A Computer Terrorist or a Prankster? : Technology: Friends say hacker Kevin Mitnick did not profit from his alleged cyberspace intrusions. But authorities say he caused millions of dollars in damage.

If a man is defined by the quality of his enemies, Kevin Mitnick’s reputation as a super-hacker was confirmed by his arrest nearly two weeks ago after a nationwide electronic manhunt mounted by a sophisticated team of FBI agents and private industry investigators.

But it remains to be seen whether the man known as the Condor is an electronic criminal with the capacity to shred the Internet, as some of his angriest critics maintain, or, as his supporters say, is the same pain-in-the-neck prankster who as a teen-ager turned off the phones of Hollywood stars for no other reason than to prove he could.

Mitnick, 31, is being held without bail on computer fraud charges that could send him to prison for 35 years. But as authorities on both coasts follow the electronic trail he left during a sometimes frenzied two-year flight from prosecution, friends and family say there is no evidence that he profited financially from his alleged intrusions.

“No one says he has ever done this for profit,” said Reba Vartanian, Mitnick’s grandmother.

John Yzurdiaga, Mitnick’s Los Angeles attorney, goes further. “He’s a nice guy. He hasn’t benefited. He has been portrayed as dangerous, but, really, he has not harmed anyone financially.”

Deciding whether Mitnick was a computer terrorist or sophisticated prankster will be up to a federal jury, presuming he goes to trial. It is not necessary for a conviction to prove that he enriched himself. It is enough to show that he broke the law by taking proprietary software owned by someone else.

The challenge for prosecutors is that Mitnick’s alleged crimes are abstract, occurring only in an electronic universe. To explain the terror he is accused of inflicting, they often use the analogy of a person who breaks into your house, reads your private correspondence, copies it and leaves.

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The battle by both sides to define Mitnick has been under way for days, ever since a team led by a government spy agency consultant named Tsutomu Shimomura swooped down on Mitnick’s garden apartment in Raleigh, N.C.

So far, in Yzurdiaga’s view, Mitnick has been losing the image war.

Netcom, in San Jose, one of the user systems Mitnick is accused of penetrating, was so overwhelmed by interview requests from television stations that it commissioned its own satellite uplink broadcast to answer questions. “We were absolutely buried,” said Don Hutchison, vice president for sales and marketing.

“He is not some evil man,” Yzurdiaga said. But the lawyer admits that it “is more fun to read about someone who is a mean and vicious criminal than to say (this is) someone who has some insatiable curiosity.”

The government accuses Mitnick of causing millions of dollars in damage by stealing secret computer files and thus forcing companies to install new security measures. Industry sources say he copied software from dozens of firms, along with 20,000 credit card numbers taken from Netcom, and stored everything in a file in a Bay Area network and Internet access provider called the Well.

Conceivably, he could have reaped large rewards by selling the material. When asked whether Mitnick tried to do so, Assistant U.S. Atty. David Schindler said, “That’s something we’ll be taking a look at.”

Netcom’s Hutchison said there is no indication that the credit card numbers were used. Another accusation against Mitnick is that he “zeroed out,” or removed information from, an accounting file on the Well. A Well spokeswoman believes that Mitnick probably killed the file by mistake.

This official speculated that Mitnick invaded the Well not because he wanted a good hide-out for his hot files until he could unload them in some giant electronic fencing operation, but because he knew that is where some of the best software minds in the nation hung out and he wanted to impress them.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John Bowler in Raleigh, where Mitnick was captured, bristled at implications that Mitnick is merely a prankster.

“There’s some perception that this is an adolescent crime,” he said. “Those days are gone. This is going to be treated as a serious crime.”

Mitnick began his lengthy career as a hacker at Monroe High School in the San Fernando Valley, where he broke into the computers of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

He also hacked into a Defense Department computer several years before the movie “War Games,” about a computer nerd who almost starts a war when he breaks into a Defense Department computer, came out.

After Mitnick was caught and spent a year in prison, he worked for a private investigations firm in Calabasas. That job came to an end when FBI agents showed up at the company in late 1992 to investigate allegations that Mitnick had fallen back into his old habits. He fled, surfacing publicly two weeks ago.

It appears, however, that his life on the run was never much of a secret. One friend, who said he was in frequent contact, said Mitnick asked his attorney to tell the government he would be willing to turn himself in under certain conditions.

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Yzurdiaga said Mitnick wanted some idea of how much prison time the government would hit him with.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Schindler confirmed that he had been in contact with Mitnick through Yzurdiaga. “I made Mr. Yzurdiaga aware that Mr. Mitnick should turn himself in,” Schindler said. “Mr. Mitnick apparently declined my offer.”

The government refused to make any promises and Mitnick resolved to remain in hiding, said the friend. “His basic position was, sooner or later he knew he would be caught.”

He almost was apprehended in Seattle in October. Authorities raided an apartment and found a scanner and a host of computer and cellular phone equipment--but no Mitnick.

“It was just a stroke of luck he was not there” at the time of the raid, the friend said. “He said maybe he should pack it in and give up. ‘Maybe this was my wake-up call.’ ”

But he didn’t. Mitnick’s real wake-up call came four months later, about 3,000 miles away, when he was arrested in Raleigh.

In the one-bedroom, $550-a-month apartment he rented Feb. 4, authorities found a book about the best companies in America to work for and 44 job application letters. “He was living like a poor person,” Yzurdiaga said.

But working against Mitnick, said Hutchison of Netcom, is a souring public mood toward hacking. Hutchison said most users of his system--even ones who would have once been first in line to buy “Free Kevin Mitnick” T-shirts--are not sympathetic to Mitnick any longer.