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Comment by hal9000xp | Hacker News Reader

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hal9000xp·

I recommend to watch movie based on Kevin Mitnick story:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_Down

I couldn't say it's very accurate story but it's still fun to watch.

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99% of it never happened and what actually "happened" was over-dramatized.

They exaggerated so much that Mitnick was sent to a maximum security jail.

He served his sentence in FCI Lompoc, which is where his lawyers asked that he be incarcerated.

This movie is known as Takedown in the rest of the world, and it is not fun to watch, nor does it cover Mitnick's side of the story: "Track Down (also known as Takedown outside the United States), is a 2000 film about computer hacker Kevin Mitnick, based on the book Takedown by John Markoff and Tsutomu Shimomura."

Watch the documentary Freedom Downtime by Eric "Emmanuel Goldstein" Corley and read Mitnick's book, Ghost in the Wires. Written by Mitnick after his probation terms were expired. Dude's got humor, and its written in a way which is both fun and suspense. Whether it is accurate, who knows, but it is from his perspective.

I'm sure the movie is terrible (I've read the contemporaneous books, though not Mitnick's more recent one), as you might expect from a Hollywood crime story.

But what's Mitnick's side of this story supposed to be? The crimes he was sentenced for got his co-conspirator probation, right? It seems pretty clear that Mitnick mostly got punished for being a recidivist. Even Mitnick doesn't claim to be innocent of the charges; in fact, he's spent the last 10 years trading on his criminal reputation.

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