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After my arrest I was transported to the County Jail in Smithfield,
North Carolina, where the U.S. Marshals Service ordered jailers to place me into `the hole'-solitary confinement. Within a week, federal prosecutors and my attorney reached an agreement that I couldn't refuse. I could be moved out of solitary on the condition that I waived my fundamental rights and agreed to: a) no bail hearing; b) no preliminary hearing; and, c) no phone calls, except to my attorney and two family members. Sign, and I could get out of solitary. I signed.
The federal prosecutors in the case played every dirty trick in the
book up until I was released nearly five years later. I was repeatedly forced to waive my rights in order to be treated like any other accused. But this was the Kevin Mitnick case: There were no rules. No requirement to respect the Constitutional rights of the accused. My case was not about justice, but about the government's determination to win at all costs. The prosecutors had made vastly overblown claims to the court about the damage I had caused and the threat I represented, and the media had gone to town quoting the sensationalist statements; now it was too late for the prosecutors to back down. The government could not afford to lose the Mitnick case. The world was watching.
I believe that the courts bought into the fear generated by media
coverage, since many of the more ethical journalists had picked up the "facts" from the esteemed New York Times and repeated them.  The media-generated myth apparently even scared law enforcement officials. A confidential document obtained by my attorney showed that the U.S. Marshals Service had issued a warning to all law enforcement agents never to reveal any personal information to me; otherwise, they might
find their lives electronically destroyed.  Our Constitution requires that the accused be presumed innocent before trial, thus granting all
citizens the right to a bail hearing, where the accused has the opportunity to be represented by counsel, present evidence, and cross-examine witnesses. Unbelievably, the government had been able to circumvent these protections based on the false hysteria generated by irresponsible reporters like John Markoff. Without precedent, I was held as a pre-trial detainee-a person in custody pending trial or sentencing-for over four and a half years. The judge's refusal to grant me a bail hearing was litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the end, my defense team advised me that I had set another precedent: I was the only federal detainee in U.S. history denied a
bail hearing. This meant the government never had to meet the burden
of proving that there were no conditions of release that would reasonably assure my appearance in court.  At least in this case, federal prosecutors did not dare to allege that I could start a nuclear
war by whistling into a payphone, as other federal prosecutors had
done in an earlier case. The most serious charges against me were that I had copied proprietary source code for various cellular phone handsets and popular operating systems.  Yet the prosecutors alleged publicly and to the court that I had caused collective losses
exceeding $300 million to several companies. The details of the loss
amounts are still under seal with the court, supposedly to protect the companies involved; my defense team, though, believes the prosecution's request to seal the information was initiated to cover up their gross
malfeasance in my case. It's also worth noting that none of the victims in my case had reported any losses to the Securities and Exchange Commission as required by law. Either several multinational companies violated Federal law-in the process deceiving the SEC, stockholders,
and analysts--or the losses attributable to my hacking were, in fact,
too trivial to be reported.  In his book he Fugitive Game, Jonathan Li wan reports that within a week of the New York Times front-page story, Markoff's agent had "brokered a package deal" with the publisher Walt
Disney Hyperion for a book about the campaign to track me down. The advance was to be an estimated $750,000. According to Littman, there was to be a Hollywood movie, as well, with Miramax handing over $200,000 for the option and "a total $650,000 to be paid upon commencement of filming." A confidential source has recently informed
me that Markoff's deal was in fact much more than Littman had originally thought.  So John Markoff got a million dollars, more or less, and I got five years. One book that examines the legal aspects of my case was written by a man who had himself been a prosecutor in the Los Angeles District Attorney's office, a colleague of the attorneys who prosecuted me. In his book Spectacular Computer Crimes, Buck Bloombecker wrote, "It grieves me to have to write about my former colleagues in less than flattering terms.... I'm haunted by Assistant United States Attorney James Asperger's admission that much of the argument used to keep Mitnick behind bars was based on rumors which didn't pan out."  He goes on to say, "It was bad enough that the charges prosecutors made in court were spread to millions of readers by newspapers around the country. But it is much worse that these untrue allegations were a large part of the basis for keeping Mitnick behind bars without the possibility of posting bail?" He continues at some length, writing about the ethical standards that prosecutors should live by, and then writes, "Mitnick's case suggests that the false allegations used to keep him in custody also prejudiced the court's consideration of a fair sentence."  In his 1999 Forbes article, Adam L. Penenberg eloquently described my situation this way: "Mitnick's crimes were curiously innocuous. He broke into corporate computers, but no evidence indicates that he destroyed data. Or sold anything he copied.  Yes, he pilfered software but in doing so left it behind." The article said that my crime was "To thumb his nose at the costly computer security systems employed by large corporations." And in the book The Fugitive Game, author Jonathan Littman noted, "Greed the government could understand. But a hacker who wielded power for its own sake ... was something they couldn't grasp."  Elsewhere in the same book, Littman wrote: U.S. Attorney James Sanders admitted to Judge Pfaelzer that Mitnick's damage to DEC was not the $4 million that had made the headlines but $160,000. Even that amount was not damage done by Mitnick, but the rough cost of tracing the security weakness that his incursions had brought to DEC's attention. The government acknowledged it had no evidence of the wild claims that had helped hold Mitnick without bail and in solitary confinement. No proof Mitnick had ever compromised the security of the NSA. No proof that Mitnick had ever issued a false press release for Security Pacific Bank. No proof that Mitnick ever changed the TRW credit report of a judge.  But the judge, perhaps influenced by the terrifying media coverage, rejected the plea bargain and sentenced Mitnick to a longer term then even the government wanted.  Throughout the years spent as a hacker hobbyist, I've gained unwanted notoriety, been written up in numerous news reports and magazine articles, and had four books written about me. Markoff and Shimomura's libelous book w a s made into a feature film called Takedown. When the script found its way onto the Internet, many of my supporters picketed Miramax Films to call public attention to the inaccurate and false characterization of me. Without the help of many kind and generous people, the motion picture would surely have falsely portrayed me as the Hannibal Lector of cyberspace. Pressured by my supporters, the production company agreed to settle the case on confidential terms to avoid me filing a libel action against them.  

Final Thoughts
Despite John Markoff's outrageous and libelous descriptions of me, my
crimes were simple crimes of computer trespass and making free telephone calls. I've acknowledged since my arrest that the actions I took were illegal, and that I committed invasions of privacy. But to suggest, without justification, reason, or proof, as did the Markoff articles, that I had deprived others of their money or property by computer or wire fraud, is simply untrue, and un

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