When Kevin Mitnick was released from prison this year, he may have thought his troubles with the law had come to an end. Little did he know, they were just beginning.

After his arrest in 1995, Mitnick spent four years as a pre-trial detainee while he faced a 25-count federal indictment and dozens of hearings regarding legal maneuvers by Federal prosecutors to withhold evidence, deny him and his attorneys access to material necessary to prepare a defense, and, ultimately, deny him of a bail hearing (which meant that authorities never had to justify his lengthy pre-trial detainment). His case ended when he plead guilty to three counts of wire fraud for making phone calls where he misrepresented his identity to gain information, and one count of computer hacking for storing files on the computer system of the University of Southern California.

Mitnick was released in January of this year and is finding that now he has to live under the constraints of conditions of supervised release that are worthy of a Kafka novella. Supervised release, which is intended to rehabilitate the convict after he or she has been punished, is not intended to be punitive. In Mitnick's case, it is hard to read it otherwise.

One of the conditions of Mitnick's release is that he is barred from touching a computer for the next three years (a condition relatively common for hackers), making finding employment virtually impossible. These days even working at a fast food restaurant requires some computer contact (though the probation officer offered to make an exception if he'd be willing to work at Arby's). To make matters worse, not only has Mitnick also been barred from touching computers, he has now been barred from talking or writing about them.

The probation office overseeing Mitnick's release has interpreted the ban that prevents him from serving as a technical or computer consultant to mean he may not speak or write publicly about technology. An interpretation rife with irony given the fact that just two months earlier, Mitnick was invited to appear before the United States Senate, where he gave testimony regarding computer security and the Internet.

A related condition of Mitnick's supervised release prevents him from profiting from his crimes (the so-called Son of Sam law), assigning any monies made from his story to the victim companies in the case against him (Sun, Motorola, Fujitsu, Nokia, and USC, among others). Indeed, Mitnick still must pay restitution to those companies that totals roughly $100.00 per month divided among a dozen corporations. The most recent ban is something altogether separate. It does not simply prevent Mitnick from profiting from his crimes, it prevents him from talking about them at all.

The ban, under which he was even denied the opportunity to speak at Carnegie Mellon on the issue of civil rights, has forced Mitnick to turn down a series of speaking engagements, as well as offers to write for a number of publications. It is in this vein that Mitnick was not only finding a means for gainful employment, but was also using his knowledge and expertise to inform a often confused and frightened public about the realities of hacking, computer security and cybercrime. As an articulate and informed individual, Mitnick was receiving invitations to speak at universities, participate on panel discussions regarding technology and the media, and even discuss ways in which journalists could be better informed about issues of technology. In other words, he was turning his life around and people that had the opportunity to hear him learned something.

While Mitnick is having difficulty making a living, it seems that those around him are cashing in. New York Times reporter John Markoff and security consultant Tsutomu Shimomura both profited handsomely from book and movie contracts detailing the pursuit and capture of Mitnick. Now Jonathan Littman, author of yet another Mitnick book (this one critical of Markoff and his reporting) is suing over the movie Takedown, based on Markoff and Shimomura's book, which he claims borrows heavily from his own Fugitive Game. Mitnick remains an object of fascination in a technology obsessed culture, but has yet to see any gains from his celebrity.

In part, one of the reasons Mitnick has had trouble making ends meet is his steadfast refusal to cooperate with those telling the stories about him. As a result, Mitnick, and the threat he poses, has largely been an invention of the media. Since he was first deemed a 'darkside hacker' in the 1980s, and later as 'Cyberspace's Most Wanted' by Markoff (which led to widespread mis-reporting that Mitnick was actually named to the FBI's most wanted list), Mitnick has been demonized as a threatening, malicious, and dangerous figure. He has been made to stand in for everything that we hate, fear, or can not comprehend about technology.

The fact of the matter is that Mitnick's hacking never caused damage, and he has never profited from any hacking activity. Mitnick has always remained true to the original hacker ethic, governed by the spirit of exploration and the promise of technology to free information for the public good.

In a world where the level of public discussion about computer security and cybercrime is given to hyperbole, panic, and drastic oversimplification, a voice like Mitnick's is not only welcomed, but much needed. What we lose in such silence is not only the information that can help us make sense of the rapidly changing world of technology, but also the freedoms that were the promise of the information revolution.