SOURCE: "On the Track of the Hacker," in Book World—The Washington Post, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, January 21, 1996, pp. 3, 7.

[Below, Platt reviews Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw—By the Man Who Did It, the story of Tsutomu Shimomura's efforts to catch the computer criminal Kevin Mitnick.]

Every age has its bogeymen. A century ago, fictitious outlaw antiheroes such as Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau and Captain Nemo chilled readers who were concerned about the emerging powers of science. Today, computer criminals have acquired the same dangerous aura, and Captain Nemo has been replaced by Kevin Mitnick.

Mitnick, of course, is a real person—or is he? Katie Hafner and John Markoff catalyzed his notoriety in their book Cyberpunk, where they portrayed him as "the darkside hacker," a nerdy recluse with a grudge against society. Mitnick later complained that this was "twenty percent...