John Markoff
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- This article is about the writer. For the professor of sociology and history, see John Markoff (professor).
John Markoff (born October 24, 1949) is a journalist best known for his work at the The New York Times, and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick.
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[edit] Biography
Markoff was born in Oakland, California and grew up in Palo Alto, California. He graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, Washington, in 1971 and received a Master's degree from the University of Oregon in 1976.
In the 1990s, he wrote a series of articles about Kevin Mitnick, who was then a fugitive on the run from a number of law enforcement agencies. Markoff also co-wrote, with Tsutomu Shimomura, the book Takedown about the chase. The book later became a film that was released direct to video in the United States. Markoff's writing about Mitnick was the subject of criticism by Mitnick supporters and unaffiliated parties who maintained that Markoff's accounts exaggerated or even invented Mitnick's activities and successes. Markoff stood by his reporting in several responses.
The film went far further, with Markoff himself stating to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, "I thought it was a fundamentally dishonest movie." (Mitnick stated a number of times that he settled a lawsuit with distributors Miramax over the film, but details were confidential; Miramax has apparently never publicly confirmed that.) [citation needed]
Markoff was also accused by Jonathan Littman of journalistic impropriety and of over-hyping Mitnick's actual crimes. Littman himself had also profited from a sensationalized account of Mitnick's time as a fugitive in his own book on the incident, The Fugitive Game. In his book, Littman recounted how he invited Markoff to lunch after Markoff had referred a Playboy assignment on Mitnick to Littman, and then Littman stiffed Markoff for the lunch. Further controversy came over the release of the movie Takedown, with Littman alleging that portions of the film were taken from his book The Fugitive Game without permission.
After Mitnick, Markoff continued to write about technology, focusing at times on wireless networking, writing early stories about non-line-of-sight broadband wireless, phased-array antennas, and multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) antenna systems to enhance Wi-Fi. He covered Jim Gillogly's 1999 break of the first three sections of the CIA's Kryptos cipher[1], and writes regularly about semiconductors and supercomputers as well.
[edit] Bibliography
- The High Cost of High Tech (with Lennie Siegel) (1985) ISBN 0-06-039045-X
- Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with Katie Hafner) (1991) ISBN 0-671-68322-5
- Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura) (1995) ISBN 0-7868-6210-6
- What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005) ISBN 0-670-03382-0
[edit] See also
- Interview with John Markoff about What the Dormouse Said, April 13, 2006 (audio)
