Career Paths: Notorious Criminal or Security Consultant?
The same basic impulses – insatiable curiosity, good people skills, an appetite for risk – that led Kevin Mitnick into a decade-long game of cat-and-mouse with the FBI are richly rewarded in more prosocial professions.
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Interviewer: If you hadn’t found the theater, what do you think you might have been?
David Mamet: I think it’s very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.
David Mamet: I think it’s very likely I would have been a criminal. It seems to me to be another profession that subsumes outsiders, or perhaps more to the point, accepts people with a not very well-formed ego and rewards the ability to improvise.
– THE PARIS REVIEW
What’s the Big Idea?
In this clip from our recent interview, legendary hacker-turned-security consultant Kevin Mitnick recalls an incident back in 1981 when he was seventeen: He and a phone-phreaker buddy decide to sneak into Pacific Telephone’s central office in Hollywood. They social-engineer the key code and stroll in nonchalantly. Almost immediately, a security guard catches them. Typically this kind of story ends with a weeping phone call to Mom. But Kevin Mitnick was notyour typical seventeen-year-old . . .
In this clip from our recent interview, legendary hacker-turned-security consultant Kevin Mitnick recalls an incident back in 1981 when he was seventeen: He and a phone-phreaker buddy decide to sneak into Pacific Telephone’s central office in Hollywood. They social-engineer the key code and stroll in nonchalantly. Almost immediately, a security guard catches them. Typically this kind of story ends with a weeping phone call to Mom. But Kevin Mitnick was notyour typical seventeen-year-old . . .
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
