 And I'm going to be introducing the next speaker. This guy's a pretty good friend of mine. He has a background, quite a background for here at DEF CON. He's spoken at a number with what the last five or six... I'm sorry, the last eight DEF CONs. Obviously a very popular talk. I know a lot of you had to sit out there in the heat and wait to get in here. And he usually has some fairly interesting things to say. I think that even though in a lot of cases a lot of us that get up on stage say a lot of the same things year after year, I think this year is probably going to be a little more...it's going to be a little bit more important to actually listen to what's being said. This is a somewhat of an interesting slash scary time in our world, the underground world. And so a lot of what Richard has to say is very, very important and should be taken to heart. So anyway, without further ado, go ahead and introduce the neural cowboy himself, Richard Thame. Thank you. Thank you, Nomad. It's always...yeah, this is the eighth year at DEF CON. I do have to ask yourself how much of that is necessary. Do you really have something new to say? And each year, the last couple of years, certainly, I've debated whether it was sane or sensible to speak again here. This is my home, my psychic home. It has been since I first came here. I've talked about that some before, that it's a space in which I feel most at home because we usually do not have to explain any of our presuppositions to each other. It's the only conference or con that I go to where I know that for sure and where the trusted friends I've made here over the years are people who have stayed by me and continued to assist me in helping to frame reality in a complex and difficult time. The world is changing radically and I thought to myself well, even if it's only one more time, what is it if you died tomorrow? You know, we silverbacks think that way. What is it if you died tomorrow that you would not want to have left unsaid? Is there anything if you could speak truly and clearly to the people you have come to love and value and respect as colleagues and comrades that you do not want to leave unsaid? So that's what I'm going to try to say in this talk. I'm going to begin at the end. The end is what I called totally arbitrarily third generation hackers. The article that's in the program was written at the request of Jeff and Ping and I decided that would be the framework in which I spoke. And the third generation hacker as we will discuss as we proceed is a hacker who has evolved out of the first generation hackers to see clearly what is happening in the world around and understands the dangers that are true and real and understands that hacking has been raised to a new level because of the presuppositions of the subculture and the hacker efforts are going to mean anything. They're going to mean that we have to learn how to strategize together, how to organize together as well as in solo and small bands in order to secure the truths and the kind of modus operandi in the world that we value. That happens to dovetail too with a time that is scary as Nomad said. It's scary because things that we thought would never be taken from us like habeas corpus are being taken from us. I grew up with the Bill of Rights as a guarantee and it's not anymore. So the thing you cannot underscore the most is this is a genuinely different time in America than there has ever been before. I remember picketing Huac when I was a kid in Chicago walking around the building and being told that my picture was being taken by the FBI which probably conditioned me for this life. That was in the 1950s. Huac, you may not know, piece of history, House Un-American Activities Committee came into being primarily to investigate IE slander of people whose politics were suspect. The kinds of things that Huac did in the McCarthyist era were targeted most distinctly at particular industries. People in Hollywood, people in unions were targeted but today the target is anyone who is perceived to be left of center and compared to the past, the left of center means anyone who is a moderate Republican all the way to a communist. Because the right has so shifted the center that what used to be defined as the center is now defined as the left and what used to be so far out on the right is now the modus operandi of the government in a technocratic and matrix like world. So things are happening that intimidate us. Telephone conversation can become the cause of an investigation. Yesterday came across the internet, some of you may have seen this. It was a fellow who was the head of a society or an association concerned with nuclear contamination proliferation and he was being investigated or interviewed by a reporter and on the telephone responded to the reporter's questions, finished the interview and then went to the airport where the police were waiting for him and they had his boarding pass and they took him to a room for interrogation because he had been overheard speaking in a public place about nuclear contamination and nuclear destruction. The interrogation itself was serious and harassing and intimidating and he told him the story he had been talking to the reporter and gave him the reporter's name and number and the reporter spoke with the police and assured him he was okay and it was a legitimate situation but they nevertheless did put his name which if it had been one of the many names I mean I'm always tossed when I go through security it may just be an accident as they tell me but it happens every single time. They put his name through the database to see if he was on any terrorist watch list anywhere in the world when they found he wasn't they escorted him to the gate and waited there to be sure he boarded the plane as if he added as a footnote I was going to run out the back door of the airport and disappear somewhere or hide. I think most of you have read this one that was in the Atlanta newspaper the FBI may be watching about a fellow who made the mistake of reading in a editorial in a coffee shop so that when he arrived at the bookstore where he worked the FBI did come to interrogate and investigate him because he had been heard of spousing positions that may have been characterized as seditious. Now the fact itself of an interrogation by the FBI or by the police is intimidating and harassing and it can have quite an impact. About a year and a half ago I was scheduled to key note an infregard conference for the states of Minnesota Illinois and Wisconsin. It had been set up by someone in infregard connected with the FBI months earlier. But late one night about a week before the event I received an email and it said on the advice of the FBI office in the city of Milwaukee we are disinviting you to speak at our conference. If you have any questions call the FBI during business hours. Since it was late at night it wasn't business hours at least they didn't answer the phone but he did return the call the next morning and he said I understand you have a problem with our withdrawal of an invitation. I said I'd like to know the cause. He said the cause is we are not going to sponsor someone who openly advocates criminal activity, criminal intrusion and black hat hacking to key note one of our conferences. I said the evidence for this accusation is what? He said three fold. You have been overheard at 2600 called meetings making statements to that effect. We have emails that you have sent to the 2600 list making statements to that effect. And last but certainly not least we have a picture of you having lunch at the pink taco with the 2600 club from Milwaukee. So to the third case I could plead guilty. I had had lunch with the guys and the gals and they did say would you like to get out of the picture so you won't be associated with us. Kind of like my family does. But I said for better cause. But I didn't and the picture was on the website. Hardly hidden. To the other two accusations I could say by design and for this reason I have never attended 2600 in Milwaukee nor posted to the list although I'm on it and receive email from it. I was asked your name is Richard Thiem. Is it not? It is I said. And your hacker handle is our time. Is it not? It is not. I said are you not ZAM our time? I said no. ZAM is 27. He lives in Madison Wisconsin and if you'd like to have lunch with him I will be glad to introduce you. Oh shit said the FBI agent. Now to his credit he immediately said with a pathological urgency was surprised me. I've got to fix this. I've got to fix this. I've got to fix this. I've got to fix this. And he did. Fixing it took the form of writing again to all the people who now it had seared into their cognitive structures. An FBI memo saying we must not allow Richard Thiem to speak at this conference because he advocates criminal intrusion. All the leading IT people in associations, governments and business organizations in my home state. So the second withdrawal of the first mail was overlaid as you know on top of the deep imprint of the first one. And the reason he had inferred that our time was a hacker handle of our theme is because our time and our theme were similar. That was the depth and extent of the investigation. It was all open and above board. If you'd only listened to the talks I do at DEF CON which are on my website he would have had grounds for making the same statements but he hadn't. Truly but he did not. But he did not. He went entirely on a total misconstruction. Well he did fix it. I did speak. They said you hit a home run and thank you for not rubbing anybody's noses in our mistake which would have embarrassed us. But the point I want to make is that was a year and a half or two years ago and I still think about it. I still feel about it because the FBI wields extraordinary power and so do the police who are waiting at the gate to interrogate the head of an association for responding to reporters questions in public because the environment in which we're working now is one tilting more and more and more in that direction. And therefore the only people as I understand it who have the freedom still to pursue the truth without an agenda is what I think of as the hacking community because in this community we share information for no other purpose than to build the picture to know and when someone like Steven Northcutt at SANS tells me what we're trying to do now with our SANS workshops is replicate the information sharing apparatus and speed and stealth of the online hacker community so that people who are doing security can share information just as quickly. But the problem with that approach is that all of those people working cultures that filter and inhibit and constrain their behaviors and don't allow them to do the things that we do in our best moments when we are hacking and sharing information about it which is to simply pursue the truth in a shared open community and get it to one another as quickly as possible for each other's use. So the question that confronts us in the environment of which I just spoke, which is now increasingly pervasive in this country and in the world is how do we use that community of shared information speedy and stealthy in order to advocate participation in a bigger picture intention and point of view to do something more than just share the information for our own individual and mutual benefit. In other words how do you get your hands on a culture that is morphing and transforming even as we try to get a hold of it. I think the reason the matrix had such an impact on a generation is because it described clearly for third generation hackers the world in which they know that they live nested levels of reality simulation upon simulation in which even as you apprehend what you think is the basic data structure that points toward the systemic truth it morphs in your hands and turns into something else. That is the conflict which confronts you. And so where hackers have to work you know that any organization, any culture has like four kinds of rules. One is known and written. When you join an organization they give you the bylaws and all the rules that are written. Those are known and written and everybody knows them. Then there's about 90% of those written rules that nobody knows and they're in a file cabinet or online somewhere in an offsite storage device. Those are unknown and written. So there are rules that are known and written, 10% known and or written and unknown which everybody looked at and filed away without even noticing what they were. And then there's the critical quadrant which are known and unwritten. How a culture is governed, how it really regulates itself are the norms and rules which determine how it is going to behave. And these are the things you had better learn quickly when you joined an organization. Because as Margaret Mead said, when you go into a new culture it takes her, she said, a whole year to learn again as an anthropologist what she learns in the first week. You have a narrow window of opportunity to observe a culture before it co-ox you. This is relevant because as free as we believe we are, whenever we participate in a cultural structure or organization it begins to change us. As a consultant I know when I go into a company I like to think I'm a cucumber jumping into the brine and I'm going to cucumber the brine. But a week or two later I always get pickled. In other words, you cannot resist the collusion that is invited from us as we participate in the rewards and structures, the unspoken ways of affirming or disaffirming our behavior that begins to take us over quietly over time. A great example of how that works is newspapers. Michael Prenney, the radical journalist said that there are four stages in the socialization of any journalist. The first, like a hacker. I think of a good journalist as a Jedi journalist, a real hacker, who runs out, sees an extraordinary story, runs back, tells the editor about it and the editor says, I'm sorry we don't do that kind of story here. So the next time he goes out he sees the story and he's excited but he doesn't run back because he knows they don't do that kind of story there. The third time he goes out and he sees the story but he's not really excited. He notices it and then later he goes back to the office and the fourth time he doesn't even see the story anymore because he has been so totally assimilated or inculturated. I wish it really didn't work that simply but it does. A friend who works on a major metropolitan daily called the other day Totally Distressed during the Iraq War, the second Iraq War, about what was being done at the newspaper. He saw the pictures laid out every night as they came in from the wire services showing what looked to him like some significant brutality, some outrage and some horror. But that was never the front page photo in our daily the next morning. It was some little girl dressed in a sari offering a flower to a smiling GI in a tank. So he made the obvious statement to his colleague at a coffee break. He said, you know we don't do news here anymore, we do propaganda. But a senior editor walking through hurting and the next day he was given an assignment to investigate thoroughly the Al Jazeera website and do a story on what real propaganda looks like. And to do it in depth and detail, he took a whole wait to do the exploration and then it was one paragraph on page 34. He said the message was clear. Anytime you question the norms and values of the organizational culture, he said suddenly you're not doing front page stuff, you're doing the strawberry festival in Cedarburn. So that's the way it works. And the question is how can you hack the structure to go more deeply even beyond the unwritten but known rules to the fourth quadrant which are unknown and unwritten. Because the unconscious rules that govern the behavior of the society around you which are so deep and penetrating that you don't even see them are the ones that is now our challenge to hack. Because you have to see the invisible. You have to see the invisible structure. It's what hacking requires. Hackers, if they are worthy of the name, see deeply into the arbitrariness of structures. How form and content are assembled in subjective and seemingly random ways. And only then can you see how they can be subverted or defeated. You must know the deep presuppositions and assumptions that a subculture is making about itself in order to manipulate those assumptions and use them. You must be able to see the content of the lies which surround you as the tissue of fictional truth. The consensus agreement by which the people in our society are coming to live. This requires the essence of hacking. Weld, Weld Pond I'm sorry, Chris Weisopel, who is now a respected member of that stake and no longer Weld at the loft said that he learned how to think logically about invisible things that you can only think about in your mind in an abstract way which is how he learned how to hack a system. His background was software engineering and therefore he learned like an architect to see more deeply into the nested levels of the structure. Because that's the only way you could see how a logical machine can work and therefore how it can break. You have to take the machine and its operating levels apart one by one by one. In other words, you have to hack the system in order to see the big picture. Peter Neumann said the same thing. If you don't know who Peter Neumann is, go to his website, a genius. He runs the risks list now, but he also was instrumental in doing multics and other far-seeing anticipatory projects. He said top-down big picture thinking is essential to being a software engineer. Because you have to see not only the granular details that engineers see you have to see the big picture purpose for which it is intended and that's the goal of this short speech to say please clarify and align yourself with the end or intention of the big picture thing it is you want to achieve by your hacking. Because only then can you be able to maneuver safely in the matrix that surrounds us. Now I'm going to go to the beginning. The beginning is how it really is. How it really is is described from a narrow point of view in a new book called All the Shaw's Men, an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. It describes how on 1953 at our instigation a revolt was fomented that was labeled and described as a popular revolt against the freely elected government in Iran that was calling for the return of the Shaw of Iran which who was then installed as one of the most oppressive and torturous regimes in an area of the world where there had long been such a history of such regimes. The British had wanted to get him out ever since on nationalized oil and knowing the threat that was to the British interests who owned the oil. They offered to negotiate a deal that would give the British nevertheless plenty of money but still the British did what they could to foment rebellion and unrest and the British were thrown out so they went to President Truman and asked him to please help them overthrow the freely elected government. He wouldn't do it but Eisenhower on the advice of his Secretary of State and other counselors did and therefore we participated in a fictional coup which we said was the result of popular concern in order to secure oil for our interest and the people who owned the oil. I don't say there's any parallel between that and what is happening today. Alright I do. There is. We are being given a story that describes a complex multifaceted event but it does not describe it accurately, deeply, cleanly or clearly and it does not describe it truly. It is because management of perception, perception warfare, information warfare has become the cornerstone of warfare in the new battle space which is fighting for the mind of society and what the matrix about is the co-opting of that mind by structures, people, principalities and powers evils that we cannot get our hands on easily but which infuse and penetrate the space of our lives. It began in 19, well after World War II and Dwight Eisenhower famous general saw clearly what was coming and he warned at the end of his two terms of the military industrial complex. Now I know because you live in it that you can't see how extraordinarily different it was what he said was going to emerge and it has emerged in a form and with a power that is so much greater than he could have imagined or anyone could have imagined around 1960. By the military industrial complex he meant the collusion, the conscious collusion between all segments of the society in government and in corporations and in scientific research and ultimately in the entertainment and media industries which dominate perception. Herman Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda Nazi Germany said entertainment is always the key to propaganda you can always get something done in a Hollywood movie. You can't always get done on the editorial page because nobody reads the editorial page but they do go to see legally blonde too. So if you want to undermine an image or an idea or a way of thinking you feed it with a sweet pill called entertainment. He was warning there was a collusive attempt to overtake the mind of a society and that if we were not careful it would come to ultimately dominate and control every person in it simultaneously there was the evolution of a closed world which was the evolution in the military industrial complex of computing. What you take for granted it wasn't the only way it could evolve but it was the way they chose to have it evolve the pioneers of AI and the pioneers of mainframe computing devised a way of thinking about computing and its problems that created the matrix and enclosed psychic space inside which we all live both really and metaphorically and which we do not see because it is the water in which we swim. The dovetailing of those two things the evolution of a seamless collusion in society between convergent self-interest on the part of the powers that be and the manufacture of an enclosed fictional space which people would believe are real was what hackers began to explore. Hackers who had the name of hackers the DEFCON1234 hackers who had been given through hobbyist apertures through apples and Sinclairs and all the rest of them. A way to begin to hack into the space that I just want to be real clear had already been created as a completely surrounding matrix or environment in which they lived and moved and had their being. Personal computing and then network computing was merely a subset of what had already been devised and constructed and therefore what we thought we were exploring with such gusto as a new frontier EFF all this wonderful mythology of the brave new world we were creating had already been created for us. We all unknowing thinking we were co-creating and discovering what already existed. Now we did hack into a new way of seeing it and then the second generation hackers inherited that new way of seeing it. So when I began to speak at Kahn's 3, 4, 5, 6 years later I noticed a generational shift which was that people took for granted the existence of the matrix and that distributed networked world. It was no longer co-created like the DEFCON1 hackers had co-created something in which they participated as it was being built. It just existed and a symptom of that reality for example years ago I remember a focus group at Harvard and they were talking about where do you go for WAN ads and it was young I guess freshman at Harvard were saying where they went to find jobs, buy stuff and when they got to newspapers it's one choice they all looked at each other because no one in the focus group had ever thought of going to a newspaper to see a WAN ad. For the old graybacks who were conducting the focus group that was an epiphany, a moment of deep insight because they had never gone anywhere but newspapers. That shows how pervasive it had become to simply live in and believe and accept the networked online world and its matrix of images as if they were real. The thing I want to really emphasize is that it did not used to be like this. There used to be a different kind of life in America. I'm not saying it was better or worse but it certainly was different. And the CNN wars are a good example of it. Here's a quote from the authors of the military technical revolution who call on US military forces a number of years ago to be ready to fight a CNN war. US forces must be capable they said of responding to media demands for instantaneous information and of using the rapid transmission of data to its advantage. This magnifies the importance of tending to images. Tending to images means using the images in a war against those who are using the images on the other side. So as soon as El Jazeera uplifts or uplinks an image it wants to use in the battle space we have to combat it with images on our own part. You know how Somalia was won. That was one of the best examples of CNN war when two Rangers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu behind a jeep and Clinton immediately announced that we were going to withdraw from Somalia and what it showed is that the image was the weapon. In fact the videotape was the weapon on which the image was captured and people realized that you didn't need to use bullets if you could manipulate, leverage and manage the mind of society with a 10 second clip. Hacking requires that you go to the source of those images. Find out what's real. Find out what's true and we've got to find a way collectively to announce or articulate or clarify what's true. Let me give you a danger. Well that's good timing. Because here's the danger. Communicators are perceived as credible. It says in the CNN war document, if they seem safe, I seem safe. If they seem qualified, I seem reasonably qualified. That is trained, experienced and informed. And if they are dynamic, bold, active and energetic. Ha ha ha ha. Down front please. The point is, after 8 years of speaking at DEF CON, I have self-consciously, not just here, but in my life of the last 10 years, created a persona from scratch. Using the online world and speaking and writing to recreate a person who had been thought to be a teacher of literature and a writer in his 20s and an Episcopal priest in his 30s and 40s. I mean think about it, I had to radically reconstruct the perception of myself. I did it in a self-conscious way so that I would have credibility in the world in which I wanted to live and work. It's the challenge that anybody has in a world of fluid and modular identities. How to take the root cause of your identity, get root on it, and then build back up a systemic approach to interacting in a modular fashion with others so that they accept the presentation you are putting out there as real. I was talking to someone about social engineering, Fred Cohn. He said, the social engineers I worry about are not guys like Kevin Mitnick who wrote a pretty nifty book on social engineering. It's also a document on how to do it. I'd read it if you haven't yet. He said the ones I worry about are people like priests. At that point you just wait quietly until they move on. But the fact is that as a priest for 16 years I learned clearly how to build a belief system into a community and then how to reinforce those beliefs in order to enhance the bonds in the community and its belief in me as a credible leader in it. But this is the rub and I want you to keep this in mind as you be careful in the years ahead. I always did it out of my own self-interest. In other words, as committed as I was to the deeper truths of the values in that community, I also wanted the cash flow to increase because it was the only way I was going to get my kids to college and therefore we needed more money moving through that wonderful sacred space and the only way to do that was to enhance the value people thought it had so that they would put money into it from which I would then like the casinos give me a little off the top, be able to draw a bigger and bigger salary. That's just what's so. We used to say in the religious world that we always came to do good and sometimes we did well. That's just the way it is. In other words I'm finally going to be able to write a book as fiction in which I can tell the truth about what I know, about how it works and the management and manipulation of images and symbols in a religious construction of reality because no one is free of self-interest and collusion and the desire to leverage those symbols on their own behalf if you're human because you're co-opted by the culture as I said. In other words, don't take my word for anything. The fact that I know how to present this data in a way that may sometimes sound compelling does not mean that I have a clue. Now the older I get, what becomes more and more clear is that anyone who thinks they have a clue does not. And anyone who has a clue does not believe that they have a clue. It's just the way the universe is built. So do not believe anything I am saying unless you test it for yourself, unless you go deeply into it for yourself, unless you hack it for yourself and test the hypothesis that I'm putting out there to see if it makes sense because the world is full of fictional interpretations. My friend, my colleague Gary Webb, was absolutely whacked when he did his expose of the Contras and CIA and cocaine money. He was whacked not because he didn't do his groundwork. He did a three-day series for the San Jose Mercury News. He put on his website all of the interviews he made for that case so people could listen to the words of the people he interviewed in their own voices because he said to me, I know what's going to happen. I know what they do. I know what they're going to do. There was silence for three or four days and then broadsides from the Washington Post and the New York Times start coming at him. Heavy artillery attacking him, not for what he said, but for what he did not say. Changing the terms of the conversation so that he could be claimed to have said that the CIA intentionally introduced through free-way Ricky Ross in LA Watts, crack cocaine into the ghettos of America to undermine and destroy the black middle class. Never said it. Very clearly never said it. Said that the CIA was faring money, cocaine and arms back and forth between the Contras and this country. That's all he said. The case was made. He was fired. He was actually transferred 150 miles away to a cow pasture where he reported on cow pies day after day until he said he was so depressed he had to quit. Now the point is that the CIA did subsequently acknowledge that of course those initial claims were true. But by then it didn't matter. His career had been destroyed. Assassination may be the ultimate form of censorship, but you don't need to do it in a matrix world. All you need to do is undermine the credibility, ridicule the person. Or as a friend at Black Hat said to me just two days ago when we were discussing perception warfare. Perception warfare is a term that emerged in 1995 for the first time, not information warfare. Perception warfare is the targeting of an individual or a small group or community in order to construct for them a view of reality which is not true, but on which they will then subsequently act. Counterterrorism doctrine says that one of the things you do is degrade the capacity of the network to function. So you find the best players in it. Think of hacking. Think of hacking. You find the best players in it and you either accelerate their importance or degrade their importance. You degrade it so they are no longer trusted by spreading rumors, or by innuendo, or by savaging their reputations in the terms in which their own communities will believe. Or you exaggerate their importance way beyond any possibility so too much attention is paid to them so that you can pay attention to the nodes in the network that you really want to work with. Now, this is a fellow who's working with information warfare currently. So he wasn't speaking hypothetically. He wasn't speaking theoretically. He was speaking the simple truth of his daily job. And therefore you have to find out what's so and who can be trusted and what network can be built and how you can live and work within it. Altering the context or the culture in which you work and live is the key to the kingdom. The big picture is just another way to say you have to see the system at all points of the fractal so you can see the points of entry into it and leverage those points of entry on your behalf. And this may mean using new skills, new parts of your brain. Engineers can tend to be granular, can't they? I remember being asked to speak about UFO phenomena to the Astronomical Society of Chicago. And I asked who was in the audience so I'd have a clue how far out you could go. And they said, oh, these are all Motorola and so on. I said, oh, so they're educated people. And the voice came back, well, yeah, but they're engineers. Now, you know what he meant. He meant that they've been educated in a particular way which can tend to be granular. And yet Peter Neumann was talking about one of his mentors, Ted Glazer, who was blind. And this is what he had trained his brain to do. He said he could stand in a cocktail party and listen to four or five or six conversations simultaneously. And when he left the party, he had all the knowledge he needed of all the directions of critical research at MIT because he had heard all of them flowing through his brain in a way he had trained it to compartmentalize and retain. He said he also trained himself to speed up tapes to five, six times their normal speed so he could listen to a one-hour lecture in about eight minutes. Now, whatever it is you want to train your brain to do, I am simply suggesting you need to train it for new ways of thinking to respond to genuinely new conditions, what I call third generation hacking. The brain is infinitely more plastic than we believe. And Peter was responding in my tale of someone who had learned Braille and how they have discovered that at any age, at any age the brain will generate the neurons and begin reconstructing the areas of itself that enable you to learn through, in that case, the fingertips. You are never too young or too old to begin with an intention to train your brain which is infinitely plastic to learn a new way of thinking. And Peter Neumann said anyone worth their salt in the hacking world is both right brain and left brain. They can see the granular details but they also can build the big picture. So, I mean by third generation hackers. Those who have grown up in the world I've been describing and are not surprised by anything I am saying. They understand that simulation and dissimulation is just how it is and how it works. They know that management of perception is just what we do. They know that perception warfare is just another name for trying to social engineer someone and then sandbag them or move them in a particular direction. It's not cryptography. It's a totally different way of thinking. What was it somebody said about cryptography? Cryptography is the opiate of the naive. Wasn't that a sentence? It came across an email. In other words, when you reduce the problem at any time to a single thing, as Bruce Schneier has learned, and now articulates so well, you learn that crypto for example, the more you harden it the better it gets just enables you to sabotage the system in another way. And that's what Peter Neumann kept repeating. He would talk to Ron Rivest and he would talk to Bruce and he would talk to other cryptographers and they would talk about the strength of their algorithms. Is that my phone? No. And he would point out but yes that's true but the entire system can be subverted and they would say that's not my problem. In what I'm talking about it is our problem. You have to see the system and I'm talking about the big system that determines how you perceive the world. Don't underestimate what they're doing in the closed world. Everything I have ever been able to ferret out is 20 years, 30 years ahead of what hackers are doing. And yet hackers are still not getting caught. Not getting caught. The best of them are not getting caught. Why? Because they manage their egos. They do not repeat patterns of behavior. They move only in small trusted, stealthy groups. Three, four, five, six, seven, no more than eight people at a time. They go into a system, they're there 20 minutes they go out. Yes, there may be a packet somewhere in the gigabytes of data that shows they've been there. And it may be recorded on some tool that can be uncovered through forensics but you're not going to spend 20, 30, 40 thousand dollars and more to find that packet in that huge haystack. So you'll learn what it is that others look for to detect your presence and then you avoid doing what others are looking for. Because it's always at the connections that people make. When you're looking at a community to try to get in you look at the nexus, you look at the doorway, you look at where the conversation is taking place to see what transpires. You may never be able to penetrate the inner circles of the concentric circles that ring out but there must be a conversation that is taking place and that is where you have to observe people in order to understand who they are and that is where they observe you because you're never going to get the true story of our history ever again. I was walking through the Cryptologic Museum at NSA with a good and valued friend and as we paused at the door of the room that said Cold War, he looked at it kind of wistfully and he said, my life has been spent in that room. And I said when will we ever get the story of what really took place that includes what you really did? And he said, never. Because it is never going to be declassified. There's just too much to declassify and it will be long after anyone is interested. And the point is that we no longer have a history. For those of us like myself who grew up with a single history, a shared mythology it has come as a shock for third generation hackers it doesn't. To know that we have histories, modules of history which are all mythologies many of which are not shared with other subcultures. And you have to be clear on how you are building the mythology yourself the way Jerry Reuben and his pals built Woodstock as a mythology for another generation in the 60s. There are no histories there are no histories that are true. There's only autobiography and Nietzsche said in the war between pride and memory, pride always wins. So there is never a true history that shows us to ourselves as our own poor American history should be evident as evidence of right now. Inside our history we believe we are special and different and cannot grasp easily why it is that the things that we do elsewhere like the 1953 revolution that we fomented and then disguised to bring back the Shah of Iran why this leaves lasting, deep hatred pain in the lives of other people. We're so at odds with the way nation states really work because we do believe we are special and different. And all I'm saying is the lack of alignment between what we claim as our values and what in fact we do that gets feedback loops that say something else to us is extreme. You can't change the nation in which you live but you can change the small group which as a hacker is part of your self-identity, your self-generated persona as I described myself recreating myself. You can choose with whom you will bond and how you will move speedily and stealthily in small trusted groups in order to try to get as big a picture as you can cobble together because that is really the end of hacking isn't it? The end of hacking is to get the pieces on the black market for truth and share them with one another so that you can know what is going on. What is going on is so often hiding in plain sight. Gary Webb wrote it he was destroyed for writing it. He wrote a book called Dark Alliance an article in Esquire testified to the truth of what he said but he still is not a journalist again. And then when I read in Dorothy Denning's book I don't remember the name of it on information war and computer security and I came across a story that accepted Gary Webb as a poser and a conspiracy theorist of the first rank and it accepted it at first value and I called Dorothy and said so how much do you really know about Gary Webb and she said who? And we both looked it up in the index and there was no mention and then we found the page on which she had referred to him and she didn't really remember who he was or how she stood up and you can get a sense of a methodology. She's a brilliant woman who does great work right but there's a methodology of collecting stories at top level and not hacking down to the bottom level to find out what that was really about. She just simply didn't know because she hadn't done the drilling down to the granular level to find out what the CIA story and the Contra story and the crack cocaine story really was all about. Another friend inside one of the agencies called the other day said I'm really concerned that some things are being overlooked. They said like what? Well he likes to talk about all sorts of things and I never know what to take as truth and how much he's just playing with me. Last time I quoted him verbatim in a column I was used by Joel Garot in the Washington Post as an example Joel called up and said I'm writing a story on thinking out of the box and I want to use you as an example puff puff puff puff puff don't ever listen to anybody in the media including myself ever. So he said what companies do you work for? So I told him the names of companies. I've worked with GE Medical and I've worked with UOP and he said great thanks and then I saw the article online and it was about how far can people who work with credible companies go in their nonsense before people will start to totally disbelieve anything they say. So yeah it's not fair. Right? Well it's not fair and the article was about one of my sources telling me what he thought was likely and possible which Joel had turned into what theme said was definite and when I pointed out the discrepancy he said well if it's not clear to me it's not clear to anybody and that was the end of the matter. That was my problem. Alright so one of the things this wonderful source talks about now is train derailments. Has anybody noticed since 9-11 an increase in the number of train derailments he's got online and does some research and he says they're up 20% and yes there are all sorts of reasons. Tracks are bad weather all kinds of conditions human error that cause train derailments but they're up 20%. So I went online and I start finding as many stories train derailments as I could and they're always the first story and they always conclude with this no one knows what caused the train to jump the tracks or something like this. Two derailments in two weeks is extremely unusual. I've been with the company 20 years and I can count on the fingers of one maimed hand. We didn't really say that but I thought it sounded better number of times this has happened. It's two derailments too many. Different things can cause it. The track of the weather is too early to say what caused it and all I'm saying is the story is always about people saying they don't know what caused it and I have searched in vain for subsequent stories to tell you what caused it and you never find them. You do find nine derailers a piece of railroad equipment used to derail trains have been stolen recently sources said setting the FBI's weekly intelligence bulletin it's strange since their little use outside the rail industry railroads have been targeted in the past by terrorists. I'm just saying here are bits and pieces I'm not making a claim that there has been an increase in train derailments in the past two years because terrorists are derailing trains I'm saying you don't know. You don't know because the media has no interest if it knew in letting you know. For the reasons that my friend reported the people who would write a story like that like Gary Webb are reassigned to a cow pasture or to the Cedarbrook Strawberry Festival they are not allowed to pursue the truth because it does not serve the corporate interest of the mass media to present the truth to you and therefore anyone who breaks the law by hacking into the original sources to find out what the hell is going on and the world that exists around them is called a criminal and in the environment which I described in which you can be pulled over at the airport because you spoke on a phone to a reporter or because you read aloud an editorial in a coffee shop can get a visit from the FBI is one in which intimidation and harassment dismissed by the agencies and police organizations that are doing it can be used to create a climate in which nobody ever again speaks out and for good reason who wants to get an email at 11 o'clock at night saying the invitation for you to speak and you make a living as a speaker has been withdrawn upon the advice of the FBI and therefore this is the matrix this is why the matrix resonates because it's truly the environment in which we find ourselves living the true value of hacking is to share the truth with people it is our culture it is our ethos but I beg you to be careful and clever in how you do that because you must first establish as clearly as possible the bonds of trust and the bonds of an ultimate intention in your hacking you have to learn first the tools of your trade to know how to go stealthily where you want to go in order to learn what is happening social engineering is always valuable because it is merely conversational it is merely tilting the boards of the stream of information runs downhill into the little pot all over the world about how well we were really doing in Iraq how come we were focusing on just a soldier here a soldier there dying only of relevance to his or her family after all we were really doing with securing a nation for the peace and freedom of the future and above all securing that oil pipe so it could blow again so wealth could be brought to the Iraqi people the way peace and freedom have been brought to the Iranian people hacking means knowing how to see through chance it means knowing how to feel when it doesn't work when it's wrong it knows when it's wrong it knows when it's wrong it knows when it's wrong it knows when it's wrong it knows the Laquana group who plea bargain their way into jail because they were offered a choice of being considered enemy combatants which means taking them out of the legal system or remaining within the system and getting guilty once you can threaten people in the system with taking them out of the system you no longer have a system and yes as long as it's nothing but Arabs in Laquana it's not a problem for us is it but when it's increasingly people on the left and the left is perceived as I said to be anywhere this side of people talking on the phone in an airport to reporter when you can be intimidated in that way then it is only a matter of time unless the tendencies that are having so much momentum right now are reversed until it is not just Arabs in Laquana the right to a trial is essential it is no longer ours the freedom not to be tortured during interrogation is no longer ours yes there's ship to friendly governments like Egypt or even Syria which has designed a wonderful cell in which you can either lie down or stand up nor sit but which you'd never the less relish because the only time you're taken out of it is when you're tortured and so the guy who has a German passport was telling people in Morocco not to worry about those who had been caught in the first al-Qaeda sweep claimed when he was interrogated by various intelligence agencies his right to return to Germany on his German passport and instead found himself in Syria two years ago and that cell has not been heard of since or we can simply not torture people just use what we call harsh interrogation I've talked to people who do it in Guantanamo if it's so e so effortless and kind to them to keep them in a cage in the tropical sun as room felt said a vacation as it were out of the cage fifteen minutes a week or we keep them in a cell where the lights are so bright you can't even shut the light out with your eyelids where the heat goes up to a hundred and ten then down to twenty back and forth and you notice it because you're naked and of course you're trembling because you haven't had enough food or drink and there's loud loud loud noises this is merely this is not torture this is merely interrogation the playing field has changed forever you cannot move in this country anymore without papers I remember when a picture a moving picture of someone coming down the aisle of the train asking to see your papers meant you were seeing a world war two movie and the person worked for the German government of the Gestapo things have changed their generation hacking is the ability as a good friend of mine said to recognize it and free the mind to live vibrantly in a world without walls how can we live vibrantly he asked knowing that people can walk through walls that you can put on the coke of invisibility and disappear how can you use that power which is not trivial it is the essence of hacking do not be deceived by their uniforms or ours by mine of course I'm wearing a DEF CON shirt this is DEF CON and a guy came up to me at the association for investment management and research and said how come you're wearing a $500 suit why don't you wear one of those black outfits and pierce your chest with a titanium bar like you do when you're in Las Vegas he got the bar wrong he was thinking of AJ and I said obviously I'm wearing the uniform that makes sense to the people to whom I'm speaking do not be deceived there is no theirs or ours there are only moments of awareness at the nexus the connecting touch where fiction and myth do in fact connect there are only moments of convergence but if it's all on behalf of finding out the real truth and disclosing it then it is hacking I have all this wonderful stuff on the UFO culture that I've explored and maybe I'll do another talk on that somewhere else some other time but it all shows what it's like in the wilderness of mirrors when you're trying to find out and what happens to you if you find out the truth I'll just include one from that world when I thought for about 48 hours that I had what was as close to a smoking gun as I was ever going to find multiple witnesses, material residue all still intact on a ranch in South Dakota and so I finally told some people the story and I learned as Weld Pond said to me well just tell the story and then all you lose is credibility because you've been made to look ridiculous illusion, misdirection, ridicule these three are the hallmarks of deception and cover but ridicule is the greatest you can hide the truth in plain sight and even if you find the truth no one will believe it the truth of the hacking community from way back look at the text files from the bulletin boards it's fringe stuff because we knew the truth was likely to be found on the fringes and on the edges we have always valued that fringe stuff we know there's a lot of chaff there but there's wheat too and the purpose of this community is to share the information we genuinely find on behalf of moving speedily and stealthily in organized ways to achieve the values in which we deeply believe for the first time in history that I know of the values of the hacking ethos and the values we used to call American have converged completely and therefore it is not seditious it is not rebellious and it is not terroristic to want to know the truth so the truth can illuminate the topography of the landscape in which we live people who are bound to the matrix and will cling to it ferociously rather than be freed can make choices they would rather not make because they would prefer to stay within the safety of their comfortable little world that's not what hacking is about it's being uncomfortable and leaving that world but trust the people trust them when they are worthy of trust and remember that Lyndon Johnson said trust is when you have them by the balls Lyndon Johnson knew trust but verify as our president once said a president who said he could not understand how anybody could be president if they had not first been an actor right true story and the truth of it is revealed every time we have a press conference where there they are with our current president so know that in the discovery of the truth that you seek you will be transformed there will be moments of apprehension that feel like freefall a zone of annihilation which everything you thought was true is called into question and disappears in front of know that you will have to reach out in the darkness in that freefall and there will not be a hand to take know that that is the risk and that is the exhilaration that is required of us if we are going to be true to any of the things in which we so deeply believe but be true to the ethos the hacker ethos is the essence of this quest if ever it was stay tight with each other get the feedback that will give you the knowledge you need to stay steady and remain accountable to each other on behalf of the bigger picture okay the man has come up and said it's Q&A time so pause there and invite you to ask any questions that you would like oh I know Q&A thank you thank you as usual throw business cards down they have my email my website anybody ever wants to connect with me about any issue or request help or be of value in any way take a card that's what I'm here for that's what I'm there for don't hesitate to be in touch