"Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick

Unlike his other books, this one is pretty much an autobiography of Mitnick.  The book starts when he's a teenager who doesn't really fit in the common social groups and starts to do HAM radio chats to find friends.  HAM radio leads to phone "phreaking" which leads to computer hacking.  He starts small, hacking free long distance for his mother, then hacking school computer systems - "just for fun", then moving onto hacking commercial companies like DEC and downloading source code for their top paid Operating Systems, like VMS. All for fun, of course, he claims that he never sold any information or code, and never used any credit card numbers that he obtained.  This might as well be true, as he pretty much lived most of the time around the poverty line standard, and if he really made a huge amount of money with his hacks there would be no need for him to beg his mother and grandmother to sponsor him from their meager savings.

His hacker friends have pretty much all betrayed him to the authorities, and even though some of them he forgave (why?), he does claim that the ancient proverb "There's no honor amongst thieves" is still very true and valid.  His best friend not only betrays him to the feds, but also becomes his wife's lover, which is a really shitty thing to do.

The feds come off as some horrible people, and so do pretty much all law enforcement people in the book, with a few honorable exceptions.  Sometimes these things ring true, like Mitnick being put in solitary and in top security prisons with uber-violent offenders, while in reality he was never aggressive or violent towards anybody.  Seems that his reputation and rumors have scared law enforcement people and judges and they wanted to err on the cautious and punitive side, because they really did not understand the subject matter and did not want to be played for fools.

Mitnick is amazing in what he calls "Social Engineering" which most people would call "lying" and passes himself for a variety of different people, even cops and FBI officers, and extracts all kind of information from unsuspecting patsies who should have known better.  Mitnick is very proud of his Social Engineering skills, and often describes the meticulous research with which he approaches every such situation.

Eventually he does get caught, despite having piles of birth certificates (from South Dakota!), false identities and all kinds of phone faking equipment.  He spends some pretty rough time, a couple of years, while waiting for trail, and is so broke he cannot even afford his own lawyer.  He gets sentenced to a couple of years, after which he becomes a security consultant where the book ends.  This book is published much after the "Takedown" book which describes his case from the POV of the law enforcement people, because the judge ordered that Mitnick is not to profit from his story for a certain amount of years afterwards.

Today, some people even forgot Mitnick - I read a review on Amazon claiming that Julian Assange (!) is a bigger hacker.  Newsflash: Assange is a journalist, not a hacker.  I guess time destroys everything, which is why even bloodthirsty tyrants are seen in a positive light after a few centuries have passed.

The book is written in a very easy, conversational style and is monotone and repetitive at times, but still a good read.  At some points the reader wants to yell "Kev, don't do it! Why would you do that Kev, when you know you're sure to get caught?" but I guess there's some compulsion at play here, so we cannot assume a totally logical actor.