2 Images of the ‘Condor’ Emerge : Computers: Friends call arrested super-hacker Kevin Mitnick a bold prankster who made no personal gain. The government says he is a sophisticated electronic criminal.

If a man is defined by the quality of his enemies, Kevin Mitnick’s reputation as a super-hacker was confirmed by his arrest last week, following 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, 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 behind during a sometimes frenzied two-year flight from prosecution, friends and family say there is no evidence that he profited financially from any of his alleged electronic intrusions.

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

John Yzurdiaga, Mitnick’s Los Angeles attorney, went 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 joker will ultimately be up to a federal jury, presuming Mitnick goes to trial. A conviction does not depend on showing that Mitnick enriched himself. It is enough to show he broke the law by taking proprietary software owned by someone else.

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

The battle to define Mitnick has been underway for many 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.

And 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 requests for interviews by television outlets seeking information about the cyberspace outlaw that they commissioned their 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,” said Yzurdiaga, adding 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.”

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The government accuses Mitnick of causing millions of dollars in damages by stealing secret computer files and forcing firms to install new security measures. Industry sources say he copied software from dozens of companies, 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 sell the material, 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 cards were used. “My general sense is, none of the material was used on a for-profit basis,” he said.

Another accusation against him is that he “zeroed out” or removed information from an accounting file on the Well. A spokeswoman at the Well believes that Mitnick probably killed the file by mistake. Mitnick, working from long distance, apparently hit the wrong key on his Toshiba computer.

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

“He hid the stuff in the Computer Freedom and Privacy Conference,” she said. This was likely another Mitnick joke--to test the limits of computer freedom.

Assistant U.S. Atty. John Bowler in Raleigh, where Mitnick was captured, bristled at implications that Mitnick is 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 now-lengthy career as a hacker back at Monroe High School in the San Fernando Valley, where he broke into the computers of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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He later became what is known as a “phone phreak,” learning how to manipulate the telephone system to pull pranks such as turning off phones and putting on recordings that told his targets to deposit 25 cents.

He couldn’t bear to do anything without getting the satisfaction of poking fun at his victims, a pattern he apparently repeated with Shimomura, who said the man who hacked into his Osiris system left behind voice mail claiming “my technique is the best.”

Roy Tucker, the owner of a ham radio repeater known as 435, said that after turning off someone’s phone, Kevin Mitnick would come on the air and snicker, “I bet Richard’s telephone doesn’t work.”

Mitnick, said Tucker, learned what he did about phones by requesting a tour of the phone company. During the tour, he would rifle desks. He also went through trash bins outside.

“It would appear he’s not really a thief,” said Tucker, “but a very clever and amoral prankster.”

Mitnick also hacked into a Defense Department computer several years before the movie “WarGames,” about a computer whiz who almost starts a war when he breaks into a Defense computer.

After being caught and spending a year in prison, Mitnick entered a counseling program aimed at teaching him how to control his compulsion to hack. He got a job working for a private investigation firm in Calabasas. All that came to an end when FBI agents showed up at the firm in late 1992 to investigate allegations that Mitnick had fallen back into his old habits.

He fled, not surfacing again publicly until last week.

It appears, however, that his life on the run was never much of a secret. Friends heard regularly from him. 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.

Schindler confirmed that he was 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 stay out as long as he could, said the friend. “His basic position was, sooner or later he knew he would be caught.”

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

There was some speculation at the time that Mitnick had heard police radio broadcasts indicating the police were on their way, but the friend said that’s not what happened.

Mitnick had come home from a movie and believed that his apartment had been broken into, the friend said. After questioning the manager, Mitnick decided not to go back to his apartment.

“He took off,” said the friend. “No clothes. No computer.”

“It was just a stroke of luck he was not there” during 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.

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

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But working against Mitnick, said Hutchison of Netcom, is a souring public mood on hacking. He said the attitude is similar to society’s changed views about drunk driving. Once, it was not considered a serious crime and it was even cool to brag about how drunk you were when you drove home from the party last night. Then society got fed up and took a hard line.

Hutchison said most computer users on his system are not sympathetic to Mitnick anymore, even ones who once would have been first in line to buy “Free Kevin Mitnick” T-shirts.

The computer world, Hutchison said, has grown up. Kevin the prankster never did.

“It’s not funny anymore,” he said.