickiness (enforced, likely, by some behavior which resembles O.C.D.) prevented me from expanded my culinary horizons. I’ve got better since, but I still eat well-done meat, abstain from seafood, and stick to foods that I know I like instead of trying new things. Clearly, I am at odds with Bourdain’s foodie nature, yet it still seems as though the gourmet-loving subculture he describes throughout the book seems predicated upon using the most disgusting ingredients possible. His love affair with food began, he writes, when he slurped down his first oyster while on vacation in France, to the disgust of his family and the obvious delight of the crusty old fisherman who proffered it. Since then, Bourdain has simultaneously made apparently delicious meals as the chef in a number of high-end restaurants, and made it his life’s work to eat every comestible on the planet, regardless of its aptitude for intestinal distress. The book describes his visit to Tokyo and necessarily his gorging on all sorts of sushi and sashimi (of course), but culminates with a trip to an out-of-the-way local eatery where he dines on a smorgasbord of things that I wouldn’t feed to my cats: with particular relish (both for the memory and the queasiness he knows it will elicit from his readers) he details eating a grilled, scales-on fishhead, noting how he sucked out its eyeballs.

In other words, Bourdain routinely eats things for pleasure that Bear Grylls eats to stay alive in the wilderness. One cannot help but note with some consternation that Bourdain refuses to order fish on Mondays (because it may be bad) but later exhorts his readers to eat foreign food, even if it means risking intestinal distress.

There is a certain extent to which Kitchen Confidential is little more than Bourdain showing off. While it may contain an account of his first humiliation while working in a busy kitchen (which caused the young punk Bourdain to suddenly become serious about cooking—an 80s movie montage follows), it’s largely an account of how much drugs he did, how many parts of languages (usually the dirty and conversational bits) he can shout, how scarred his hands are, how he knows much more about cooking than you will ever know, how he’s gladly eaten things that will probably make your anus pucker. Most of the biography is of this same attempted badassery; aside from a visualized swagger, there’s not much else we know about Tony Bourdain the man, which makes one wonder what the point of all the storytelling was in the first place.

It tends to be a messy business when people who are not writers turn around and attempt to write books; even with competent ghost writers, this so rarely ends well. Generally you get wooden prose, a plodding narrative, and the sense that the author has no real sense of purpose or direction; it’s akin to listening to a stranger tell you stories about their cat. Surprisingly, Bourdain (who does not use a ghostwriter) sometimes manages to pull great prose out of his back pocket. With practice (and there’s no reason to believe he hasn’t improved in the last decade), I can well imagine him becoming a capable writer. Kitchen Confidential, on a purely technical level, contains too many departures from a good writing to be impressive, and its overall quality isn’t enough to bridge that gap.

Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

Just under two years ago, David Foster Wallace killed himself, leaving behind a legacy that included—and perhaps unfairly focused on—his magnum opus, the 1’000+ page Infinite Jest. Though I happened to appreciate Wallace’s nonfiction (see Consider the Lobster) even more than his fiction, he was equally adept at both forms—at any form, to be honest.

When Wallace killed himself, the internet was full of retrospectives, but the one I recall as being the most beautiful was “The Lost Years and Last Days of David Foster Wallace”, which David Lipsky wrote for Rolling Stone. When I read, shortly after, that Lipsky would pen would of two upcoming biographies about Wallace, I was enthusiastic to say the least. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself isn’t a biography, if one wanted to be pedantic, but it’s as close to an unfiltered volume of DFW as we are likely to get.

The year was 1996. Wallace had just published one of his most famous essays, “Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” for Harper’s, which made him something of a pseudo-celebrity in literary circles. But more important, Little, Brown had just published Infinite Jest, that colossal, postmodern book which consumed no fewer than three years of Wallace’s life. In what amounts to a publicity blitz in the high art world, Little, Brown sent Wallace on a book tour, and Rolling Stone sent report David Lipsky to spend a week traveling with Wallace and interviewing him, and amassing a stock of tape recordings and notes commensurate to that long a timespan.

Despite what was at that time a literary goldmine, Lipsky’s source material was never turned into a product. Rolling Stone‘s editor assigned Lipsky to something else and—much to the magazine’s detriment—these recordings and notes languished in a closet somewhere in the intervening years. The form they take now is an edited transcription, not an entirely new essay based on the source material. The basic form is this:

Time and Location [e.g. Bloomington-Normal Airport]

Lipsky asks something varying from surprisingly intelligent and literate to borderline tabloid, though these usually seem like after-the-face edits rather than faithful transcriptions of Lipsky’s questions.

Wallace responds, and these are—these are, you know, usually straight transcriptions, which veer from, like, that extremely folksy and vernacular way that Wallace could be when trying to be populist and grounded, to extended, beautiful monologues that go on for pages, which finally make you understand what Lipsky means when he says that DFW could extemporaneously “talk in prose”.

[Finally, Lipsky often interjects either narrative, such as describing what the two are eating, to longer musings about Wallace himself. I am unsure if these were inserted in the original notes or after, since some seem startlingly prescient.]

So it goes on for 350 pages. In much the manner you might expect, this narrative veers wildly from the utterly banal to the startlingly brilliant; to one with enough patience, it paints one of the clearest and most haunting portraits of DFW ever put to paper, but the form is filled with noise, and the short opening essays (one of them culled from “Lost Years and Last Days”) by Lipsky tease us with the extraordinary insight and tenderness with which one writing prodigy can more or less eulogize another. I can’t help, therefore, feeling as though, given enough care and time, Lipsky could have finally turned his source material into an amazing chronicle of the life, times, and psyche of David Foster Wallace. The cynical part of me thinks this book was rushed to press—preempting any such calculations—in the wake of Wallace’s death; the more generous part thinks perhaps the author and the editors thought the raw, unfiltered transcript (aided by Lipsky’s interpolations) to be the best tribute to a departed literary giant. In truth, I have yet to figure out which I believe.

What surprised me most about DFW in this interview is just how conflicted and insecure he seemed to be, especially dealing with a dose of newfound fame. Many of his conversations with Lipsky seem to center on how alien and troubling he finds the book tour, the sudden and orgasmic public attention, and the tension between those parts of us which relish low entertainment, vices, and all the visceral pleasures life has to offer (think of Chuck Klosterman’s MTV apologetics), and those parts of us which crave more, which shirk fame for fame’s sake, which—believe it or not—actually crave complicated pomo literature because it asks so much of us intellectually. Forget Lipsky: David Foster Wallace, given sufficient time and prompting, will have an entire dialectical conversation with himself; one gets the feeling it is a permanent fixture in his head, and the engine which drove all of his tremendous creative output. In the meantime, his extemporaneous prose manages to be more brilliant than ten thousand Dan Browns or Stephenie Meyers working in concert, leaving such gems as that which titled the book: “[...] although of course you end up becoming yourself” no matter whom you try to become.

Having read Lipsky’s earlier piece on Wallace, and knowing what he is capable of, I must admit to some measure of disappointment that Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself didn’t carry more of his own input; at the same time, it is impossible not to appreciate this transcription for the unique treasure it is.

Last Words: A Memoir by George Carlin

Last Words took about 17 years to write. As the story goes, Carlin commissioned it in 1993 with Tony Hendra, but it wasn’t until Carlin died in 2008 that Hendra finally pulled together all of his recorded conversations, notes, and other materials and cranked out the more or less definitive semiautobiography of George Carlin, and Last Words is that book.

I need hardly explain who George Carlin is or why he is important—if you don’t know, this review will be meaningless to you—but for those of us well-acquainted with his unique and sometimes unpredictable views, Last Words is really quite illuminating, and I was surprised by not only the general quality of its craft, but the depth of its information, as well.

In accordance with the book’s jacket copy, Carlin’s story begins literally at birth, as he provides a few choices about the intersection of his almost-aborted 9-month-old self and his mother Mary’s vagina. For those hoping that the book would incorporate much of Carlin’s uncensored spirit, the very first pages are proof enough that this isn’t a dry, tame eulogy, and that either its content came straight from Carli without overly much manipulation, or Tony Hendra is very good at channeling Carlin.

It may surprise some (though I was vaguely aware) that the blue George Carlin we know and love from the last twenty or so years was not always the George Carlin that was popular or famous. Though Carlin begins by describing the turbulent times of his family, especially vis-a-vis his deadbeat father, the familiar material only begins to emerge when the story arrives at Carlin’s stand-up career. But in those days, Carlin was more or less a family-friendly acting, performing schtick like “The Indian Sergeant” on primetime television and event, yes, to sold-out crowds in live venues. At that time, with a wife and a young child, Carlin was living a comfortable—if boring—life as a comedian.

Soon, however, things began to change, and the world-weary ire for which we tend to know George Carlin arose—but so did a number of years of controversy, on-and-off success, and drug abuse by both he and his wife, Brenda. He gets arrested for obscenity in Milwaukee; he starts in a children’s television show. In some ways, Carlin is remarkably glib about his prolific career and profligate personal life: based on the text alone, you wouldn’t guess that Carlin was one of the most important comics of the past half century.

Initially, it was observational—Carlin decries it as naval-gazing—which predated Seinfield’s “And what’s the deal with XYZ?” schtick by a number of years…. gave birth to it, more accurately. Sometimes it was harmless, like observations about the physical properties of boogers; other times it was more controversial, such as his seminal “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television” from his 1972 album. Especially when it came to language, Carlin was blazing new and important trails: I can remember listening to some of these early bits as a child, and it no doubt helped to spark my interest in language and semantics.

As a simple chronicle of Carlin’s career, it is brief but informative; remember, after all, that this story was most from Carlin’s mouth, and so doesn’t seek to be an exhaustive listing of his engagement or life. What’s far more interesting to me is to see Carlin’ philosophize about how his life influenced his comedy—attributing his love of language to his mother, for instance, or admitting that his yearning to be loved by crowds is a feeling which stretches back to his childhood. Then, too, his eventually shift to a countercultural comic came from somewhere as well, at one point roiling out of Carlin in a career-threatening wave. Carlin’s struggle for both success and self-respect is the meat of the book, and it occupies the most space. Unlike, say, Tracy Austin’s autobiography, Last Words isn’t a facile recollection of random anecdotes, or a feel-good storybook with big print, or a simple cash-grab with writing so dull it render less mortals catatonic….. no Last Words is, as I began this review, surprisingly engaging, remarkably honest, and decidedly Carlinesque.

Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel by Judith and Neil Morgan

Dr. Seuss might just be one of the most beloved children’s authors of our time. Growing up, I distinctly remember Green Eggs and Ham, The Butter Battle Book, and my personal favorite for some inexplicable reason, Scrambled Eggs Super!. It’s always been easy to glibly jibe about the relative ease of Seuss’s job (“just make up words when you can’t rhyme anything else”) but of course the man was an immensely talented crafter of stories that will remain popular long after his death.

Though he never made any particular secret of his life, digging into the history of sometime who was known more by his pen name than real name is always a bit of an adventure. It’s almost strange to thing of a revered figure like Seuss being a young boy or a petulant college student.

Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel is a dense, thorough affair, which I admit takes some of the charm away from Seuss. However, it is ultimately interesting to watch him go from a doodling college student to a successful children’s author. He took the pen name “Seuss” when he incurred the wrath of Dartmouth administrators after holding a drinking party during Prohibition. He met his wife, Helen, at Oxford, where he was pursuing a PhD in literature without any enthusiasm. Initially, he wrote jokes and cartoons for national publications, as well as doing commercials advertisements for companies like General Electric.

It was after World War II that Seuss began writing some of his most famous material. The Cat in the Hat came about as a sneaky sort of grammar for schoolchildren. From there on out, Seuss did two different styles of books: simpler “Beginner Books” for young children, and more complicated pieces for older children.

I won’t list the man’s whole life, of course: if you’re interested in it—and you should be really interested if you read this book—go ahead and read Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel. If you aren’t, maybe reading his Wikipedia entry would suffice, and you can spend the rest of the afternoon reading Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson

Let me first say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am absolutely crazy about Bill Bryson. Really, the man can do no wrong. I think perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever said about his books is that his very first one was kind of dry. I therefore look forward to each new Bryson release with a fervor most people save for Harry Potter.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage is a short book, written as a (sort-of) one off project for Bryson. The book is one in a series of brief biographies. Luckily, it’s not as short Bryson’s African Diary, but I was disappointed nonetheless, not by the quality of the book, but by my selfish desire for an endless amount of Bryson’s prose.

Bryson does manage to pack his 200 pages with excellent material, however. Writing a biography about Shakespeare is a difficult process, because despite being one of the most revered authors in the English language, he is shrouded in mystery, his legacy built by a canon of plays and poetry and piecemeal legal documents and snippets of text. If you were to play a drinking game wherein you did a shot every time Bryson uses phrases like “We can’t know for certain” or “It’s impossible to know,” you’d be comatose by the end of the book. Yet, as Bryson points out early on, we know more about Shakespeare than any other English playwright of that era. Much like I thirst for new Bryson material, so society at large thirsts for information about this demigod of Elizabethan/Jacobean drama.

Given the relative paucity of direct historical data about Shakespeare, much of Bryson’s biography is told with context: he talks about the era, and the places where Shakespeare would have likely been. He talks about the vagaries of playwriting and performance; he talks about Shakespeare’s father John, and Shakespeare’s various and sundry relatives. He also talks about what others of the time had to say about Shakespeare. He even, ironically enough, transmits a great deal of information about the lack of information about Shakespeare.

Finally, and with great gusto, Bryson deals with the conspiracy theorists: those that think Francis Bacon is Shakespeare, or that Ben Jonson is Shakespeare. Or that a slew of different people are Shakespeare. The author comes down hard on the conservative side, insisting that despite the many holes in our history of Shakespeare, there’s no convincing evidence for most of the marginal theories about his life. The truth is simply that Shakespeare was an exceptional writer that left us very little about himself.

Bryson does all this without fawning or obseqious language; he manages his trademark blend of anecdote and information. Like every other Bryson book, this one is fantastic and you’re a horrible person if you don’t read it.