Four years after FBI agents surged into a North Carolina apartment and captured the world's best-known hacker, the saga of the man they hunted down - Kevin David Mitnick - seems finally to be nearing a conclusion.
Mitnick and federal prosecutors signed a plea agreement last week that sources said would keep the accused hacker in prison for roughly one more year. In addition, Mitnick is likely to be barred from profiting from his story, and restricted from touching a computer for at least three years after his release. The agreement, which still requires the approval of a federal judge, brings the curtain down on an era.
Mitnick has come to personify both the golden age of hacking and the intense public paranoia that accompanied the dawn of the personal computer revolution. Born in Los Angeles, his dubious career spans two decades, and by the early 1990s he had become a hacker legend.
Since his arrest, others have made millions of dollars telling his story while he spent the past four years penniless in jail awaiting trial. A film about his capture is due out this year. And legions of other hackers consider him a martyr, tearing down prominent Websites to erect protests in his name.
"The Mitnick case is the last vestige of hacker hysteria from the late 1980s and early 1990s," said Mike Godwin, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet civil liberties group.
"It's not that there won't be more hackers. It's just that cops and the media have moved on. They're more worried about gambling and porn sites and domain name registrations. But Mitnick was demonised in that era, and there's still a lot of people who want to take a piece of him."
Mitnick, now 35, has never seen the shopping, chatting, humming mecca that is today's Internet. His days are ruled by the routines of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, where he has been held without bail on a 25count indictment that includes 14 counts of wire fraud and eight counts of illegal possession of computer files and passwords stolen from such companies as Motorola and Sun.
Mitnick grew up in Southern California when the region was emerging as the stage for a handful of hackers whose collective notoriety has not been rivalled since. There was Kevin Poulsen, who, along with fellow hacker Ron Austin, tied up phone lines at radio stations during call-in contests. By improving their odds this way, they took prizes ranging from a pair of Porsches to Hawaiian holidays. There was Justin Petersen, a hacker playboy who pleaded guilty to trying to transfer $150,000 out of a California bank. He is best known, however, for continuing his hacking even while he was working as an FBI informant. And then there's Mitnick. A high-school dropout, he was not the most technically gifted but was a master of "social engineering", talking others into lowering their electronic defences.
At first, Mitnick's hacks were little more than juvenile pranks. He set up celebrities' home phones so that they were asked to deposit a coin whenever they tried to make a call, for instance. But he became primarily interested in pilfering hacking tools from big companies and computer experts.
Between 1981 and 1988, he was arrested for hacking at least four times, culminating in a one-year prison sentence for stealing software from Digital Equipment.
While on supervised release from that sentence, Mitnick took a job with a private investigations company in Los Angeles. Suspicious that Mitnick's new employer was taking advantage of his hacking skills, the FBI launched an investigation in 1992.
True to form, Mitnick was onto the Feds almost as quickly as they were onto him. On Christmas Eve 1992 Mitnick tried to trick employees at the motor vehicle department to fax driver's licence photos of the agents to a copy bureau.
Suspicious of the request, the department set a trap and sent an agent to wait for whoever came to collect the photos. As the agent, Shirley Lessiak, approached Mitnick, "He tossed the papers at me . . . He ran, and he ran faster than I did." Mitnick kept running for the next two years.
Then, on Christmas Day 1994, someone hacked into the computer system of Tsutomu Shimomura, a security expert at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Convinced that Mitnick was the culprit - which remains unproven - Shimomura set out to help the FBI catch him.
Using high-tech surveillance equipment, Shimomura and FBI agents tracked Mitnick first to a mobile phone "cell" in North Carolina. From there, they zeroed in on his apartment.
The plea agreement, filed under seal in in Los Angeles last Tuesday, involves a five-year sentence. Considering the time he has already served he could be out within a year, sources said.