Kevin on Rotten.com

Rotten.com is one of the internet’s most infamous shock sites, running since 1996 and known for graphic imagery most of the web won’t touch. Alongside that it runs the Rotten Library, a sprawling, anonymously written encyclopedia that covers criminals, celebrities, and historical figures in a sardonic, muckraking voice that throws out the neutral tone of a conventional reference work. That a site like this has profiled Kevin is a genuine thrill: it marks the point where he has crossed fully into folk-legend territory, a figure notorious enough to sit alongside the site’s usual roster of outlaws and infamous names, yet treated here with unmistakable sympathy rather than ridicule.

The entry profiles Kevin as the hacker famous for “social engineering,” and frames his story as a case study in punishment wildly outstripping the crime. It traces his path from bulletin board systems in 1980, under the handle “The Condor,” through his 1980s intrusions, his flight from a federal investigation, and his 1995 capture in North Carolina. Along the way the myth around him has grown so large that jailers believed he could launch attacks with his voice alone, and he spent long stretches in solitary confinement. The piece is openly partisan: it excoriates New York Times reporter John Markoff and Tsutomo Shimomura for blurring reporting and investigation and then profiting from the book and film “Takedown,” and it catalogs the abuses of his prosecution, including inflated damage estimates, stacked charges, withheld evidence, and nearly four years of pretrial detention without bail. Written in Rotten.com’s trademark profane, muckraking voice, it stands as a sympathetic and indignant account of a man it considers far more sinned against than sinning.