 If I were an attendee, I'd probably be drinking beer rather than listening to me. Can everyone hear me alright? We good? Louder? Good? Excellent. Right, well before we get started, I'm just very curious, how many of you voted in the last election? Have you had a sign of hands? Well, that's more than I expected. Well, you're too young to vote, but how many of you think that voting is a colossal waste of time? Exactly. Right, okay, what I'll be talking about this afternoon, this evening goes to the heart of the problem a lot of you have with the system as it currently works or not works. It's pretty obvious there's a huge gap between us, the citizens of this country, and our elected representatives. Most people in the U.S. don't even bother to vote. Many of them, because they like you, think it's a colossal waste of time. Politicians are bought and paid for by private industry, and they're the ones who are shaping the laws and making money off of the laws they just paid for to be passed. Companies are making millions, billions of dollars off of the USA Patriot Act, total information awareness or total terrorist awareness, caps to and lots of other government programs that restrict or limit our constitutional rights. We the people get to have our tax dollars given to corporations that lobby and then profit from laws that hurt us and benefit their bottom line. So if corporations are the ones who run our country and not us, what can we do? We may not be able to change or influence government policy through voting or writing our congressmen, they're already bought and paid for by business. The only meaningful vote we have left is the one that we cast with our wallet. The best hope for political change comes every time we decide whether to buy something or not buy something. We vote with our wallets and our purses. We can indirectly change government policy by punishing companies who profit at the expense of our constitutional rights and freedoms. So in other words, we can't change government policy but we can affect change by changing companies. We can use the glorious powers of capitalism to punish those who make money by selling out the bill of rights and we can hopefully make America suck just a little less. And collaborators must be made to pay a price. The punishing of collaborators is a very old concept and after World War II in France women had their head shaved for sleeping with the enemy. In our own country not too long ago being tired and feathered was the price you'd pay for selling out our revolution. And frankly as it's now illegal to tar and feather an otherwise deserving CEO or corporate management team, we're left with basically two major weapons at our disposal. One of them, public humiliation and the other is simply denying them custom. Now I use both of these weapons pretty effectively this year in a successful attempt to at least temporarily stop Caps 2. Now if any of you read the newspaper today and I'm sure you're all avid newspaper readers you probably saw the headline in the local paper about changes to Caps 2. It just happened yesterday and today I was on a road trip and I'll address some of the changes that have been made towards the end of my presentation. But if you don't know what Caps 2 let me give you a brief overview. It stands for Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System. And as originally planned they were going to be running credit checks, banking record checks and criminal background checks to determine whether you had the right to get on an airplane or not and determine whether you were a terrorist or a fine Ashcroft American. They were even going to color code you, they wanted red for evil, godless terrorists, yellow for people in need for just an extra cavity check and green for people who did the right thing and voted Republican. Now as originally planned we didn't know how they were determining this, what they were doing with the information and how the whole program was going to roll out. We didn't know whether having bad credit was going to make you a terrorist, whether having an unpaid parking ticket was going to color code you red. But the goal as originally stated by TSA through Homeland Security was to have the Caps 2 system deployed in all US airports by March of 2004. Lockheed Martin was awarded the contract to build it and Delta Airlines volunteered to test it. Now as you can imagine the idea of being asked for zip papers every time I wanted to travel in my own country did not amuse me at all. Not a lawyer, but I think I know of violation of the Constitution when I see one. When you see your own country taking the nonstop on flight 1984 you basically have two choices. You can either go out shopping for another country or you can stick around and fight. So I ran to the radio to pretty much anyone I had in speed dial for a few hours and I decided to do something about it and that of course was to start a boycott against Delta. There are several reasons why I looked at Delta Airlines as the primary target. First of all you can't sell your shares in the Transportation Security Administration. Fighting city hall or the government is difficult if not impossible. Lockheed Martin the people that were building out the system didn't have any consumer goods that I was aware of that I could go out and purchase down at Wal-Mart and Delta was on its own testing this program and nowadays now more than ever the executive branch is very very very sensitive indeed to the needs and desires of corporations and corporate pressure. So the idea was by applying market pressure to Delta being the best way to stop caps to a Delta boycott punish them for collaborating as a tester because it was the only airline to do so. By making the test fail the idea was that we could kill off the entire program. I first read about caps to in an AP wire story that came out on the 28th of February of this year and by Monday morning due to the help of Mr. Paul Holman here who's kind enough to flip my PowerPoint presentation boycott Delta was on the air. The website was up and running and I thought it was only fair that I contact Delta's stock analysts to inform them what was going on. And by the end of day one the first media story was out and Delta's stock was down. The following week a story attacking Delta in the New York Times the headline was beautiful it read safer skies or welcome to 1984. So enraged Delta's CEO Mr. Leon Mullin that he hopped on the plane to DC and demanded that the TSA pull Delta's fat from the fire. The media onslaught against Delta and caps to went from zero before the boycott to appearances on CNN and PR in every major daily newspaper in the country. And all over 27 million dollars worth of negative publicity rained down on Delta. I received over 8000 emails the emails ran pretty much 80 percent thinking that I was wonderful and 20 percent suggesting that I relocate to Baghdad. But bottom line was that as other airline stocks went up Delta's went down. Now the most important role played by the boycott Delta movement as the unreasonable group in the whole caps to debate was that it made it possible for more reasonable groups to be heard. As I was busy playing Malcolm X Martin Luther King in the guise of the EFF CDT ACLU Epic and other groups started looking better than ever. They started to get their phone calls answered TSA even set up a weekend conference to brief these groups on caps to a needless to say they walked away more skeptical than ever. Congress started investigating caps to and the Department of Homeland Security finally got around to appointing a Chief Privacy Officer and this of course being in no small measure to the pressure brought to bear through the boycott. Now I ended the boycott after 102 days because I received a series of phone calls from pretty senior people at the Department of Homeland Security. They told me that the testing had been stopped pending a full privacy review. They told me exactly what Delta had provided. They had provided them with the details of all Delta flights going back several years as well as the records of all of Delta's frequent fliers. Now because of the uproar in the press caused by the boycott Homeland Security told me that they'd never used the information because they were simply too scared to do so and they weren't sure whether the records were destroyed or given back to Delta. I think that's a prime foyer request for the likes of the EFF or Epic to find out what happened to these records. Now needless to say Homeland Security's street cred was around zero in my book. So I asked for all of this as one would do with anyone you didn't trust. I asked for it in writing and believe it or not they did just that. And so I declared victory and went home. Now caps to might not be dead but Congress has withheld all funding in 19 for 2004 and caps to as things look right now has a plastic bag over its head and is suffocating. Now this is not the first time that I've been involved in punishing a collaborator. Those of you how many people were here for Def Con 9? Free Dimitri. This is Mr. Paul Holman again. Paul and I got Dimitri Skelyotov out of DMCA jail and did a pretty good job together with the EFF on the boycott Adobe movement. Now I want to talk a little bit about what's been happening over the past couple of days. You can imagine the joy I felt after driving from Austin, Texas to Las Vegas, Nevada in a 1987 Chevrolet Caprice classic former police car and arriving with a number of messages and emails telling me that the Transportation Security Administration Homeland Security had come out with a new privacy policy that caps to was going forward in terms of testing. And a lot of people wanted to know my opinions on it. Well first of all I'm still doing a lot of research to find out exactly what's going on. The good news is that new low Conor Kelly the Privacy Officer at Homeland Security has also obviously been doing her job because Homeland Security is spelled up fairly clearly exactly what they're going to do and what we're calling caps to .2. What can I say? I mean it's one thing to spell out exactly what you're going to do and it's nice to know but it's almost like a burglar sending you a postcard a couple of weeks before he robs your house. You know yeah it's kind of nice to know but it doesn't make it any less illegal or any less a violation of one's person. They're also of course looking to use caps to as a funnel to catch any manner of criminals. They're not just talking about terrorists now they're talking about using caps 2.2 as stated in the privacy notice to catch outstanding federal warrants on people with violent crimes. And I'm quite convinced that it will come down to someone saying that it's for the children and they'll be going after parking tickets, deadbeat dads and the like. So bottom line is that I don't think any of us should feel grateful that the government is telling us how they are going to screw us. It's nice to know, it's nice that they tell us because for the past couple of years we get used to this almost cult like aura of secrecy around the federal government. So for once they're finally telling us what they're going to do that doesn't make it any better. So let's move on. I'm telling you all of this because getting things done like stopping caps 2 or freeing Demetri is really nothing more than classic PR, media relations and organizing. It's the stuff that I do for my day job just saving democracy and all that stuff. It's just a hobby. You can be doing this too. And so with that I've put together a few things. If you're thinking about taking action, if there's a collaborator that you're looking to punish, if there are things that you want to do and fight the good fight, I've put together some rules. And being the quiet, shy, humble guy that I am, I've gone and called them Scannell's rules. So let's look at number one. You have to get angry. You have to have your own personal limits violated and crossed to the point where the anger boils over to point two, where you get so angry that you're actually going to do something. Now that's the hard part because I don't know about you, but I get angry about 18 times a day. One of the many reasons why I don't own a handgun because I'd probably use it about 18 times a day. But you need to get angry and actually want to do something. You also need to focus that anger. You need to focus what you're going to do. It's one thing to read an article on the AP or in Wired or somewhere on Slashdot. It's another thing to go out and do some research, learn the facts, and find out what other people are doing. It's completely pointless if somebody's already doing something about it that you can contribute something positively to, whether in a social way or with your technical skills, get them out and deployed. Set a goal and be realistic about it. I mean don't say we're going to kill off the DMCA now because that's a fairly unrealistic goal. But what you can do, laser-like, is to focus on one small part and say, okay, I'm going to work on this part. And once you decide what your goal is, don't deviate from it. It's important for you because you're not shifting the goalposts and it's important for whomever you're going after that they know that your word is good, that once the goal is achieved, that you'll stop and walk away. Acquiring a target is an interesting thing. You have to really look to see where the weak spot, where the soft underbelly is and whatever issue you're looking at. I mean God bless them, the EFF and Epic and a number of groups have been talking about Caps2 for a couple of years. But frankly the press wasn't paying attention to them and that's wrong because they're reasonable and smart and have great lawyers and actually know what they're talking about. And I'm a guy with 17 bucks and a cell phone, but it worked. It worked. Once you've acquired a target you've got to decide whether you're going to play Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. Martin Luther King is reasonable. You can talk to Martin Luther King. Malcolm X is by whatever means necessary. And just as in the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s, the only reason why the Civil Rights Act was passed, the only reason why Martin Luther King has a national holiday named after him is because Malcolm X was out there lobbing bombs and applying pressure on the unreasonable side. The unreasonable made the reasonable possible. Don't do this alone. You've got to recruit help. You need people around you. If you are someone who's technically inclined, get someone who can help you with words, someone who can write. If you're a writer, don't try to design your own webpage because if you do, it will look like the webpage I first designed before I managed to go out and recruit a number of friends that were able to help me. Put together a team of people that believe in what you're doing and are going to be willing to see all of this through. Now you've got your goal, you've acquired your target, you've got to think about how you're going to package all of this. How are you going to say in one sentence what you're up to? Because one sentence is pretty much all you have. Whether you're talking to the media, whether you're trying to explain to friends, whether you're just trying to get the word out, you kind of have to know what you're doing in terms of what your story is and what your goal is. Make it personal. The devil hates to be mocked. Leo Mullen, God blesses he, then Saul, didn't know what was coming after him. He was compared to a Waffen SS officer. He was given horns. We put a picture of purple Kool-Aid in his hands and compared Delta's headquarters to Jim Jones' cult temple. And when they get angry, they get stupid. And the fact is that Delta brought a bag of checkers to a chess game and I cleaned their clock. They have literally hundreds of PR professionals on staff, but yet they blew every possible opportunity they had to play this story so they did not look like the fools and incompetence that they looked like in the media. Keep it legal. Now putting a picture of purple Kool-Aid and Leo Mullen, CEO of Delta's hands, is mean. Comparing him to possibly being not unlike someone who liked to say sig Heil is mean. But we're protected by the First Amendment, at least up to now. Have your stuff legaled. I was very, very fortunate in having the EFF back me on this. The Electronic Frontier Foundation did an absolutely wonderful job in watching my back and making sure that I gave the bad guys absolutely no ammo to come off to me legally. You've got to expect success. Plan on winning. Plan on getting noticed because there's nothing worse than coming up with a clever idea and a clever way to go off to Dr. Evil and have your website crash on you or your phones not being returned because you forgot to pay your cell phone bill or any number of things. Be prepared with sufficient bandwidth, load balancing, all those wonderful things. And have people on your team that understand what load balancing is, otherwise you're going to be in a world of trouble. Make sure also that you can be gotten a hold of at any time of day or night because the world is not just the three time zones in America, it's 24 time zones around the world. And I cannot tell you how many times I was woken up by callers and by journalists in Australia on deadline in the UK, Germany, even Russia. Pravda wrote a wonderful editorial about CAPS II. Talking about how they'd seen that bad movie before. Create your informational materials. Give other people ways of distributing your information. So having a web page with a lot of information is all fine and well. But create whether it be a brochure, whether it be a handout, we created up boarding passes for Boycott Delta that were mockups of a Delta boarding pass for Flight 666 for an American citizen that warned people about what was happening to their information. You need to create as many things as possible so people can find out what's going on. By creating these materials, you can get other people to take action. Now for example, when we look at Boycott Adobe, swarming technologies worked really, really well. That all of a sudden Paul and I fired up this web page and before we knew it, because we had allowed this to happen, there were people setting up free Dmitri groups all over the country. While the EFF was inside negotiating, there were literally thousands of geeks who hadn't seen sunlight in years outside holding up hammer and sickle logo parodies of Adobe. Make sure you talk with one voice. It's a time when you really need to have one chief and everyone coalescing around them. Pick one person within your group of people you put together and have that person be the spokesperson because otherwise you're going to be all over the place. If there are things regarding strategy and whatnot that you need to think about, make sure that you talk about them beforehand rather than have your friends read about it in the paper the next day and say, my God, what have you just said? Allow for growth because it will grow. Again with the Boycott of Adobe, it grew very, very fast. Three people protesting in San Jose is nothing. If three people are protesting in 20 cities around the country, well, you know that's a nationwide protest. By getting them where they least expect it, it works. Also allow alliances to be formed. I had people calling me regarding the CAPS-2 issue. I had people calling me from the Association of American Travel Executives. People who were road warriors who were absolutely terrified by the implications of CAPS-2. Allow them to join you. Allow airline pilots, for example, in my situation, called me and I put their story out. Let people join your team. Don't be exclusive in that sense, which brings us to the idea of credit. Just because you came up with the idea, just because you were the good boy or girl who came up with the idea, doesn't mean that you get all the prizes. Let other people take credit. A strong prince surrounds himself with strong princes. It makes the king even more powerful. So let other people take credit. The credit that you get will be known by the people that need to know. And most importantly, when all is said and done, when you've accomplished your goal, declare victory and go home. Take your dog for a walk, clean your house, go on vacation, do what you have to do, but declare victory and walk away. Because there's nothing more annoying than an individual who gets on his horse and just doesn't know when to get off. So that's where I'm coming from. I hope some of this has helped you in. Let's open the floors to any questions you may have. I'll do my best to answer them. Correct. Yeah, I've watched people who can't swim try to swim. They panic. I see Admiral Poindexter getting fired over his terrorism futures market. And two days later, a privacy notice coming up. So yeah, they're trying to salvage what they can. But the limits that Congress has put on them in order to get funding re-approved, it's a pretty high, high, high level. And by my general reckoning, and I'll need to study it a bit more, at best they've made 50% of that bar. I don't see them getting any higher by the end of the year. The gentlemouse, at what point did CAPS go too far? What point did it cross my personal line? I mean, in many ways you're right. It's like the frog in the pot. You don't know how hot the water is really getting until you're boiling in it. Look, this is America. I have the right as an American to travel anywhere I feel like it. We do not have internal border controls. Burma has them, China has them, North Korea does, but not my country. So for me, the idea of having to show the papers after I spent four years, two months, 18 days in a wake-up wearing a US Army uniform, really, really upset me. So that was my personal line. You're right. We need to catch bad guys. But what CAPS do, CAPS do assumes is that somehow using a computer system, you might not be able to say who the bad guys are, but you can certainly know who the bad guys are not. In anyone who's spent more than five minutes studying crypto or any sort of computer security knows that that's just absolutely false. So when you have a bunch of people down in the 18th subbasement of Homeland Security headquarters being fed granulated sugar and Wonder Bread with lots of bright fluorescent lights coming up with systems like this, it's really left to an individual to say this is not right. People are afraid, as perhaps you've observed since 9-11, people are afraid to open their mouths and speak out. When I fired this whole boy caught up, I was scared. I was waiting for the knock at three in the morning from the FBI or Homeland Security. And that fear only made me angrier because we have the right to speak out. I got 8,000 emails and frankly it wasn't until about a month ago that I actually got to read all of them. I tried my best on the website to take a selection of the letters that I was getting from people, but people are afraid. People are really scared. There is that mommy help me, protect me. I don't care if I have to fly naked, handcuffed and cathetered. If that's going to make that plane get from A to B, God bless them all. There are a lot of people who have that fear in them. There are also a lot of people who just find all of this unacceptable. There is this silent minority, or frankly as far as I'm concerned, a silent majority of people who have kept their mouths shut because when you open it, you're against us. We have, sure, I worked as a journalist for over a decade and when I look at the poor quality journalism that's coming out of the US right now in terms of looking at what our government is doing, the meekness of the media. And frankly the meekness of individual citizens and their fear to speak out, it's really quite depressing. I read a wonderful book a couple of months ago called Democracy in Dark Times and the author quite rightly points out that democracy at its finest is when an individual citizen stands up and says no more and tries to do something about it because the more individuals you have stepping forward and stating their opinion, it's only going to improve society. You don't need to have a focus group for that. You know what's right and wrong. You have a moral compass. So use it and don't stay quiet. It's hard. It's hard to keep track. The federal register is a wonderful thing because despite the fact that the executive branch of our government right now doesn't necessarily like to follow the letter or the spirit of the law, there are still some old school people who do that. The federal register lists all policies being conducted or about to be conducted by cabinet level jobs. So Homeland Security has to publish something before they do something. They of course weren't doing this until they appointed a chief privacy office who said terribly sorry but there's that whole constitution thing and that whole privacy act of 1984 thing of 1974 rather and you have to do some stuff and if you don't you're breaking the law. It's difficult to keep track but you know there are a lot of human beings in our country. I mean not everyone is a mindless automaton. I can go off to Delta and beat on them but I can't tell you the number of emails that I got from sources inside Delta saying hey I'm appalled by this. This is what I know. Hey I work here. This is absolutely terrible. This is what I know. So we all, confidentiality agreements are not, secrecy clauses are not, still have the ability to be good Americans. We might not necessarily be able to shout it but there's still ways to get it out. No sure but by the fact of you asking that question you've just proven to about 100 people that you are not a moron. You're a pretty smart guy. And you, yeah you fooled me. But in a sense sure I mean you can, I went to a Jesuit school so I know very very structured arguments. Sure but the fact is that bottom line is we know what's right and wrong. We do. And we still have the right in our country to stand up and say what we think is right and what is wrong. There is a right to privacy in the Constitution at least according to Justice Wendy Seltzer to the Constitution. It comes from the Fourth Amendment. I wanted to say William Brennan but I'm not sure if he was the gentleman who spoke about the right to privacy. You're right. It's not, I can't say, yes it's Article 14 because it's not. But it's implicit throughout the Constitution. And again we know when something is wrong and we can step forward. And you're right. You can either fight a legalistic argument with people or you can say well you know what I might not be able to prove it but I'm not going to spend any money on you. And once they feel that economic pain they're going to start changing their tune. So it's, I still get about 25, 30 emails a day. In fact I found out about what was happening with the new Privacy Act notice in Caps 2 from one of old Ben Franklin's gentle readers. I turn on my email with 400 emails saying Ben do something. I'm still trying to figure out what exactly to make of the latest changes to Caps 2. And I will do whatever I can possibly do to back up the reasonable people. Because it's not unreasonable people that make policy. They lay a groundwork and raise a tide so that reasonable people can go in and get their jobs done. People are not amused. I mean it is the frog in the pot and a lot of people are realizing the water is getting pretty hot. I live in Texas and when I hear Texans starting to complain about this stuff then you know this problem. Their needs are my needs. They work for me. I am their employer. Nobody wants to be on a plane and have it get blown up. But the fact is that I am not prepared to surrender everything. Frankly I think John Gilmore is absolutely right. I don't see any reason whatsoever why I even need to show an ID to get on an airplane. As long as it's pretty clear that I don't have thermonuclear devices strapped to my back or an AK or I am just a general bad guy about to spontaneously combust I think I should be able to fly from point A to point B. Now what CAPS 2.2 talks about is just this very issue. They're saying oh well it's a terrorism catchment measure but you know we can look for these other guys too. And it expands and all of a sudden you have a funnel in which the government is allowed to set up an internal border funnel people through and decide who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. Do I think murderers are good guys? No. Is a murderer who is totally unarmed who wants to fly to Cleveland is he a threat to me on an aircraft? No. Any other questions? Thank you very much for coming. Thank you for your time. Oh oh oh wait wait wait I have one more announcement. So there have been some rumors about the car about the Blue Mobile and they're all true. So here's the deal. A few friends of mine and I we bought a car at a police auction in Austin Texas painted a beautiful beautiful 1987 Chevrolet Caprice classic a very fetching blue color got it inspected through some Texas plates on it and we drove it here to Vegas and it's a one-way trip ladies and gentlemen because we're flying back home and we are raffling the car off only 170 tickets we just want our money back 170 tickets the tickets cost ten bucks each this gentleman in the back wave your hand Thomas if you want a ticket and you know you want one get these people as they leave and if you don't get them they'll they'll get you thank you.