Tsutomu Shimomura

Tsutomu Shimomura (下村 努) is an American scientist and computer security expert based in the United States, who became an instant celebrity when he and computer journalist John Markoff tracked down and helped the FBI arrest hacker Kevin Mitnick.

Takedown, his 1996 book on the subject, was later adapted for the screen in Track Down in 2000.

Biography
Born in Japan, Shimomura is the son of Osamu Shimomura, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended Princeton High School.

At Caltech he studied under Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. After Caltech, he went on to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he continued his hands-on education in the position of staff physicist with Brosl Hasslacher and others on subjects such as Lattice Gas Automata.

In 1989, he became a research scientist in computational physics at the University of California, San Diego, and senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Shimomura also became a noted computer security expert, working for the National Security Agency.

In 1992, he testified before Congress on issues regarding the privacy and security (or lack thereof) on cellular telephones.

He is best known for events in 1995, when he assisted with tracking down the "computer hacker" Kevin Mitnick. Shimomura and journalist John Markoff wrote a book, Takedown, about the pursuit, and the book was later adapted into a movie of the same name. Shimomura, himself, appeared in a brief cameo in the movie. The Mitnick case also inspired the Cyberthief and the Samurai, by Jeff Goodell.

Shimomura worked for Sun Microsystems during the late 1990s.

Shimomura presently lives in the Reno/Tahoe area.

Author Bruce Sterling described his first meeting with Shimomura in the documentary Freedom Downtime:

It was in front of Congress, and I was testifying to a Congressional subcommittee. And here was this guy in sandals and, like, ragged-ass cutoffs, and the rest of us were done up in ties [...] giving our best sort of 'yes, we're in front of Congress' thing and Shimomura is there in this surfer gear.

Criticism
Kevin Mitnick and others have raised legal and ethical questions concerning Shimomura's involvement in his case. California author Jonathan Littman wrote a 1997 book about the case called The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin Mitnick, in which he presented Mitnick's side of the story, which was a very different version from the events written in Shimomura and Markoff's Takedown. In his book, Littman made allegations of journalistic impropriety against Markoff and of the legality of Shimomura's involvement in the matter, as well as suggesting that many parts of Takedown were made up for self-serving purposes by its authors. Mitnick's autobiography, Ghost in the Wires, further expands on concerns that Shimomura's involvement in the case was both unethical and illegal.

Writing credits

 * Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw—By the Man Who Did It (with John Markoff), 1996, Hyperion Books. ISBN 0-7868-6210-6
 * French title: Cybertraque, 1998, ISBN 2-259-18402-2
 * Dutch title: De klopjacht, 1996, ISBN 90-254-0639-4
 * German Title: Data Zone - Die Hackerjagd im Internet, 1996, ISBN 3-423-15101-3
 * "Minimal Key Lengths for Symmetric Ciphers to Provide Adequate Commercial Security", January 1996 (co-authors: Shimomura, Bruce Schneier, Ronald L. Rivest, Matt Blaze, Whitfield Diffie, Eric Thompson, Michael Wiener) (pdf)