AT&T this week politely informed reformed hacker Kevin Mitnick that they could no longer serve him as a customer, at least according to Kevin Mitnick. The one time master of phreaking apparently hired a lawyer this week to complain to the provider that people were obtaining his personal information and posting it to public hacker forums. Mitnick supposedly ponied up more than $2,000 per month for mobile service due to high roaming charges, but the hacker says AT&T wasn't interested in keeping him as a customer.

"They can't seem to secure my account," says Mitnick. "And then instead of doing something about it, they try to kill the messenger and want to boot me off their network when all I want them to do is to secure my account so no one gets access to my phone records." "They have to take some responsibility," he says.

Mitnick had a similar run in with his hosting provider earlier this month, when Hostedhere.net decided they didn't want him around. After a number of breaches, the company "decided it wasn't cost-effective to keep me around," says Mitnick. "This is just one of the perils of being Kevin Mitnick," says Hostedhere's David Wykofka. "If you're Barack Obama, you don't get webhosting at GoDaddy."

As for AT&T, as you might expect they dispute Mitnick's allegation that he was "fired" as a customer. "We investigated Mr. Mitnick's claims and determined they were without any foundation," AT&T tells us. "We refused Mr. Mitnick's demands for money, but did offer to let him out of his contractual obligations so that he could find a carrier that he would be comfortable with," says the company.

There is irony somewhere here, yes?