I’ll be honest – I don’t have much of a problem with AT&T.  I’ve had nothing but stellar service with the company since, several years ago, I found a way to game the system and be the first to get the fabled $10 DSL. I’ve since upgraded to AT&T’s UVerse service, which I was just gloating about yesterday on Twitter.

Despite all that, I recognize that the company is in a heap of trouble at the moment, and for reasons that I completely understand – Mike Arrington has dumped his iPhone due to their network, the Wall Street Journal put out a pretty scathing post mortem on the Google Voice App painting AT&T as the villain, MG Seigler zinging them almost daily in his headlines, and a pending FCC investigation.

And now they just invited a heaping helping of PR fail this week, dumping Kevin Mitnick (yes, that Kevin Mitnick) from their service due to the inability to secure his account from script kiddies.

The Register has the story:

Over the past month, both HostedHere.net, his longtime webhost, and AT&T, his cellular provider since he was released from prison more than nine years ago, have told him they no longer want him as a customer. The reason: his status as a celebrity hacker makes his accounts too hard to defend against the legions of script kiddies who regularly attack them.

The move by AT&T came this week after Mitnick hired a lawyer to complain that his privacy was being invaded by people posting Mitnick’s account information in public hacking forums. It included the eight-digit password Mitnick used to authenticate himself online, the numbers for his cell phone and land lines, his billing address, and the last four digits of his social security number.

Mitnick, in his statements to the Register, puts MG’s travails with AT&T to shame.

"They can’t seem to secure my account," Mitnick told The Register. "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."

Far be it from me to attempt to dictate rules how a corporation should or shouldn’t act; AT&T is well within it’s rights to refuse service to whomever they want. Let’s not forget, though, that this is the guy who literally sponsored an entire culture of hackers in the 90s – he was the spirit of the #2600 culture.

Certainly, maintaining Kevin Mitnick as a customer might be more difficult than the average consumer, but shouldn’t AT&T be worried about the fact that their systems can be penetrated so many different ways that Kevin doesn’t have just one or two hackers to worry about, but a legion of script kiddies?

Given that AT&T seems to continue to want to take the tactic throughout all their recent PR troubles that they’re simply a monolithic, impervious organization, I’m actually curious to see how they’ll try to spin this – at some point AT&T will need to address the mounting consumer concerns here in a real way other than simple spin. Otherwise, even Steve Job’s legendary reality distortion field won’t be able to help them.