 It's always great to be back every year. I think this is this is definitely the last time and You know sooner or later. You're right What I wanted to do today because when you look back over nine nine years and look at the different themes that I've been talking about You realize you've kind of arrived at a point where they really have converged that the issues as we have evolved together have formed a very Clear focus for me, and it's going to be difficult to articulate it as clear as it is to me Because I don't think we yet have the language to understand it So I'm going to try and it's going to have some dense pieces in it We've only got what 40 minutes to talk and I do want after a few minutes Hopefully I will stimulate Questions and do not hesitate to ask them and we'll manage that as best we can Because what I'm trying to talk about I call it quantum hacking but that's just one of those titles I make up that Doesn't necessarily mean a lot, but what I'm trying to say is that clearly people when they are discussing security and privacy and intellectual property and intelligence and cyber war and all the issues that are blaze on the The media's cross wires all the time Often sound like they're coming from totally different perspectives and it became perfectly clear to me that they were that in fact The transition in the middle of which we find ourselves from one way of framing our understanding of humankind to the next Makes it impossible for people to articulate clearly what they see unless they know what their assumptions are Because it is from those assumptions that the conversation issues and when people are coming at them from different assumptions It sounds like conflict, but in fact one is like Relativity and one is like quantum mechanics, which you know I don't know anything about physics other than what I read in picture books, you know meet mr. neutrino or I Am mr. Quark shake, you know that kind of thing It's popularized stuff. I can't do the math, but I try to grasp it as best I can by reading popularized accounts And string theory as I understand it is an attempt to dig more deeply using mathematical structures That will somehow reconcile seemingly contradictory ways of constructing reality one called Relativity the other called quantum mechanics, or it is kind of like the wave particle duality Which we now all know and are taught is common sense if you look at the photon from the point of view of a particle It will behave like a particle and you can measure it as if it is a particle Whereas if you look at it as if it is a wave it will behave like a wave I think what I like to call cyborg humanity in other words Humanity as formed by its symbiotic relationship with network computing is Becoming a different kind of humanity if by that we simply mean you have to get into essence and philosophical concepts to know that We think and behave differently, and that's the value of being older and still having some memory left Is that you remember how you used to think and you notice that it is profoundly different from the way you think now And there have been analogies in the past to this kind of event like we in Caxton who brought the printing press to England in the late 1400s and when he was in his 60s he looked back and said the England I remember is Not the England I inhabit so profound has been the transformation by this machine of the space we inhabit I mean that's what he would have said if he had done asked and used words like the space has changed I don't remember exactly how he did it, but that's what he meant the space has changed and he didn't mean the physical space out there He meant the internal landscape we inhabit as our subjective field of collective experience Because what the printing press had done was taken people who thought of themselves as individual units smaller groupings tribal units If you will and had names and identities based on those units and by choosing a dialect a single one among many and Then imposing that on the whole space called English created the space called English and someone who thought of themselves in 1500 as an English person Profoundly experienced reality differently than someone who thought they were Yorkshiremen or from East Essex merely It really was a transformative engine and during the transition people get confused and the space gets gray I love working in the gray spaces because that's where we can see most clearly What is emerging and I love the term gray hat hacker? It's one of my favorites a gray hat hacker as you know is a black hat hacker who needs a job Okay validation so I'll go on to the next which is a white hat hacker which is a black hat hacker who does not always tell the truth Because how else did you learn anything? Except by doing what subsequently as the context was redefined came to be called black hat hacking Well now something else is happening too on the evolutionary path Jay Heiser a month or two ago an information security wrote a piece In which he said he was on a platform and someone introduced himself as a white hat hacker And he said cut out all the cowboy crap We're not cowboys, and we don't wear white and gray and black hats This is about risk management. We're kind of insurance people in a business Now what did that signify there are a number of places you could put the markers But you know every time something truly powerful emerges first there's mythology Then the mythology has turned into metaphor and then the metaphor is deconstructed and described objectively and scientifically And by the time you're doing that no one believes the myth anymore What was the mythology of hacking well go back to when the in the net began to emerge in public imagination and Gibson wrote Neuromancer and Sterling wrote islands in the net anticipating wisely my title islands in the clickstream and You know pre cognitive moment, you know, I don't know if Bruce will acknowledge that Sometimes people think they came before but that's their confusion in a space-time world And at any rate the mythology emerged as cyberspace a consensual hallucination Well, you know you could have applied that definition which seems so profound to speech as well Which is also a consensual hallucination what we are engaged in right now is creating cyberspeech In other words a virtual space which we inhabit as if it is real But which we have inhabited now for so long as humankind that speaks through the structures of the brain and the evolution of the teeth tongue pallet Prefrontal cortex, you know how it worked all together and suddenly we built this symbolic space to manage the complexity of our social environment It seems like that's when it emerged to manage that so that could have been set a speech or writing or printing press But he said it of electronic communication and people believe the myth you go back and read John Perry Barlow And now it sounds it well it sounds like someone who writes the lyrics for the Grateful Dead exactly On a very very extraordinarily powerful and enjoyable acid trip because he was describing Cyberspace as if it was separate from meat space and you remember it's just sucked us in we're going to we believe the myth Cyberspace has no boundaries Cyberspace has no laws Pioneers go out west and there are no fences and we can roam what we will and capture the pelts that we will and so on But sooner later to come the merchants after the frontiersmen and then after the merchants come the lawyers and when the lawyers show up The game is over And you know it is Because what was free and open range where you could graze is now fenced in and suddenly the dotted lines They're drawing on maps are implied to be real lines, which by social construction and agreement We all agree a real and we say well What about cyberspace then this powerful new domain forgetting that it was invented over 40 or 50 years through the military Industrial educational entertainment media complex for getting its origins in source It's wrapped around many censored surveillance systems that enable us to do what we do as if we are birds in digital cages You don't have to move the bird. You just move the cage That's where it came from but we believe the mythology, but now when you read John Perry Barlow It's clearly you say well it was a metaphor By the time you say well it was a metaphor it is not even a metaphor any longer It is already being understood as it's chips and switches and routers and and so on it is the internet and it can be described Mathematically and objectively and some say that's the way I've always described it So where do you put yourself on the trajectory? the myth the metaphor or The reality well what I'm talking about really is trying to drill down to the deeper assumptions that control our perception and our behavior and I'm going to try to say as Sincerely and with as much Passion as I can that from my understanding because I do cross many borders and boundaries and work in many different places The stakes have never been higher Because the danger we face now of losing things which may have already been lost irrevocably by having been Put into a bureaucratic structure that it may not be possible to dismantle Mean that things we took for granted like the first and fourth amendments may truly be lost in The same way that hacking was given power by the technology to replace the spies or intelligence or counterintelligence of nation states What used to be given by sanction of the state was given to a whole generation by sanction of the way the technology worked Ie the ability to break the rules cross the borders live in a world without walls and seek out a way to free the mind Well the technology gave us that but the technology also gives you the dark side and the implementations of technology now I'll say it at the end to try to make it clear The implementation of what technology enables us to do when fused with a mission imperative that Leaders who are using privacy and secrecy at a level we have not seen since Watergate and maybe before the Nixon administration According to someone like John Dean who is there This is not about Republicans Democrats libertarians. It's about the inevitable Necessity of exposure and transparency Because of what we are in danger of losing and I'll try to be as specific as I can Now I said drill down to assumptions. I just did a speech in black hat. I was plugged in You know how well organized we are right at ten o'clock the night before could I do a speech at ten o'clock the next morning? So I did when I had done at the Pentagon the week before and that's an example of I think of the fact that I can go different places But it's also true that when I looked out at who was in that conference room at the Pentagon Which was the only room in which I was allowed to go other than the restroom I noticed that about one third of the people were people I knew from Def Con That's not an exaggeration and people kept coming up and say don't you recognize me well No, when you're wearing fed clothes and have short blonde hair one inch tall and last year at Def Con You had shoulder-length Jesus like hair. No, I didn't recognize you right off the bat You were in a different uniform and he subsequently wrote an email saying well I guess a hobby is a hobby regardless of who pays the check And recently I was in Israel speaking for Microsoft Israel and you'll appreciate this This was not the official line But an email from the person who invited me to return for the second year to keynote the conference Said you are going to be the bookend for Steve Ballmer and the reason is you will give Steve Ballmer credibility Now I'm only telling you that because you're my close friends. Don't repeat that outside this room Right. I don't think I'm going back anyway a third time But but the point is why could I be trusted to do that even though I had keynote at Apache con the year before? Because I own myself Situation in which you often as you know, I think Find yourself feeling lonely and uncertain to what organizational structures you belong even as they morph and their identity changes But we do need some kind of social community to reinforce our sense of who we are in this transitional time So we can make a conscious intentional effort to develop and build the identity that we need to build in this time of transition and morphing organizational structures and That's why I come back here This is one of the places where I have developed trusted friends Who allow me to discover who I really am and make my primary commitments? You wouldn't think that you come to the primary hacker convention to find your ethical or moral center But once you've been out there Where people think they have an ethical and moral center and have lied to themselves about where they put it as Supposed to in here where we know we create it from scratch every day of our lives It really is a place where you can find it So what are some of the assumptions in that speech at black hat? I mentioned Matt blaze's statement that The critic of the missing link or the weakest link in any security situation is often the definition of the problem And the definition of the problem is most often not what we think it is And so you have to drill down below your assumption about the space of the network and who owns it and how it operates in order to see What matters most in order to know what really needs to be secured or if you're intruding in that network to know What really matters that you need to take out in order to build a piece of something bigger So you can understand what's going on and I'm saying that's that's my work because the system won't answer any questions about itself Robin Roberts used to be head of R&D. It's CIA info sec R&D a small group, but a powerful group She said that you can you can't query the system you cannot ask it once it is built What assumptions it is making and therefore the human awareness or consciousness of what it is and does is what's most critical for the hacker mentality or Sal Svi said a friend who brought me to Microsoft in the first place after listening to my talks at black hat Which is how she found me on the web. Oh, excuse me. She said she noticed that more and more people are substituting security appliance for building a secure network and more and more people are simply putting the appliance in their network and Therefore security seems to be inversely proportionate to how little you know about your system In other words the feeling of security not information assurance and genuine security But the feeling of it is inversely proportionate to what you know about the system because you have never taken that black box apart and Seen what it does and doesn't do and how it interacts with the other applications And therefore I enjoy you to remember Marshall McLuhan statement. Nothing is inevitable Nothing is inevitable so long as we are willing to become conscious So long as we are willing to become conscious that includes remembering history At the Pentagon I was astonished to talk about the closed world of computer simulations using Paul Edwards Who teaches the University of Michigan's term for it great book the closed world because it showed how the Conversation or discourse in a simulated world built over 50 years is what determines the kinds of political choices we make And I said, you know like for example igloo white during Vietnam and not one person in that military context knew what igloo white was Who can tell me what igloo white is? Thank you Thrillian the Hershey bar Igloo white was filling the Ho Chi Minh trail coming down from North Vietnam forking through Cambodia to South Vietnam So you with sensors that would detect for example the smell of urine or the sound of human voices or the footsteps of soldiers Or the treads of trucks and tanks in other words It was an attempt to use electronic means to detect the enemy and as soon as something was detected And if you went to the center for igloo white it would look as terrific of the as the wall of knowledge looks when you go Iraq and see how the battle space is defined electronically it looked great It was the best video game in the world and whenever there was an interruption in the space a perturbation in the force They would push the button and a missile would hit wherever the urine was or the truck was or the voice was and then they would Name it as a kill and by the end of the war we had destroyed more trucks than North Vietnam had been capable of making But no one noticed because they were in the closed world of the simulation without a point of reference To something outside it the metaphor and analogy is I'm saying that's the danger of an administration or a form of government As committed to secrecy as this one is doing what it is doing With the technology which is bending the rules in a way. They have never been built So by the end of the war we should have won and there should have been no Ted offensive Because the men in material to conduct it should never have passed that way But of course the Vietnamese had spoofed all the symptoms that we were attacking with missiles because once they knew we were looking For urine and trucks and voices of course. What do you provide? Urine trucks voices whatever and every time there was a missile strike They waited till it was over and then they infiltrated down to South Vietnam Same thing happened with Watergate But as I said people who were in the Watergate space at the time are alarmed at the degree to which it is being done now Inside a shroud of secrecy that must be penetrated What will happen over time inevitably is the truth will out and who will blow the whistle is currently not known But somebody will get to a point inside the system who can't stand what is happening People are already at that point. Let me tell you how it works because I've left different careers and at first you try to negotiate with it You try to fix it. You try to negotiate with the White House You try to negotiate with the powers that be in different communities of intelligence You try to make it right. You try to balance the legal issues against what you see people doing Because when there's a moral imperative people feel forgiveness is much much easier to get afterward than permission In the same way that murder and torture became fundamental attributes of strategy after 9 1 1 and So they are trying inside Those who have a conscience to do something that aligns the actions of our nation with the dictates of that conscience But they also perceive how difficult and slippery it is and someone whose conscience will not quit Will sooner or later out the modus operandi of what is going on? I wish I could be more specific But I can't because I'm not the Washington Post and I can't say what is going on and anyone if I did would say he's Crazy because that's easy to say and what are his sources and what does he know about what he's talking about? And we would be left with a conspiracy theorist who had too much crack last night and pretty soon the reputation Such as it is tattered though. It may be Would would come down So we have to keep a light heart as we go through this adventure McLuhan said that too the machine easily masters the grim and the dumb the masters of technology must be light-hearted and intelligent Okay, I'm gonna pause to see if there are any questions at this point because somebody a crowd like this must have thought of something Yes The speech I gave at the Pentagon was very similar