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.
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.He is best known for events in 1995, when he assisted with tracking down the computer hacker Kevin Mitnick.
In that year Shimomura also received prank calls which popularized the phrase "My kung fu is stronger than yours", equating it with hacking.
[4] In his book, Littman made allegations of journalistic impropriety against Markoff and questioned the legality of Shimomura's involvement in the matter, as well as suggesting that many parts of Takedown were fabricated by its authors for self-serving purposes.