 Thank you. You never know when it's your last time speaking at DEF CON, and there's such a mellow vibe this year. I shouldn't say that prematurely because it's only Saturday, but it feels like a very mellow vibe this year, like a lot of the raw and new disappointment last year. What the con had become because the old DEF CON was gone, and a lot of people didn't like it this year, as acceptance and maturity and growth, that the old DEF CON is gone, and the new DEF CON is a very, very good and appropriate, and even somewhat different place to be. But the essence of hacking is still the question, and the reason for getting together. It's still, this place is still THE place. Now I know these words, because they can be recorded and broadcast in a lot of other contexts, may not sound to others like they sound here when I say them to you, the real concrete flesh and blood audience, but this is still the place where I find I can tell the most truth that I know how to tell, because most of what I try to say is understood in the way it is meant to be said. The context in which hacking takes place has changed. It has changed for finally in ten years. If you read DT's piece, in the program, he talked about what it took to be a leak ten years ago. You knew through four systems, you couldn't get on the internet unless you knew how to hack on, you couldn't do a Unix box unless you broke into one. Today all that has changed, and because the context has changed, the content of hacking has changed, but the essence of it has not. One sign of how the context has changed was one of the statements, Simple Nomad, just tossed out earlier. We do find ourselves in dialogue and congruent from year to year as we kind of pop the directions, we think things are going. And at some point it struck me that Simple Nomad felt it necessary to say, now I want to make clear to you feds here, that I am as patriotic as anybody else, and I love this country, and that gave me a slight chill, because we didn't need to say that before, we didn't need to declare out loud in public, we really are patriotic in order to assuage whatever powers that be, who might take issue with what we are saying, when what we are saying as he said, is simply to maximize the freedom and space in the country. Which is what the essence of hacking at its core is really about. I remember doing the Watergate hearing Sam Irvin, long dead now, great old country lawyer, said, we have saved the Constitution for one more generation. From what did they save the Constitution? In taking down a president and taking down so many of his henchmen. They saved it from the inevitable corruption of the human heart when it is given too much power, however well-intentioned that power may be, however well-intentioned it is, that that power be exercised on behalf of the body politic, and however the powers that be believe in their ability to execute that much power without becoming corrupted by it. That's why we have a system of checks and balances. When the checks and balances are skewed, when the balance starts to move a particular way, the essence of hacking in its core is to tell, find and tell the complete truth. By using any means necessary to discover, to articulate it, and to communicate it, so that the discourse in which we need to be engaged can be maintained. So remember I talked about politics, increasingly hacking is going to be, for those who are conscious of what they are doing as they do it, a political activity that will not become capable of hacking without being aware of its political implications or dimensions. I knew people who were alive in the 30s, and they tried to explain to me what it was like to go through the depression and to go through a time when it looked as if democracy had become bankrupt. Stephen Spender, an English poet, said to me, it seemed to us the only choice was between fascism and communism. And because that's the way it looked to us, democracies were failing, moribund, appeasing the fascist dictators, that's why he fought on the socialist side, the communist side in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in the late 30s. 20 years later the context has shifted, and the parents of friends of mine that I grew up with who had gone to communist cell meetings in the 30s, because that's how it looked to them, were now sitting before here at the House of American Activities Committee and being questioned about the reality. I'm simply trying to underscore that this shift since we last met a year ago, as a result of September 11th and its immense aftermath, has made it necessary for people who otherwise would not have to do it to assure people that they are patriotic Americans when they are speaking on behalf of maximizing freedom. And I don't know any other single thing I've heard here that italicizes or underscores the changed context and why now more than ever you need to be keenly aware of what you are doing, how you are doing it, and why you are doing it. No, you are not all going to be filtered and taken off in the night. Only some of you. Only some of you. And the key thing is to remember that you don't want to be in that group. There are checks and balances. My understanding is the names of those detained must be now revealed according to the courts. The checks and balances have to work or, inevitably, people become corrupt with too much power and in the face of too much fear. Okay, so, hacking in this essence, what is it for? To what end, Marcus Aurelius said, we ought to ask of anything. To what end? What is it for? What is the purpose for which it exists? My belief is that hacking, above all, means what Edward Wilson said in Consequence was true of all great scientists. All great scientists have passion, obsessiveness, and dare. Passion for knowledge and absolutely a nearing desire to know the truth and to find the pieces of it broken though they may be, scattered though they may be, wherever we can find them, and then learn how to knit them together in order to present the big picture in the name of this check. Obsessive, I don't know anybody who is interesting who is not obsessive. That's just a statement of fact. I'm sure they're out there, but they look pretty plain white bread vanilla to me, most of the time, because most of the people who truly accomplish something have gotten bed out of shape about it, have no perspective whatsoever, at least some of the time about it, because it is their love, their passion, and they burn to do it, and they have to do it, and they are daring because they have to do the unconventional thing. So what is the unconventional thing to do in a context post-September 11th, when all of us who felt it viscerally responded to the attack on New York and Washington, by being aware so quickly of who we were as a single people, and wanting somehow to combat that thing, the danger is that in the fighting as during the Cold War, we will come to look exactly like the enemy, because we come to reflect the person we hate and fight by using the same techniques and the same tactics. So, you don't have to do that, I'm just speaking from the heart, because I'm thinking this may, who knows, this may be my last shot to tell you the truth as I can see it. And I said once that one of these things, I mean you know who you are, you know so much more than I do in the aggregate and in the individual person, that anybody who really understands Linux or Unix really understands the universe, and anybody who understands Windows really understands Windows. And that also happens to be true. Linux, Unix, is a system so complex, so elegant in its design and execution that it echoes the deeper system of which it is both symbol and mediating methodology for communication and connection. It is an image of humanity connecting itself in order to maximize its ability to think and to dare to act differently. I've said before and I'll recapitulate some of the things I said in order to present them in a new context, that the truth always moves from the edge to the center, and when things are moving rapidly, the edge is the new center. And I've quoted John Galvin many times from Motorola who said when I asked at the end of his career, what were the ideas that made the key critical breakthrough difference in his life in Motorola? He said every single one began its life as a minority opinion, a minority opinion. And every time the group had a challenge and someone suggested a solution and everybody agreed that it was the right thing to do, it was always wrong. And this is not a hacker exactly, although he did have strange ideas meetings. They were talking about chips in people's heads long before the idea became mainstream. It is mainstream, isn't it? The idea of hacking the wet-wear-dry-wear interface and refiguring ourselves so that identity becomes the way we program it to be, and we set up new points of reference for self-reflection. I think it's mainstream now, almost. Blade Runner is mainstream. In this new environment, the mind of society is both the target and the weapon in our new kind of war, and therefore the management of perception from intentional deception and psychological operations to propaganda, spin and public relations, which are simply words that tame the distortion and disguising of the truth. Those are the cornerstones of this war for the mind of society, and that means the truth can only be found in exchange in a black market. The hacking community, the hacker nation, the vigilante hacker. No, you didn't say that, did you? I'll take that back. What was your term? I don't remember. I don't remember. As opposed to cyber-core... Oh, yeah, cyber-militia. Cyber-militia. A community of people aligned around the values I've begun to illustrate, or name at least, this community is the only antidote to the distortion of the truth in the public space. That's the black market where the truth is found on the edge and moved to the center where it forms a consensus for itself. I would like to suggest to you that hacking is the engine of the exchange of the real truth. It's the machinery, and it is knowing how to use it, how to leverage it, how to build it, how to tweak it, how to jack it up. So it really does mean taking the red pill and looking at the matrix from the inside out in a way that nobody else can see. I'm going to give some examples of that. One from Space Travel, most from some experiences I've had recently interacting with people in the intelligence community. Nothing classified. Why? Because I don't know anything classified. Or if I do, I don't know that it's classified, and therefore saying it is not revealing classified truth. I'm sure it isn't. But it is about cover and deception and becoming appreciative and aware of just how exquisitely and subtly and effectively it is practiced in so many areas of our lives. You begin to sound like a conspiracy theorist. You really do. Except that's what we used to call a journalist during the Watergate days. And don't forget that it was Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein fame, who in the 1970s after the Watergate and Church hearings, Church committee hearings, when an article for running started, I think, was 1977, in which he discussed in detail the 250-something journalists, or people in the journalism industry who worked and always had worked hand in glove with the CIA from its inception. Because the people who built the New York Times and built Time magazine and built the Washington Post were cohorts, partners, pals, old friends, as it always is with those who built the intelligence community at its inception from the RSS after World War II. It's just the way it is. And the Church committee ended that theoretically because then a long list passed saying the journalists could not be hired or used by the intelligence community. Let's just have a show of hands. How many of you here today, you foreign journalists, are really working for your governments? Could you please raise your hands? Okay, just a couple of you have the courage to raise your hands. I spoke to someone who was a career man at CIA and I asked him about that and he said, Wink, wink, literally wink, wink. No, we can't do that anymore. Although sometimes wink, wink, some of the boys find it's easier to get forgiveness than permission. When you are on that side of the mouth that is speaking, it is easy to be grib and complacent about that fact. When you are on this side of the mouth and you have a passion for knowing the truth, it is a chilling thing to be told. That's just the way it is. And so all I'm suggesting is to begin with that we jack up our awareness of what it is we are hearing and how effectively we are led, like real birds in digital cages, so that when the cages moved and the constructions of reality that have been artfully created, we flapping our wings with the illusion of flying because the cage has always been big enough for that, we'll move along with the direction of the cage. 15, 20 years ago we were talking about in space war context using holographic projection, multi-spectral camouflage and designing simulated environments that people would believe were real. I would like to suggest that those are incredibly good metaphors for information war as well, for the management of perception. Holographic projections, I love to explore the UFO world, at least in part because what it reveals about what's really going on, the UFO phenomena I use to cover up. And when you see something in the sky that you've never seen before, and it looks anomalous and it looks wonderful and it looks astonishing and then it works out. It could be actually beta reticulins come to abduct your grandmother, but it also could be a holographic projection that you are not able to see the origin of. And I'm going to talk in some more detail about what that looks like. Illusion, misdirection and ridicule. Illusion, misdirection and ridicule are the hallmarks of any campaign of cover and deception. Let me give you an example. Jim Poteet was a career CIA man. He was the go-to radar guy during the Gulf of Tonkin. Currently you find him in Washington as the president of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, AFIO. Now, Jim told me directly, this is not classified, it's just an interesting story, that when the Gulf of Tonkin incident, some of you are realizing, some of you are maybe too young, this was during the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War, you remember, it was after Grenada, it was before the Gulf War. I mean, you've studied it in history, I'm sure, some of you. And how we got majorly involved in the Vietnam War was an event called the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Lyndon Johnson went to John McCormick, who was then head of the CIA, and said, we believe our ships have been fired on by Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. We want to know if that actually happened. And in order to do that, they went to Jim Poteet, who was the go-to radar guy, and he said, I can tell you if the reports are accurate, but I need the radar logs, I need to know the meteorological conditions, I need to know the conditions in the sea, I need to know a number of diverse sets of data, they will definitely enable me to tell you what happened there with great probability, and it will take about 48 hours. And that's what John McCormick told Johnson, and Johnson said, I don't have 48 hours, I've got to know that tomorrow morning. And they said, we can tell you, in other words, the intelligence community can function as it is intended to function, if you just give us two days to do the job correctly, the next morning Johnson announced that our ships had been fired out in the Gulf of Tonkin and began the bombing of North Vietnam. Poteet said to John McCormick, I don't understand being young and naive at the time. Why didn't we wait 48 hours? I could have told him that the truth was likely to have been, and McCormick shaking his head said, isn't it obvious, he didn't want to know the truth, he wanted to go to war. He never spoke, Johnson never spoke to McCormick again, months later he resigned as director of the CIA. Now, Gene Poteet used to have fun around 1960, designing a way to put radar blips on the enemy's radar. He could do this in a way that simulated altitude, speed, and size of the ship. He said a very simple engineering job, but it was an elegant hack. So what they did was test Russian radar by putting blips on Russian radar in order to test the Russian responses to what would be perceived as an enemy in-flight. I asked him about this because of my crazy preoccupation with UFOs and asked him if he had ever done that to our own due line. In other words, put blips on the radar that looked like something they couldn't be and then made them seem to move from zero to five thousand in a twinkling. He chuckled and said, as everybody in the intelligence community seems to chuckle when I ask a question like that, we talked about that and we thought about doing it, but of course we had our parameters that defined our field of operation and we didn't do that. And of course, wink, wink, until we were testing stealthy technology and we did want to test how people would respond to blips that disappeared in the night and then we did do it. But at the time he said we didn't do it, the question I want to ask you is when you are reading newspaper reports, when you are reading connected, collusive, coherent narratives that seem to build a structure of reality, are you seeing a real blip or not? Is there something on the radar because something is in the sky or because a false return has been generated in order to have it show up on your radar? Partitsa, they had great fun with this. One of the things they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, they heard a Cuban pilot find a Russian MiG say that he saw the plane that was generating the radar return. He was obviously mistaken, believing is seeing rather than seeing is believing. They all looked at each other because it was being intercepted by NSA in real time and they looked at each other and everybody nodded and they hit the switch and the blip disappeared from the radar screen and the Cuban controllers and they believed therefore it had been shot down by the pilot to them, they had just given permission to fire. So you could have a lot of fun creating the illusion of downed aircraft even when they don't even exist. So when I found myself doing some consulting lately recently in Washington, the Washington Post was on the table in the conference room in the morning and it was a terrific story about plans for dams, soil compositions, this sort of thing found on computers in Afghanistan owned by Al Qaeda and it talked at length about an Australian who had released sewage in an act of individual terror. He wanted a job cleaning up the sewage so he hacked into the sewage system and released sewage 46 times, which it was pointed out did not show a very good police response to the issue of identifying who was hacking into the sewage system. It was a very detailed, very specific article and I raised the question, when an article of this specificity, of this density of detail, shows up on the front page of the morning Washington Post, then it says to me that it is not about what it looks like it is about. It is probably, I would suspect, I would guess, a communication from somebody to somebody and then the deeper question for the hacker becomes who is communicating to whom and about what? What is the real intention of communicating that that knowledge was on a computer taken from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? And I asked that question to the people for whom I was consulting because most of them had worked for the CIA and the leader of the core group burst into laughter and he said, again, I always get these answers, I am so close to that particular news item that I can't answer your question specifically and I suggest we begin our business. In other words, it's not a non-denial denial, it's a non-confirmation confirmation. In other words, yes, you've picked something up but you're not sure what you've picked up and that to me is the essence of hacking. How do you know what you know? How do you know? How can you cooperate it? How can you drill down deep? Let me give you one more example like that from the intelligence community. I have a friend who writes stories for Aviation Week in space technology. He's crazy and obsessive like most of us. He spent many nights in the desert outside Edwards Air Force space with his night vision camcorder watching something he called the drooper, a plasma-encased arrow that zoomed over Nellis out toward Air Force, not Nellis. Zoomed over the air base out toward Area 51 and disappeared. He took the photographs to people at JPL to find out what kind of plasma it was, the kind of thing that's often reported as a UFO. And he talked to me once about a power outage in the Pacific Northwest. Now, the power outage was pretty major, covered a lot of states and one of his deep sources caught him up and said, this story doesn't sound right to me. The explanation we're being given is not accurate and I'm going to tell you what I think actually happened. I believe it was a demonstration of power by a non-state terrorist organization like Medical Terrorists in Columbia who are showing us what they can do if we don't back off. It's a quid pro quo for tax sort of thing and I will know that I'm right if it happens again this week and three days later the lights went out all over the Pacific Northwest again. Flash forward two years. I'm sitting at a conference next to Major X not to be mysterious but just because I have no right to reveal his name and Major X says, I assume if you're in this conference you have clearances. I say having learned from them how to talk, that's a safe assumption. Now Major X is also irritated because he's going out after 20 years despite having been on the list for promotion because a new director of the army has replaced the list with more Hispanic women and taken off some of the Caucasian men and he is a major Caucasian man and so he's off the list and so he was maybe talking a little more loosely than he would and he was spinning out story after story and I'm sitting there trying to pretend I'm not taking notes behind my back over here with my right hand. They were just very interesting stories and one of them was this. He said some of the things we tested like electromagnetic weapons were really powerful things and there was this one that we had to test down in a skiff that is a secure area that was actually not a room that was an entire canyon and the thing was such a big deal we had to wait for the secretary of defense to give us a command that said yes you can go ahead and do it and the call came and we flipped the switch and we executed as we were supposed to and damned if the lights didn't go out all over the Pacific Northwest. Now, a couple of days later we wanted to be sure it wasn't post hoc area where Popkerhawk after this therefore because of this logical fallacy we wanted to be sure it was truly a cause and effect relationship so we threw the switch again and damned if the same thing didn't happen again. Now, accidentally you find yourself sometimes in a position to connect the dots. The discipline that you can cultivate is to find the dots and store them. It means you have to tolerate ambiguity and complexity and not knowing and hold it lightly while you are in pursuit of the pattern while refusing to impose prematurely a pattern on the dots before you have evidence that indicates what's going on. What struck me about what the major said was this he said, you know, if anyone stumbled into that skiff into that canyon we had a whole set of cover stories to say what we were doing there each one designed to fit the belief system the construction of reality that we knew was held by the person asking what we were doing based on the level of clearance that they had. In other words, at the highest level of clearance you got one story at the next highest another story if you're a prospector in a burrow you got another story. Each one of which would have been plausible and would have made sense in terms of how you believed the world worked because they understood how you constructed reality and how you believed the world worked. Layered deception layered jigsaw puzzle pieces this is not about conspiracy theories it's about billions of dollars sustaining and funding both industries that created and those that are in collusion with it and if you ever worked as I have worked with large big city newspapers you understand pretty quickly how the culture of the newspaper reflects the culture of the owners and the culture of the owner is often not what's printed on the masthead as the real reason they are quote unquote gathering the news. I'm just talking common sense I'm just saying what's so. Now, back 10 years when DEF CON 1 was taking place if you were 13 years old or 16 years old and you were hacking into an old mormat system and you uncovered some piece of interesting information or got the plans for the B-1 bomber and downloaded them on your floppy disk what you had was a trophy that was really cool and that you could show your friends and no one was going to send you to jail in our likelihood if you had done it you might get the scare of your life but now as we have heard again and again through this conference the stakes are different the game has changed and therefore you have to be more careful more perspicacious more aware more conscious than ever of what you are doing when you engage in the hunt for the pieces of the truth that will enable us genuinely to be free both in our essence and in our actions my understanding of hacking is that this is what hacking is really about you have to drill down and in light of what I just said about these stories you have to understand people and how they think and how they construct reality because the electronic network is an image a shadow of how people think and how people communicate and both the deep structure and the conceptual structure up here can be manipulated altered or observed in order to achieve a desired effect now there are some buried assumptions in what I am saying one is that the truth matters that the truth makes a difference that it really can set you free and that is my belief and passion I don't know what else there is but the truth even though it is a little piece they reprinted about Chinatown in the program even though you know you can never really find out what is happening you can find out enough to begin to have a good hunch and that can help you set yourselves and the rest of us free in other words for those of you who are younger there are many middle aged people here more than I've ever seen at DEF CON many of you have jobs in the federal government in the intelligence community many of you work on behalf of the singular powers that be so one of the dangers is not understanding who the real enemy is the enemy is not simply divided into those who work for the government and those who don't because that's really simplistic I'm in contact with people who work at very high levels of the government from time to time they have expressed exactly the same reservations exactly the same concerns that you have expressed here in this convention don't be deceived that because someone works for NSA or CIA or DIA they are simply the man and their goal is to eclipse you and render you impotent and powerless it's not necessarily true it requires great powers of discrimination to know the difference in a conversation recently among a number of us serious grave concerns were raised about the plans to attack Iraq assuming the plans that are being published have anything to do with the plans to attack Iraq rather than being disinformation or psychological operations but these are people the government is not one thing it does not move as a singular monolithic entity with one mind and one brain that the corporate structures and the corporate structures of government as well as corporations can't assimilate us over time I've seen it happen to the best of us and you think you know who you're talking to and the next minute you realize there's been a seed pod under their bed and it's replaced them in the middle of the night and they've been totally taken over a dear, dear friend it used to work for a smaller enterprise it's not going to work for a much larger enterprise in the Northwest and I thought it was the same person I always talked to she looked the same sounded the same felt the same but suddenly you realize what was coming out of her mouth was the siren well of a seed pod being who looked exactly like her but had taken over her soul in the act of signing a simple contract beware you don't know who the enemy is until you test their heart and soul and get a feel for what they really passionately truly believe every big break that came during Watergate came from a government insider whose conscience couldn't stand what he was witnessing taking place if you go to the whistleblower website of the law office in Washington that works with whistleblowers they outline all the traits of whistleblowers who will make it through the abuse you've seen the insider what the tobacco industry tried to do to someone who told the truth and there was only one quality that enabled a whistleblower to survive the extraordinary campaign of abuse against him or her and their families if you do it for money if you're pissed if you do it for revenge you will go down but if you do it because your conscience will not let you do any other thing you can survive to the end of the ordeal and the truth can break even the strongest fortress wide open that to me is the essence of hacking but don't forget what a deceptive level of world is saying it's a wonderful new book out called spies beneath Berlin which I'm going to quote from just very briefly you know in 1953 we weren't getting the kind of intelligence we wanted out of the other side of the wall in Berlin and so a decision was made to build a tunnel under the wall and intercept the Soviet communications cable through which my voice and telegraph communications took place it was an extraordinary hacking feat it was carried out with exquisite subtlety and cunning the tunnel was built and we began intercepting communications coming through that cable now it was subsequently revealed that there was a moral in the American establishment and therefore that the KGB knew about it from the very beginning it turned out that the KGB did know about it from the very beginning and when this was discovered and all exposed it was concluded therefore that all of the traffic being carried through that cable was bulbous was disinformation designed to confuse the Americans who they knew were intercepting the traffic but it was subsequently to that discovered that in fact while the KGB knew that we had intercepted all of the traffic they did not want the army officials to know it disinformation because if they did we would know it was disinformation sooner or later and that would signal that there was a moral and then the moral I believe was Judge Blake would be exposed and therefore in fact even though they knew we had built the tunnel and that we intercepted the information they did not tell the army that because they didn't want the army to change the truth that they told on the cable and allowed us to intercept it even more in place they carefully arranged I think nine months later to stumble upon the cable designed the accident to look like an accident so they could then wage a propaganda campaign and not expose the fact that they had known about the cable from the beginning all I'm trying to suggest is don't jump to conclusions in other words the truth is layered it's just like that radar with false blips on it a friend of mine who works in the at NASA has strong questions about what Hubble was really doing now this sounds like conspiracy theory face of my stuff right he just found the preposterous that Hubble which had been built with such care such technical expertise and so much money should be dysfunctional for so long he said I've always been convinced it was simply pointed at the earth doing a job that he needed to do before it began to be pointed somewhere else someone else told me they just used the mathematics and calculated how big the payload the shuttle payload space was and they were sure something else was going on at the same time we remember contact Y-bed one went for the price double the price you can get two so don't believe anything and it is the bottom line don't believe anything at face value without testing it that's how the mind of a hacker works this is what the guy said about Hubble I'm sure somebody knows more than me but it sure keeps my mind active trying to solve the puzzle that to me is the very essence of a hacker deep you know you'll never get to the bottom of everything but you can't stop solving the puzzle I'm just saying please in the context that now exists be aware of how the stakes are being raised you don't want to go before here in the 50s just because you visited a communist cell meeting in the 30s and if the stakes on the other side are very high too very, very high this is an article FBI and New Boston agents shielded criminals if you really think about the implications of what the article is saying is coming out about the actions of the Boston FBI field office in shielding Whitey Badger not a mafia an anti-mafia racketeer in covering up for people who committed murder torture, extortion and other rackets and allowing innocent people to go to jail in order to protect sources and informants who are working for the rival gang then you begin to grasp what I'm saying about the depth of corruption that can begin to penetrate even the most well-intentioned soul I'm sure that operation started out as a well-intentioned plan to bring down the Italian mafia in Boston it wound up being a cohesive operation that protected gangland murders and sent innocent people to jail all I'm saying is that without the simple truth we would never know it and that's the kind of thing that happens when people have too much power and too much power over the ability to disclose or not to disclose alright I'm not going to talk to I don't think I'm going to say anything more about the things I'd originally written I was going to say things about you know that what's coming for hacking is going to be very different in the past you know it's going to be at the wet-wear-dry-wear interface the genome is going to be one of the great pleasures of your children and that they're going to shock you the way you shocked your parents by showing up one day with a reptilian snout and some kind of cat tail not implanted but growing out of the back of their tailbone because they figured out in the basement with the genome project and their chemistry set how to do it you also know that they're going to be synthesizing Ebola and trying to make it even stronger from village to village and dying it can hop across the boundaries from village to village I suggest that hacking is the ability to provide the antidote that's what the cyber militia is in its essence it's an antidote to the all too human tendency to succumb to not finding or caring or telling the truth and letting the powers that be take over our souls in the night putting a seed pot under our bed those movies in the 50's about that the day the earth stood still and the seedpots under the bed those movies were made then because conformity became the norm and the fear of exposure and incarceration became something that permeated the whole society I'm just trying to read the signs of the times the speech was not going to be about this it was simply going to be about the ingenious, creative unconventional ways you have to continue to go to the edges to find the bits of the truth that you can put together but I found myself asking if this was the last thing you could say what would you say that matters most and it's really that I'm not getting I'm not bullshitting I've done all sorts of things like all of us that I wish I hadn't done but the passion to pursue the truth unconventionally across boundaries using any means necessary because that has been my primary commitment that has been the passion that has driven my life and that to me is the essence of hacking and it's why I feel at home here you can't do it alone you have to build trusted communities you have to test who you're talking to you have to build those networks someone said well they're happening all the time those outposts of light and all men spoke but you must keep one another accountable to the hacker FS unless you slide into unconventional activity for its own sake and not on behalf of the end for which it was intended to disclose to build to construct the truth and to set yourselves and others free no matter what we have done to ourselves please hew to the line do not forget the essence of hacking it is the hacker FS and it is real now thank you very much thank you thank you thank you my brothers and sisters any questions before we conclude the day questions, concerns critique yes every time I'm writing a book if I take until 8.30 to read to you wonderful loving encouraging letters I've been receiving from publishers lately and I said to my wife you know god damn it I'm too old for encouragement encouragement is for the young wonderful things from senior writers saying oh this is so timely it's really good and we love the writing but it's not right for our list but please don't be discouraged and I say thank you and file it in the please don't be discouraged folder it's not entirely up to me I can write a book but whether a commercial publisher will want it I literally don't know one of those was about combining the islands in a way that pretty university professor they were interested that he decided it wasn't academic enough I mean it's just finding the right niche and finding the right vehicle and finding someone to work with you and do it oh yeah I do everything I write that I can get out is on the net there's of course the matter of sustenance but that's a minor concern yeah yes first of all every step of the way just like all those levels of disclosure everyone is noble so the initial impulse to hack is noble it's just levels gradations of nobility so I just want to know what the hell is out there is noble I want to get in there and see is noble I want to look around is noble I want to know is noble you know I miss using my scanner to tell you the truth cell phones have changed and I used to know everything that was going on in my immediate neighborhood and now I find out like everybody else only when they tell me it's noble to want to know it may be ignoble to do it that way it's noble if you follow that impulse hacking is a meritocracy it consists of ad hoc groups that recognize merit and reward it by sanctioning acknowledging it and uplifting the people who demonstrate capability there's so much derision for those who are fakers and false elites because the true elites are so genuinely extraordinary at what they do it's a meritocracy where the best you know what and I've been around to see long enough to notice how that happens like everything it requires cooperative groups community it requires feedback and it requires accountability the community has happened online and then it happens here in the flesh it happens when you find people who are like-minded and you test each other and notice that you have a nothing common to pursue these goals together and you make a leap of faith and trust one another and do it inside or outside the system the system becomes more abundant and dies so there's got to be quick immediate feedback and you see that in hacker channels you see people mentoring one another recognizing true respect and helping people up the ladder but there has to be accountable to those agreed upon goals and that's modeled that's what's modeled in the mentoring it doesn't even have to be articulated you've been in the boardrooms of famous companies that have mission statements written on the walls and the readers are now being led to jail in the nightly news so it's not having the thing in print it's modeling in the mentoring what you truly value so that people get it people are not fools I mean when the Catholic bishops took the modified limited hangout route and acted like we were idiots and would notice, we noticed when the altars in Iran steal money, we notice we know when people are being untrue to their articulated values one of the reasons I've loved the hacking scene is I've never seen more hewing to the truth of the values that the hacker FS properly understood truly expresses I haven't seen it anywhere else as demonstrated as it is here because I have been mentored along by people who have helped me move up and what I've made a mistake I think my interview with 7 is still on the Iran site at Jerica's website and I was humiliating that I was social engineered by an idiot you know and there were warnings and then because there was mutual respect I would get email and it said don't believe a goddamn word 7 says or some other subtle warning that I could act on people correct one another keep each other true and if I asked further questions like why shouldn't I or how do I know do 100% of what you can do and then that informs an intelligent question which is respected by those you approach with respect and you move up the ladder together mutuality or cooperation feedback and accountability are the hallmarks of any organization of structure that is effective especially during times of rapid change anything else yes what types of technological advances do I envision in the future the problem with being good is that people think you have a clue you know I can sit here and do my science fiction writing a lot but I don't really I think obviously the critical question is identity because identity is already in flux what it is to be a human being in the Blade Runner world I was asked in the question how can it not know what it is when the wet war is being hacked to the degree that the dry war is when going to be even less aware of who we are and we're going to have to build different points of reference for our human identity I think that's going to have profound profound implications I also think the technological impact of encountering other species and intelligent civilizations one of the books I was proposing was called the UFOs on Mars this is another hacker way of thinking I think is to try to change the terms of the conversation so that a beginner's mind as the Zen call it replaces the habitual thinking you have been brainwashed into having so if you're sitting on Mars in the afternoon on your backrand and you see a huge orange ball bounce out of the sky just far from nowhere bounce across your backland come to a stop unroll a little robot looking artifact rolls out six something in the air that looks like an antenna jumping up against rocks as if it were intelligent or intentional the question is have you seen a UFO? now that's the way a UFO started and if you went to your neighbor and said I just saw the damn this thing and they engaged in ridicule in a cooperative effort to convince you you were wrong and said you know you're going to lose your job as the form of the Martian foundry if you keep saying you saw an orange bar fall out of the sky pretty soon you would start to get the idea that I didn't see it and it didn't exist so the question is how can you see what is coming out of the sky how can we distinguish between illusion misdirection the sources of ridicule and see what's really right in front of our faces and create a beginner's mind I think the people I talked to who believe as I did I've tried to interview 25 of the more intelligent people I could find in the world who have investigated the subject believe the phenomena is real scientific anomalies are genuine and worthy of study and the significant event is that they have not been studied in the public domain unlike every other significant phenomena which has presented itself to us and therefore it begins to raise other questions of why not and has it been studied elsewhere so alright so I'm going off of my alien rant so it's a relevant area of inquiry for good reason even if they're not coming here we're going there we're going there and showing ourselves to others we've colonized our solar system now through our telerobotic sensory extensions how can we not believe that life everywhere is not trying to extend itself intentionally throughout the space it is given as its destiny to inhabit and explore so I think that will have some effect when we become conscious of that happening and of course the genetic alterations we're going to make an identity out for found and I've talked about them some before but a lot of what we're doing now by pills we're going to be able to do with tweaking and it will cause a different kind of human being to come into being that we don't it will happen incrementally so we won't notice but like people have pacemakers they have false eyes, they have ear implants they have false hips, they have false knees pretty soon how can it not know what it is you've got a totally false grandmother you know there's been totally replaced with parts even with chips in the head and even instead of pacemakers we also have things in the head electromagnetic alterations for the better pretty soon we're going to be designing ourselves and we'll raise profound questions of who it is do we want to design ourselves to be my guess is this is the last generation to be merely born from here on in we're going to be designer progeny and it may not be as simplistic as that but it raises profound questions about identity yes I'm sorry did you ask a question I couldn't hear you I'm sorry it was the accent that threw me what does that leave God yes power corrupts an absolute power corrupts absolutely where does that leave God by the way if anyone doesn't notice it doesn't know Richard was Episcopalian tell the simple truth yes yeah I was an Episcopal face for 16 years and I began writing about the transformation of religious images structures and ideas in the 80s through technology and began to see that what I was saying was going to apply to everything there are so many ways to answer your question I don't want to take the time because I'm sure not everybody and I didn't say absolute power corrupts absolutely I know Lord Acton did but I don't know Lord Acton in the context in which he was speaking I do know that human nature has both good and bad in it and what I tried to describe was not only the inevitability of corruption when power makes it available but the inevitability of response as simple no man described it as the cyber militia in other words we simultaneously make the dynamite and then we create the Nobel Peace Prize the same being does both I was speaking for an infigured conference no longer a three state infigured conference in the Midwest and I was talking to people who saw themselves there to fight terrorism and they found out that the terrorism that they think they are fighting which is manifest as asymmetric warfare was created by the very networks which they themselves built and therefore the precondition of terrorism the forms in which it has been distributed through society were the networks they themselves had created right so we are all simultaneously as the Hindus say destroying and creating and God is both destroyer and creator and there are a lot of other answers to that question that make sense to me I'll just give you one technology started with speech this technology evolved the brain and the mouth and the larynx and the palate and the tongue and the teeth that enable us to create this virtual space we call the world of speech this is a virtual world this is the original simulation the world you and I have the mistaken belief we are in at the moment but which we are creating with a listener and a speaker went up another notch with printing press and then an electronic communication beginning with the telegraph last 200 years has created another notch of abstraction each one recreating the symbolic world in which we believe we live when in fact we have co-created it from the beginning if you look at what writing did you will see that all the founders of all the religions that we call Gods or Gurus Jesus, Confucius, Buddha Muhammad, Moses, you name them they all occurred in a very narrow bandwidth of historical time that coincided with the emergence of writing as a technology of human consciousness in other words real flesh and blood beings were transformed into digital beings I mean into textural beings and when people engaged with the text they recreated their image of themselves and their image of God that happened again with printing press historical evidence is clear it's happening again now so what I'm saying is when you use the word God the question is beg what in the world are we talking about because new images of both God and human identity and self I've been co-created now probably I would guess on everquest or places like that I used to think it was the muds and the mushes and the moose you look at how much spirituality permeates this subculture I don't mean traditional religious structures but I'm a spirituality the kind of good eat people up in the roof at midnight at a hot desert night leading a shamanic circle off of the intention for a good con spirituality permeates the world of everquest in all the worlds I've explored like that because there are monks and knights and all kinds of spells being cast it's a hunger of the soul so I have no question that God will emerge in the forms which are appropriate to the digital era and I know that they will be different from and catastrophic to the religious structures that have existed prior to that time because they always have been I don't know if that's your question yes is it on? is it? it's a deal it's a good question it's always come on, yes Richard real quick I wanted to thank you again for speaking and to ask you real quick if this search for the truth that we're on is the descent of the information age is it inherently the most patriotic thing that we can be doing right now? absolutely it is and it also transcends patriotism and sometimes at some point people are licking the eyes of the enemy soldier perceiving a common humanity and caught in the tension between as I felt intensively after September 1st this is my country, I must do anything possible to defend it and then you reflect further and realize this is my world and maybe there are other ways of constructing reality on it so that it suits everyone yes it is the most patriotic thing but it also transcends patriotism it's not so narrowly defined it appeals to a higher ground I'm afraid it will I'm afraid it will he just asked whether people would become so frustrated by instances of injustice that they would become violent and the answer is yes people do absolutely people do it's just that as a progression one thing eating another is justice and sooner or later somebody has to get sick to their stomach and stop or else we just keep doing it yes I can sit down now if along with that extension through technology is consciousness like the universal mind is that also electrified digitized in some way does that exist as like you were saying the images are they're self-reflective between us I'd refer you to there's an online magazine called anotherrealm.com and they just published a little short story of mine called Species Lost in Apple Eating Time it's the story of the evolution of consciousness throughout the universe until it discovers its limitations well I won't go on it's a short little story about everything and that little short story will answer that question better for you than I could hear the answer is yes you started your talk seeing that hackers will become more and more involved in politics because the act of hacking itself will have a political dimension it will require or attract attention from other forces trying to either prevent it or encourage it in certain ways just as before September 11th it could not be defined of itself as an act of terrorism in a way that most people would get after September 11th whether we agree with it at least we understand what people are saying it's starting to watch your backs as you continued with your talk you got into something of an objectivist viewpoint where you must step away from what's actually going on in order to get a better view of the whole picture wouldn't actually getting involved in the politics itself be somewhat detrimental to that and instead would it be more productive to study the psychology of individuals in order to recognize why they go about forming these sorts of political machines and why they act in the ways that they do and why you're taking certain responses from certain activities I don't think they're mutually exclusive I think the recognition on an existential level that you would never have the whole truth and you shouldn't prematurely project it people in the absence of knowledge we make it up we fill in the blanks we add things other people have said we confabulate any witness testimony will illustrate this we create what we believe happened and the mind is a very devious thing therefore when we're in search of the truth and the ones we're hacking with our minds with our machines to step back and try to achieve a beginner's mind to look fresh at the data in order not to compose it too quickly that's one thing on the human domain the level in which we live in the earth on this planet existential commitment requires that we act and we must act always with partial knowledge and this is the tragedy of human existence if you could see everything and know everything you would be God and know being is that we know so you in the face of partial knowledge knowing you could make mistakes knowing you could cause tragic accidents knowing you could kill people with collateral damage you scope the situation as best you can and then you act and when you act you act with your full intentionality your full consciousness your full awareness and your full passion what to me creates meaning in life anything else what a privilege it is to share this space thank you so very very much thank you Richard thank you very much for those of you who are inclined to stay in your seats there is no follow on presentation so you'll be here a long time