 Hello, Defcon. Welcome to my talk, which interestingly is not about computers or computer security. I am FreakMonkey, aka KC, or the other way around, depending on which way you knew me first. This is my compadre here, MutantMandius. Hello. And we're going to be talking about urban exploration. Before we get started right off, if anybody is following along on the Defcon CD, you will notice the slides look absolutely nothing like the ones that I'm showing now. You can find the latest slides on my website. I put them up last night, so if you like the slides, that's where you can get them. Anyway. Okay, by a raise of hands, how many people are familiar with the term urban exploration? Good lord. Well, later. What are we doing here? And how many of you consider yourselves urban explorers? Oh, that's something I want to do, about 10 percent maybe. How many of you are members of a community or forum devoted to urban exploration? And here's one, how many of you have ever gone or wanted to go someplace you weren't supposed to? All right. I'm going to call that 100 percent. Yeah, that's it. Excellent. Before we get too much into the talk, here's a really quick disclaimer. It's real short and sweet. It basically says, well, you see, the bottom line is the important one. Don't believe anything we said. Don't do anything we said. Don't sue us if you do anything we said. We will be talking a little bit about laws in this talk. Neither of us are lawyers. It does not constitute legal advice if you want to know whether something is legal or not. Consult an attorney. Neither of us are doctors, so if you get sick, talk to a doctor. So anyway. So what is urban exploration? Long and short, urban exploration is just the practice of exploring man-made structures that are considered either off limits or off the beaten path or not normally publicly accessible. It's combined with photography by a lot of people just because, hey, if you're going to go look at cool stuff, you know, what do you do? You take pictures of it, right? The phrase was coined by Jeff Chapman in 2004, who basically started the online community and the zine community talking about it, which I will talk a little bit more about later. What do urban explorers explore? Well, you know, what's his name? Angel of Doom guy talked about it. Anytime you categorize something, you destroy the latent connections of it. This is a growth over simplification, but this is my attempt to break down the types of things that I have typically seen explored by other explorers or I explore myself. We explore a lot of things. The most common targets are either drain systems or tunnels or abandoned buildings, which can fall into any of the categories you see here. And as some examples from my own explorers, here's a elementary school, which has been abandoned for about 10 years, prison, also in Atlanta, where I'm from, a paint factory. I like the paint factory, actually. It's one of my favorite sites. A rail car factory, which you also see a print. I'm not sure which one's which. Oh, thank you. You see a print right over here. And tunnels, right. Because in a lot of places, draining and exploring tunnels is the primary urban exploration. It's not very common where we are in Atlanta because, number one, we don't have a very old infrastructure. We don't have a very ancient infrastructure, and it's not separated from the sewer system. I like this hobby, but I don't like this hobby that much. And some more about the term urban exploration, like you're saying, labeling it kind of limits it. I hate the term urban exploration because it really does put a flavor on it, which I think takes away from, like everyone here said they've gone somewhere they weren't supposed to. And that's just an innate sense of exploration. And you want to go to places and see things that not everyone does. The Mondanes don't, but we do. We want to see what's around the corner and how to get into something you're not supposed to. And it's not just urban, it's farmhouses out in the woods or tunnels and things like that. Does anyone know where the term hacking really came from? Well, okay, that's true. Yes, yeah. Also, taxi cab driving and things like that. But in the 60s and 70s at MIT, hacking kind of meant getting around obstacles and doing things to get things done that were not obvious or intuitive and finding interesting ways around it. And Richard Stallman's talked many times about how hacking back then was climbing on the rooftops and going to the tunnels and things. And it's just in the 80s turned into just computer stuff. So a little bit of terminology. This is from my hanging out on message boards of both different domains of urban explorers and of computer hackers. I've been coming to DEF CON for a decade. God help me. And I've been an urban explorer since I was a kid. And while the two cultures are very similar, which is what I'm going to talk about, there are some interesting little parallels. Hackers refer to people as being leet, right? We have our own little nomenclature for stuff like that or Uber. For some reason, urban explorers have greatly embraced the term epic. They refer to really cool explorers as epic and really cool explorers as epic explorers. And you know a term is being overused. You all have seen this done with leet in this community when there are whole debates on message boards over the overuse of the term epic. So. Another one that I think we got to put on there was Holy Grail. Yes. Yeah, Holy Grail is another term that they use too much. For some strange reason, what we all call homeless people, urban explorers call hobos. And that strikes me as strange, because to me hobos refer to a very specific set of American icons or i-American people from a specific period of time, not just people who happen to be homeless now, but you see that a lot in the urban exploration world. The more startling or the more striking one about the parallels between our communities is the script kiddies and tourists. What we call script kiddies, urban explorers call tourists. It's a pretty simple comparison. Script kiddies are people that come into our community and just want to get the easy access and run it and get in and when it doesn't work they run it. Right? That's what tourists are in the urban exploration world. They want, they see the cool pictures online on Flickr and they want to see the they want to go there and be cool, but they don't want to do any of the work. They don't want to do any of the effort. They don't want to do any, they don't want to think about the risks. They just, they want to be tourists. And point of entry is another urban exploration term or POE, which refers to the point of entry to a site. It's often abbreviated as POE. It's basically what we call an exploit. You know, it's how you get into something that you aren't normally, traditionally allowed to get into. And there's an interesting kind of thing about that is that there's a sort of an ethic that a lot of people share of don't, don't reveal POEs, don't tell people about points of entry, let them either for a couple or either to not let, you know, whatever vandals or whoever get in there, but also it's kind of to let other people have the joy of finding it themselves, you know, because that's kind of the interesting thing a lot of times. Sound kind of familiar? Interesting aside, my background is more centered towards DEF CON and hacking. And Mandius' background here is more centered towards urban exploration. This is his first DEF CON. And he came here to talk with me about urban exploration. So, you know, you'll see us do that little contrast thing a lot. So talking about the subculture, I mentioned Jeff Chapman. He is, he's a martyr basically. He didn't die exploring, thank goodness. He had a terminal, he had a terminal kidney disease? Or liver disease? Yeah, kidney disease, I believe it was. And he knew it all his life that he was going to limit his life, but he, and he got into exploring while bored in stuck in a hospital. You know, got up in the middle of the night, rode the basement, rode the elevator to the basement and said, I wonder where this goes. I think he was even curing his little this thing. Yes, he did. He was in some of his writings, he was taking this, he had an IV. So he's exploring a hospital pulling an IV card behind him. That's hardcore. He coined the term urban exploration and he started a zine in the mid-90s when zines were popular, called Infiltration, and talked about his explorations in Toronto where he's from, which then started a website, infiltration.org off which there are several big offshoots now. And he wrote a book. He'd always said that his dream was to write a book and he wrote a book called Access All Areas that I intended to bring and I can't for the life of me find it somewhere in my house. But that book talks about everything there is to do with urban exploration and it's a fantastic book and I haven't listed it at the end of my talk as well. I highly recommend it. But anyway, so he coined it, he, which everybody who came to his website and everybody who read his zine all had the same reaction and it's a similar reaction probably that some of you are having, which is, oh my god, I already do this. I just didn't know there was a name for it. Right? It's something that we do inherently, if you have interest in exploring and you have abstract analytical abilities and you have a willingness to go slightly outside the boundaries of the normal, you're going to find yourself doing these things, whether it's hacking into computers or wandering into abandoned buildings or checking out utility tunnels under your school. You know, it's the same sort of mindset. And from this, several communities have sprung up in the urban exploration world. The largest of which is UER.ca. How many of you are members? Yeah? Okay. Don't flame me. But it's a very, very persnickety community. As all French hobbies are, they are just as distrusting of newbies as people in the IRC Channel hack or on any of the various message boards that we're on. I talked a little bit about tourists and I didn't say seamsters. That's the other thing you find in the urban exploration community. One difference, one thing that they do not have in common is urban explorers, a lot of urban explorers also consider themselves artists. And if you've ever been in any artist community, that, you know, that's a very subjective thing. And so there are a lot of people that just want to be in the scene and seen in that community. Whether they're exploring or not is not important to them as much as they look cool in our photograph in abandoned buildings. And those people suck. So, talking a little bit about what we have in common. And I touched on this. The biggest one to me is the perspective. There is a, there's a mindset behind being a hacker, right? And there's a mindset behind being an explorer. And they're really in my mind they're the same thing. It's the reason I found myself one day going, I remember these two communities and they're almost identical. They just don't interact with each other. You have to have a behind the scenes view of the world. You have to look at something and not accept what you see at face value. You have to wonder what's behind it. Or what's inside it. Or, you know, why is there a grey door in the corner that's not labelled that I never, nobody ever goes in and out of. It's a distrusting subculture. I pretty much already covered this slide. So, yeah, you know, secrecy is important to urban explorers both for their own protection and because they like to maintain a level of elitism. At this very moment actually on, does anyone read something awful dot com? There's a forum on something awful dot com comedy website that they're discussing UER dot ca about why it's such a secret community and why can't we get in and it's just a very amusing exposure to people talking about another secret community and why they're also elitist as well. And like any fringe hobby, the key to becoming a member of that community is to not show up and beg for access. It's to show up and contribute. You know, just like, imagine, how would you advise somebody to become a member of this community? Show up, listen, see what's going on. You know, express interest, but don't try to just take things from people. And if you do that, then you'll be accepted into, you know, any fringe area community. People develop trust slowly in fringe areas. And this is a fringe hobby just like hacking is a fringe hobby. So, we also all love cool technology. And urban explorers have access to some really cool technology. Can anybody identify this? Anybody? Any chance? Wrong. It's an NCR Model 31 adding machine. It was the first adding machine typewriter combo that allowed you to keep a ledger while you were doing adding. It was built in like the 1940s. I had a museum contact me and tell me that they saw my photograph online and they wanted it. Sadly, the building it's in was demolished about a week after I took this picture and oh well. No telling where it ended up. So, now in another example, they need to change the paper in this one really, really badly. So, another thing we have in common, everybody who's already considers yourself an urban explorer stand up. Yeah, can everybody see the difference between them and you? Yeah, alright. We dress exactly, that was the first thing that struck me. Urban exploring was something I did alone for the entire first, I don't know, 15 or so years that I did it. And then I started discovering internet communities and I showed up a group of explorers and I show up and I had no idea who I was going to find. And I get there and they're all people that are like, not surprisingly just like me. And then I was like, wow, well, you know, so here we are. Another commonality that we have is social engineering. And Jeff Chapman talks about this. He just talks about this a lot in his book. And he actually, to give him a lot of credit, he actually attributes it to our community, to the computer hacker community. He says, you know, computer hackers termed social engineering. It's one of the most important tools you can have in urban exploration. The big difference being if a computer hacker decides to try social engineering, he does it from, it's a decision to try it. He's sitting there and he goes, I'm going to try to get something out of this place by calling them. And the explorer might find himself faced with somebody and have no choice but to try social engineering. And that's a little higher stakes than the hacker equivalent because they might be the difference in walking away or having to call somebody to come get you from county. Yeah, the confidence, you know, if you just have a little bit of confidence in that attitude of, you know, I'm supposed to be here and you're supposed to help me be here. Same thing. It helps you out a lot sometimes. Yeah. And like all fringe hobbies, our hobby is exploited. Urban exploration is exploited. Hacking is exploited by people who are doing it just to either further some personal agenda or commit crimes and it gives everybody in each of the respective communities a bad name. The parallels are pretty interesting to me. This was just something I came up with. We have website defacers that break into computers for no purpose other than to graffiti websites and there are people clearly who break into abandoned buildings for no purpose other than to make massive graffiti murals or tag up the windows or write their names on it. We have fishers who put, you know, false front ends and send out emails to steal from people. There are people who break into abandoned buildings and break into houses or break into utility tunnels and steal copper. Actually copper in particular has become very common in the last few years because it's so expensive. And then the lowest rung, the scum of the earth that just happened to hang out in the corners of all fringe hobbies, in our community it would be the people who use our skills and exploit our skills to do things like trade kiddie porn in urban exploration. It would be the people who hang out in the places that we discover or get into so that they can, you know, do gang violence or run drug labs or that type of thing. So, you know, all fringe hobbies you have to deal with the dark element that lives under it. It's unfortunate. Sorry, that's just a joke. That's Mandeus. That was a fashion example but it occurred to me that you all would make a good fashion example too. Urban explorers in my mind, I maintain an ideal for myself, you know, sort of a code of ethics that I use in exploring. And just like in hacking, everybody has their own and you are in any fringe hobby, you're put in a position where you get to make the decisions to what is ethical and what is not because you're not always operating within the boundaries of a set of, you know, legal guidelines. I consider graffiti to be against ethics of urban exploration. I know there are people out there who call themselves urban explorers who create works of art like this or works of art like that. They're neat looking. I appreciate them when I find them in places that aren't harmful but I don't advocate it. It's vandalism and it's illegal and it undoes any ability that you have to say, I'm just here exploring. And this is an example of what happens when copper thieves get into an abandoned building. They just find a loose wire on one end and they hook a piece of metal to it and they just tug, you know, and it just makes a mess out of sites. So anyway, so that's the darker side. Now, so you all think, hey, this is real cool, I want to be an explorer, right? So the second half of this is talking a little bit about what it takes to be an explorer and what the things you should keep in mind if you're inspired by this and you go, oh, I want to go check some stuff out. And the first one is safety. Computer hacking doesn't really pose much of a risk to the safety of the health or the life of the person doing it. Urban exploration can. These places, if you're going into abandoned buildings, they don't have to meet any fire inspection or safety codes at all. If you're going into off-limits security corridors or utility corridors or into steam tunnels or anything like that or drains, they don't have to meet safety codes for public occupancy. So there's not going to be cones or garg-rails or anything to keep you from falling to your death or being flooded out of something or anything like that. Keep that in mind, you know. You have to be very careful about everything you do and think, you know, where am I? What could happen to me here? People who do draining, I don't think either of us do that very much, but a lot of people do. And yeah, I don't think Atlanta can do it. But if there are drains where you live, a general rule is that if it's raining or it looks like it's going to rain at all, then you stay the fuck out of a drain. Just the nightmare of what's going to go wrong there keeps me out of drains. That's just me. I don't like water. So yeah, you have to make your own decisions. You know, you have to look at a building and go, you know, this is a neat looking building, but is it structurally sound? And there's always warning signs. You know. That's the building I took the picture of that adding machine in. So I don't advocate going into a building that looks like that. Here's one that's a little bit in between. This building hasn't fallen down and isn't falling down quite yet. It's actually the building that the stairwell was photographed in. But there's definite warning signs in an abandoned building that you should be alert to something. The fluorescent lamps laying on the floor, right? They were anchored to the ceiling and for some reason at some point they just came falling out of the ceiling. That's a warning sign. Because that ceiling is the floor of the floor above it. And the other thing that's interesting is I thought I was on the ground floor of this building and found out later I wasn't. That there was a basement. So, you know, floors can come out from under you. You have to really be wary of things like water damage. You know, plants growing. You see on the right side of that photo. Plants growing inside a building. That's a sign. You might have a roof leak. If there's a tree growing out of the floor panels of your building. I didn't walk. This is on the floor of what I thought was the second or not to be third floor of this building. I didn't go in that room. There were several places. If you're in a place like that, stay near walls. When you're on lower floor, pay attention to the layout of the walls. Floors are less likely to collapse when there's something under them. If you can see exposed crossbeams or trusses, look at them to see what they're made of. If they're also made of the same kind of wood that's rotting and falling in between, consider not going up there. If the trusses are made of iron, but just the wood's falling out, then think about, well, okay, maybe I can stay on the iron parts. Either way, be aware you're taking a risk in places like this. Something could happen to you. Oops. Wrong way. Which gives me, comes to some of the rules we should consider. I'm not going to just read these out, but you see them. They're pretty clear. There's a couple I'm going to highlight. The first one is key. No matter how many people you're exploring with, make sure somebody knows what you're up to and where you're going. And more to the point, make sure they know when to expect you to check in and what to do if you don't. Because if you don't tell them how to react, if you don't check in with them, they're not going to have any idea what to do. So if you tell them, I'm going to go and check out this abandoned building that's on the corner of this street. If I don't call you by seven and then what to do next depends on who you're talking to, obviously. If it's your mother, then you might just say, call 911 and tell them that I'm in that building. If it's some fellow explorers, maybe they'll come looking for you and then decide whether to call 911 or what have you. But these are the things to do to keep yourself alive because you don't want to get caught, but it's not worth dying to not get caught, right? Carries as many flashlights as you need plus one. I don't need any flashlights in here. So I have one. I've been caught by this one a couple of times where I had one flashlight and I dropped it into water. It was perfectly dry day. Just this place had collecting water in the bottom of it and I was budgeting with my camera and I'd slip and I'd drop the flashlight out and it went pitch black. Which means I have to feel my way out of this basement of this abandoned building. I had a cell phone so that helped a little bit turn the cell phone light on. Yeah, that just destroys my night vision when I do that. I can see a little bit and I do the flash, I can see for a second and I can't see anything. That's when you see the zombies. Surprise you didn't put that on there actually. You threw it in, that's all matters. Never explore alone. Do I tell you all that I break this rule too often? It's a really bad idea. Rule means guideline. It's a really bad idea. I don't think anyone here follows the rules too often. I find myself in situations when I explore alone as often as I don't where I think, what the hell am I doing here by myself? It makes everything more dangerous. If something happens to you, there's nobody to help. If you encounter dangerous people, you're by yourself. Find somebody else with a similar interest, preferably somebody bigger than you. That's what I did. And take them with you. That way you have a little more confidence too. Do not move while looking through a cameras and when I have to highlight, I have two friends that have hurt themselves very seriously that way. I have one. Yeah and he has one. And then what happens is collapse this, like it doesn't have a tripod. The way it happens is, it seems obvious. You would think, well I wouldn't do that. Until you get a nice SLR camera and you're looking at a shot and you're like, oh this is really neat. Oh wow. That's what happens. Just like that. It happened to my friend Josh. I was 17. He was 16. I was in North Carolina at the time where I lived. We were in an abandoned factory thing. We had to climb over a 10 foot chain link fence to get into it. The building was wide open, but there was this well secured fence around it. We climbed over the fence, went across the field, went into the building, went up to the second floor, walking around. We were looking through cameras because there weren't digital cameras at the time. And he looked through a camera and stepped back into a hole in the floor. Thankfully he didn't go all the way through. We thought he broke his leg. He couldn't stand on it after that. He was in excruciating pain. So he had to punch around me and then do the hobble thing and I was like, it's okay we'll get out of here. But then we got back to the fence. You should have climbed a fence with somebody on your back. I don't ever want to do that again. I don't know what hurt him more the fall or me throwing him over the top of the fence when I got to the top of it. My friend who got hurt, I think the hospital bill was around $90,000 in the end. Josh just turned out to have a really bad twisted something, ligament or something. He was in the cast for like a month but other than that he was okay. So if you can't see, don't step there. If it's a dark pool, don't assume it's not just a drop into the abyss of the unknown. And don't move when you can't see. You're only looking through a camera. That's the biggest one. And the last one I put up there for the abyss has been a fix. He's got a bad habit of just, oh this is neat. So now we know how he got that way. Pictures of my blue hand and things when I stick them in paint particles and stuff. Yeah, he actually has a photo. He's like, wow. So here's an interesting example. This is a hotel or it was in between being an old hotel and then a new hotel. And interestingly, actually coincidentally I found out later it was the location of Lawn 9 which I had been to several years prior to this picture being taken. And I'd been wanting to go in there because it was a neat looking property. It's in the middle of downtown Atlanta. And the way I found in was on the third floor. And what was odd though, and it was these sliding glass doors. That's what these white things are in the background. And I pull on one and it's not locked but it's got resistance. And when I pull it opens, but what is it? It rips duct tape loose. Why would you duct tape shut up? Maybe just keep people out. And I walk in and I'm taking some pictures and yeah, see the toolbox is covered up in plastic and duct tape down too. I'm like, that's very strange. I wonder why I'm going to take some pictures and I finally find the way out that the workers used to get in, turn around, and that's what I came out through. Asbestos is the great white shark of urban exploring. There's a lot of talk about it. There's a lot of myths about it. There's a lot of people throwing stories around. A lot of people say you can walk around and roll in the stuff and nothing will happen to you'll be fine. The National Institute of Health and Human Services and the Center for Disease Control both say there is no known safe level of asbestos exposure. And they say this because there have been case, asbestosis which is the disease you get if you read lots and lots of asbestos is hard to get. But mesothelioma, which is cancer of the lining around your heart and lungs develops in people with any level of asbestos exposure more than 10 years after they're exposed. And there are no symptoms prior to it and there is no cure. So yeah, in 10 years I might get mesothelioma. It's not very likely, but you have to be aware of this. If you know a site has loose asbestos in it, particularly if there's construction and you think it might be airborne, wear masks and wear protective clothing or throw away your clothing later or don't go in there. Now I talked to my doctor about it. My doctor said, you know, you're walking around in places where everything is settled. You're not doing active construction. You're not kicking up dust. Even if there is asbestos, you probably aren't going to get any. But again, with a 10 to 15 year incubation period for the cancer, how do you know? So, you know, do it with that what you will. Look up asbestos on Wikipedia and make your own decisions. That's, like I said, it's the great white shark. There's a lot of myths about it. The other one's a little more common. Asphyxiation is another reason to be really wary of subterranean spaces. If it's not well ventilated, then professionals wear masks and oxygen things or bad air detectors like firemen you might consider looking in Gauls or another civil service catalog and buying a bad air detector if you're going to go draining because the first sign that you're not breathing oxygen is that you pass out. At which point, well, yeah. Disease exposure, chemical exposure, those are just kind of, you know, sort of just think about what you're doing and where you are. There are a lot of pigeons in the world. Pigeon waste is surprisingly caustic. Boy, it carries more diseases than probably any substance you'll ever encounter. For pigeon waste or for disease exposure, a basic N95 surgical mask which you can buy in packs of 100 will provide complete protection. That provides no protection against asbestos. The only thing that protects you against asbestos is a, what's called a P100 respirator you can buy them at home deep of about 30 bucks. They're uncomfortable. They have to do cancers on the side of them. Yeah, but you haven't lived until you've walked through about 3 inches deep of pigeon shit on Earth. It's got that strange both squishy and crunchy consistency too. Alright, alright. 12 minutes left. We've got to step it up a little bit. Anyway, you know, I found this in a plant once. It just shows you. You never know what you're going to find. Turned out this was an EPA superfund site. The EPA came out, filled up a whole bunch of 40 gallon drums full of stuff to investigate and then abandoned those. But that's a lot. Your tax dollars at work. So a little bit about security and legality. You know, we ignore a lot of signs. It's kind of hard to decide when to ignore them and when not to. And there's a lot of different laws and considerations when you're doing that. Jeff Chapman who wrote, who's Ninjalicious, wrote that book that he's talking about Access All Areas. He talks about the signs that say authorized personnel only. And he notes that it doesn't specify who does the authorizing. And so he just takes it as a general assumption that he is authorizing himself. It's actually an interesting point. Look up your local trespassers. We're not lawyers, but they're different in every state. And in most states trespassing is a misdemeanor and it's a civil offense. If the property owner isn't there to say you're trespassing, then yeah, you can authorize yourself until somebody tells you to leave. In Georgia, you have to be told to not be on premises to be considered trespassing. Now what constitutes being told, right? A 10 foot fence with no trespassing signs every 8 feet constitutes being told. So if you climb over that. Yeah, somebody firing, yeah, Taylor's right. Somebody firing a pistol in the air. That pretty much tells me I don't have the authorization to be there. You know, there's nothing wrong in my opinion and in Mandeus' opinion, because he's done it with me or if he just hasn't told me. With getting permission, you can do some really neat exploring of sites by getting permission from the property owner. That's really easy to do when the property owner is in transition if somebody new has purchased a property. Contact them. Find out what they're going to do with it. Say, do you mind if I photograph it before you tear it down? It's amazing what you can get access to if you do that, especially if you have a repertoire of interesting photography you've done in sites like that prior to show them. So, and the other thing is that trespassing laws always become extremely exacerbated by any other crimes you commit. If you commit, and this is what a cop will tell you, if you aren't doing anything but trespassing in a cop's mind, you usually aren't doing anything. Trespassing is what they add on to the charge of theft, burglary vandalism, breaking and entering. Possession of burglary tools, that's kind of a tricky one. A well-known explorer in Florida spent several thousand dollars defending himself in court for having a Leatherman with him when he was walking around the perimeter of a location. He didn't even go in. And he got it thrown out because of that, but it cost him several thousand dollars in legal fees. So, don't carry things with you that would make a cop go, okay, I don't care what you say, you're going downtown. And hence, the appearance of any of the above. It also gets really interesting there. I found a site once that I wanted to explore. The only way in was through a broken window, and it was recently broken. There's glass laying all around it. I didn't break the window. But if I go into this building and I'm found there, who's going to believe that I didn't break the window to get in? So, you know, you got to keep these risks in mind. Y'all are going to love this next slide. I want to hear your show of support. Right. I'm sorry. If you're caught at a place that you don't own, or that you aren't with the owner, and you have lockpicks, you're going to jail. That's all there is to it. You're breaking an entering by definition, even if you didn't use the lockpicks in the lies of the law a lot of times. You know, I'm pretty good lockpick. I don't use it to get into sites, because that just, there's no gray area anymore if you do that. Just like, you wouldn't go into the site with a crowbar and expect to not get arrested. So, these are some examples of places we photographed with permission. This was the Sears distribution warehouse for the entire East Coast out of Atlanta, Georgia, built right on the rail line, because Atlanta was the terminating point of a transcontinental rail line. And it's now City Hall East. It's now the Atlanta Police Department headquarters. And I found out they were only using 15% of the entire facility, and they've only ever been using 15% of it. So, I, when a developer bought it to convert it to condos, even though the police are still actively in it, I called him and said, hey. Actually, it wasn't me that called him. That was someone else. Yeah. Somebody else called him. Another explorer friend called him and said, hey, you might have a group of us come and photograph this. And he said, sure. I'd love that. So, you know, we got to photograph the inside of it, wander all through it. It was really neat. But, actually, even on that, I got to Urban Explorer inside the Urban Explorer because we kind of got led around by people. And the guy that I picked to go with was the guy who had been the maintenance manager for 30 years of the building, because I thought he might be kind of interesting. And he snuck us into a part that we weren't supposed to go into, which had all the cool machinery of sorting and things like that, which he swore us the secrets that we should never tell anyone about, because all kinds of legal issues about historic landmark things like that they were trying to avoid. Yeah. So, he doesn't tell anybody. Another one, this was funny. This was an abandoned automobile manufacturing plant. I was told not to reveal its name. It may or may not have been on a previous slide. I got thrown out of this plant three times. I kept sneaking, because it had been closed for two years. I always wanted to see it. I kept sneaking in, but they had active security because it's a three million square foot manufacturing facility that still has power and machinery in it. You know, the insurance company is the reason there's still security there. And yeah, every time I'd get in, they'd see me on camera or I'd set off a motion detector or something. And the next thing I know, I'm sworn by some guy who yells at me and screams at me. And so, when the property got bought by a developer and I'd send him a letter and said, hey, we'd love to photograph it. We'll give you copies of the digital photographs and a release to use them however you want. And he said, sure. He assigned a security guard to give us a tour. Guess which security guard it happened to be? You know, this is a slightly different type of permission I got on this one. I showed up at this site thinking, hoping nobody would be there. Because, you know, wandering around airplanes is kind of taken seriously these days, even if they don't have engines on them. And this security guard comes running out to me and asks me what I'm doing. And he came out in a brand new Dodge Ram pickup with a Cummings engine and I started talking to him about his truck. And, you know, he's like, oh, yeah, I got him to show me the truck and all that. And then I told him I'm a professional photographer and I'm a pilot and he might as well walk around. So he gave me permission. He goes, yeah, just, you know, don't climb inside any of them. So I can't show those pictures. I was like, yeah, I thought I'd seen those. There are some exceptions to this rule if you want to remain a free citizen of whatever municipality or country you're from. I don't advocate trespassing where you know it is wrong or illegal and that's where you really have to get into your own thought here. I mean, you see a no trespassing sign on a site that was an active site and it's no longer active and it's been empty for ten years and you kind of think, I think of the sign as being abandoned with the site. That's my own ridiculous justification, but sure. But, you know, you can't use that justification to trespass on places where you're going to get shot for doing so. Active airport property. The Department of Homeland Security takes stuff like that very seriously. U.S. military property, all the things you see listed here. The other one I wanted to mention since I'm here and I might be inspiring some of you all to go go, hey, look, see we can get on rooftops and into tunnels and all that. Casinos take their property very seriously. They assume for very good reason that anybody wandering outside of normal areas or breaking any rules are doing it to steal money from them. And they have good reason to make that assumption because it's probably true 99.9% of the time. Don't try to get on the roof of the casino. Somebody was arrested at this conference two years ago for going onto the roof of the casino. You know, so, yeah, think. You know, I can't give you a list of all the places it's safe to and all the places it's not. You got to just kind of use some of your own judgment there. Some signs are to be taken seriously. You haven't seen that slide, have you? Recognize the building in the background? No. Sorry. Sorry. Anyway, inside joke. We worked there. So, anyway. Were we burning through our time yet? I'm surprised you hadn't come in yet. Anyway. Yeah, you know, you want to try to be stealthy when you're wandering around. This is not stealthy. The classic tiptoeing stance Jeff Chapman says in his book was invented by law enforcement to make people who are sneaking around easier to spot. It makes sense because it doesn't, there's no other rational explanation for that behavior. You know, be confident. Try to blend in. Look like you have purpose. Don't tell any lies that you can't back up if you're challenged on. People mess that up all the time. They think I'm breaking the rules so I got to lie about everything. I asked your name. My name's Bill. All right, cool. What are you doing? Well, I'm a contractor. I'm supposed to photograph this plate. All right, why don't you sign you in? Let me see some ID. Well, your name better be Bill. Because it would be really stupid at that point to just give you permission but you're going to get thrown out because you lied about your name. You know? So, don't tell lies if you think you might have to back them up and can't. You know, I'd tell people, I'm a photographer. I even had business cards made. You know, I'm a professional photographer. You don't have to be successful to be professional, right? Yeah, a camera. A camera's a nice prop. So, you know, ninja-licious coin-to-term credibility props is a really neat term, right? It's a prop that makes it look more credible that you're supposed to be there. If you're on a construction site that requires everybody to have hard hats, wear a hard hat. That's not illegal. You know, go to Home Depot, buy a hard hat, put it on, show up. If you wear a hard hat and you look like you know what you're doing, you're not even going to get challenged. It works really well. You know, he used to like to sneak into the swimming pools of five-star hotels. And the best way to do that was to put a bathing suit on, throw a towel over your shoulder, go in the men's room, get himself soaking wet, and then show up on the outside of the entrance to the swimming pool. Who's going to challenge you at that point? Obviously, you've already been in the swimming pool. Okay, sorry, let me let you in. Where's your key card? Oh, it's in there with my gym bag. Oh, right. Because you're soaking wet in a bathing suit, obviously, you know. So, it's credibility fraud. You know, just look like you're supposed to be there. If you do this, you will eventually be thrown out of a place. It happens. Don't get confrontational. If somebody comes to challenge you and you're asking what you're doing, don't get all huffy, well, I have a right to be here unless you tell me I have to leave and I haven't been breaking any crack. Nobody is going to win that argument. You know, be nice. You know, just smile and introduce yourself and disarm them really. You know, you say, hi, oh, I'm KC. What are you doing? What are you doing here? Oh, I was taking pictures. You know, that's what I do. Most people at that point are like, oh, I don't know. Why the hell you want to take pictures of this whole building? Yeah, right. Or you can see them thinking, you're thinking, you know, I really got to get rid of you. So you go, you know what? If it looks like they can't decide what to do because they were going to call the police because they thought you were a thief and they found that you aren't, but they can't let you be there, tell them what to do. Say, I'm sorry. Are you going to ask me to leave? You know, I mean, that kind of suggestion works really well. Give them the option that you would rather them take when they can't decide what to do. And they'll usually take it. And as he learned once, and he told me this, don't say you're a geocacher just to get out of trespassing. Yeah, I didn't say it, but I was somewhere I shouldn't have been with a few other people. And we got found by someone and they were, he was going to let us out and he was actually, he had to drive us out. We followed his car and everything was fine, but then the federal investigator showed up before we got out of the property so he wanted to get our names and things, but they were still going to let us go. We saw the GPS thing on the dashboard and he's like, oh, wait a minute, y'all aren't geocachers, are you? No, no, no, no, no, just driving around. You saw that on a long order. So I talked about this earlier on the trespassing slide. Don't do harm. If for no other reason, because then if you're caught, you're going to jail for doing harm, not trespassing. It increases your likelihood of criminal charges. It makes the site, if you create obvious points of entry, if you pry boards off windows and then leave them that way or break doors open and then leave them open, then somebody else is going to start using that site for bad things because you just made it more accessible to them. And you're detracting from the hobby for everybody else, which brings me to what to do if you encounter an abandoned building that's been abandoned a while and you want to get in and it's boarded up tight and the fences are all chained. Interestingly, what I've discovered is that these buildings follow a life cycle. They start out secured. All the windows are boarded up. Fences are chained. There's no way on. There's no trespassing signs everywhere. And if they sit there long enough, whoever's been watching over it eventually just stops. And eventually somebody, one of the lower rung people, a homeless person or a graffiti artist or a copper thief, will break in. It's just a matter of time. And they'll create a point of entry. I call it the infiltrated state. Now there's a way in. There's probably only one way in and it's probably concealed. So you're going to have to look around a little bit. How did somebody get into this? Oh, look, there's this one door that it looks chained, but there's actually no lock on the... Or there's a link missing. That was one he found. There's a chain coming out of the door, the lock on it, but there's no link on the back. You could just pull the chain out. And this was the case where somebody else had broken in but had made it look secured when they left. So they're kind of... I have to do that to Rotten Beach. Okay, yeah. That's how a different explorer discovered that from our little group. So yeah, you find it... This is the state, ideally, you find it in because it's been less tinkered with at this point. Ten minutes? Ten minutes. And... I'm subtle, I know. So you'll find it in this state for a while, but what happens is other people who are checking out abandoned buildings will find it in the state also. Some of them with less ethics, they might be copper thieves, they might be graffiti artists, and they'll start breaking in and taking their friends there. And so then it becomes fairly well known about, you end up with multiple points of entry, people start hanging out in there, teenagers, other urban explorers, taggers, people start repeating the place up, maybe a rave will be thrown there. That's the promiscuous phase. It might be that way for 10, 20 years. Interestingly, that is often the phase that an abandoned building stays in the longest. And it stays in that phase until what I call the incident phase. And that is where something happens and the authorities are called. Either somebody dies there, somebody is seriously hurt there, something like that. And then the police get called, they come out, they go nuts, they contact the property owner. Maybe the media even features the site as do you know what your kids are up to? They could be in this abandoned paint factory. It happens. If you watch the news, you'll start recognizing those stories. And then, of course, the insurance companies get upset, the property owner comes out, boards the whole place up, and it starts over again. So this is a building that went from the secured phase of the promiscuous phase in a matter of 24 hours. It was a building that a lot of people in our local group had always wanted to get into and never could. And I happened to live a block away from it. I drove by it every day on the way home from work. And one day a demolition crew came and tore down the adjacent building. And when they did that, they opened all the doors and pried some of the doors off the hinges of this building and then just left it sitting there like that. So, you know, keep an eye on it. If you're interested in the site, just keep looking at it. Eventually it'll make itself available to you. There's a lot of ways to discover locations to explore. The best way is to just open your eyes and look around. Checking commercial property listings works pretty well too. But you'll find that after a while, if you just keep looking for places and figuring out what kind of things you're interested in, you'll develop a knack for it. And after a while, it won't be how do I find locations. It'll be how do I find the time to explore them. You know, at any point in time, there are two or three places that I've been meaning to get to, to photograph that I just haven't yet because I've been doing too many other things or I've been exploring some other place. Don't go onto uer.ca or any of the other urban explorations and things like that. How do I find sites? That's exactly like coming here and asking for people's zero days. It's exactly the same. You'll get treated exactly the same. You'll be mocked mercilessly and called names and then it'll take you that much longer to ever gain the trust of that group again. You know, so web searches are one way to find sites, but you're only going to find sites that have been in the promiscuous phase for a long time because urban explorers, when they find new sites, tend to not want them to become promiscuous sites immediately, so they don't post those all over the web. You know, you can go to Flickr and type urbex or urban exploration and see hundreds and hundreds of pictures of sites, but those sites are all explored by everybody who's ever done it. And there's some cool stuff there. Don't get me wrong. I find things that way I don't know about, especially when I'm in cities that I'm not familiar with. But, you know, I use the Internet last. So, for more information, you know, these are things that I've found inspiring. Obviously, Access All Areas by Ninjalicious. It's a fantastic book. It's available at most bookstores, actually. The next one, the Bill Mason book I'll put up there because it has nothing to do with hacking, urban exploring, but it's entirely about human security. He was a jewel thief. He was a cat burglar. And I just found it very inspiring. And the last item up there, music videos, you know. I mean, anybody watches any music videos. This was actually spray painted on the wall of the prison. So, but anyway. So, that's our talk. We're going to go to the Q&A room. One of five? One of five? One of five, one of three. I'm not, now I don't remember. Anyway, it'll be our Q&A room. So, thanks for coming to the talk.