 I'm gonna have a cellular telephone. I'm just curious. Can I get a raise of hands, please? Just cellular telephone owners and users in this room. Come on, there's got to be more than that. Raise your fucking hands, you lazy bastards. Come on. Raise your hands. Cell phone owners. Come on, we got more than that. All right. Well, apparently there's only five people in this room who could do our job. All right. I guess we should just go home. Yeah, how many people in this room have a computer? Let's try that. Okay. All right. Now, those of you who do not have a cellular phone, lower your hands. Anybody here who's not working for the National Security Agency, raise your hand. See now, the NSA guys are kind of slow. Sometimes they don't pick up on that one. They leave their hands down. They go like, what did he say? You can pick them out like right away. So who saw the helicopter flying overhead yesterday? Anybody here? Anybody see that helicopter? We got some pictures of it. Kind of interesting. It says search and rescue or SAR on the side, but like, we're trying to figure out why US military Bell Huey Chopper is doing search and rescue, whatever, over this particular area. So get a fucking clue. All right. So the reason we're here is to talk to you today. And I'm going to introduce myself in a minute, but right now it's better that you shouldn't know who I am. We're going to talk today about how to have a career in cypher-punking or hacking or whatever really, you know, makes your boat float. I was kind of serious when I said, whoever has a phone like this can do my job because, you know, I'm not really that smart or anything. I just been doing this a while. So you learn a few things over the years. Some of you people are young. That's cool. I like that. I was young once. Yeah, I really was. You can't tell right now, but I was. I looked at a picture of myself when I was 20 years old. A couple of weeks ago and I was going, man, I thought I was fat then. All right, so How many people here have find it useful to have money? There's some really fucking lazy people in this room because I saw like four of you motherfuckers. It didn't even raise your hands. All right, somebody bring me a space cake. We'll be having some fun here in a minute. Where's Gilmore? Hey Gilmore, get in here if you can hear the sound of my voice. Gilmore, Gilmore, come in, please. Literally. All right, so let me introduce myself and my illustrious cohorts here and we'll probably have some other fellows join us later. Yeah, we're in the workshop tent and there's like, what are like 300 people here listening to us right now. So Come on over anytime. It's it's convenient. Really. We're just getting started and we're not saying anything particularly important yet Okay, so how to make lots of money doing crypto? So all right, so my name is Dave Del Torto. I work for Deloitte and Touche. You may have heard of it. It's about 90,000 people around the world. We do Professional services, that sort of thing. That's my day job. That's the one that makes this phone ring Actually, it's the one that makes it makes it light up at all To my right and your left is Samir Parek He's like one of the dudes at Securify, which is Taherel Gamal's new company He could tell you about that. He's also the guy who started c2 net And before that worked on the original anonymizer He's a cypher punk from way back when he was even younger than he is now, which is Fucking embryo when he started this over there to our right is adam show stack What do you know like chief technical president of the universe at NetTect or NetTect or Oh, he's got a new company. What's that? What's a new one? Oh, he's at zero knowledge now. See it's like this shit happens every day Like one day he's working for one company and now he's working for another cool company Somewhere on the premises. We also have Ian Goldberg who is the chief scientist at Zero knowledge. He's passed out right now. I should love these kind of gatherings Uh, we're very informal. We're sorry by the way to keep you waiting We didn't really even have any awareness that this was going on right at this moment in time So, uh, just forgive us for just wandering over here and starting I don't even know what time it is or how long we're supposed to go. So we're just going to get started here I'll say a couple of words about uh, how to make money doing responsible hacking and cypher punking And then I'll give it over to samir and adam and they can talk about it By then we'll have some more people joining us They'll make their comments Then we'll just do like a big free-for-all question and answer session because some of you guys may be interested in how pgp Inc was started. I know a little bit about that um Adam knows all kinds of stuff about the boston scene where mit is which is I think where the word hacking was invented Uh, and samir and I are west coast guys. We work in silicon valley. Essentially, of course We work all over the place now. We're working here right now as a matter of fact How many people would like to have that job? Still only one guy raised with his hands. What can I say, man? All right, so uh, uh, this is what I did, right? I volunteered my time quite a bit for about eight years And as a result of that got to be in some of the companies that start up like pgp incorporated Eventually I got to be a very very important sounding title at network associates, which I then um threw back in their faces and left Uh for various reasons having to do with integrity And I then signed on with this delaying toosh operation, which uh, for me is actually a pretty good deal I'm the director of technology for the security services group, which is the cryptography research group And um, it's it's a great job. You can have a job like this too Um, if I had wanted to write my favorite job, this would have been pretty much how I would have written it So it was possible to find out there a job that sounds exactly like your favorite job whatever you want to be doing for money Um, I won't go into why it's nice to have money I don't have like huge amounts of money like some people here, but you know, I have enough to get me here and all that stuff So that's cool for me. Um, and I have enough to basically donate Money so that I can do this crypto rights foundation thing, which samir is also involved in by the way. He's uh, he's like the No, the number two guy, I guess or the number one guy if I'm number zero guy That makes you feel good. I don't know Anyway, he does as much as I do which is to say that we put a you know, a little bit of our free time effort into Trying to do technical security work for human rights groups, which is kind of cool and actually Because I wrote my job, uh, my job likes that idea that I do that in my spare time, uh, which is okay by me so, uh What I'm getting at here is that uh, you need to volunteer your time in the direction in which you want to go That's an excellent way of doing things in this world Particularly in the internet community where there's a lot of interconnected You know communities and work groups like we have represented here I don't know how many of you guys arrived with each other Kind of thing or who's like just struggling and all by themselves But there's obviously little groups of people who know each other and this is a very cool thing that we should all meet in one place That happens, you know at a million times a second on the internet and That is how you get to know the people who will eventually Start companies run companies or work at companies where you can make money doing your favorite thing And if you're out there building reputation capital, which is a very investable thing on the internet Then you will have at some point a chance in the non virtual world to to collect a salary That's actually a really cool thing because as I said you can then do things with your salary That have further, you know cascading effects on the on the rest of the world So that's my two cents for now. I'll just pass it over to samir and he can say something about this and adam you guys okay, so I suppose the uh Let's see somebody bring us some water at some point if anybody has any handy or something like that You know what's been putting it so that may be a good thing. Who knows have a partially drunk beer. Thank you very much Yeah, okay. Anyway, so Um the way I've been trying to make money has been through starting companies doing. Uh-huh. Thank you You're a man Have been starting companies doing interesting things that need to be done And um, I suppose I'll talk briefly about Some of what I did and some of what I've learned. I've got you know three. What is it? Five years worth of stories, so I can't tell them all today But a few of them are pretty um Are pretty valuable So if you're interested in starting your own company and you have questions you can ask them or maybe one of the brief stories I tell you today will be useful so Well, uh, just want to say we will be having like ongoing workshops in the cypherpunks and the crypto rights tent on stuff like this So if you don't think of your question now or in the next Half hour an hour, you can come and talk to us anytime Assuming we're sober, you know Or not Yeah, that's also pretty useful They get a really good answer So, um, how long should I talk in? Level of detail five minutes level of detail discuss, uh, discuss the market cap on your current venture The market cap on my Just go man Okay, so tell about your job What I do with my job if you do anything I'd rather tell talk about studying company because that's actually interesting. Um, so In 94 it was an interesting time because I just moved to california. I just started school I was going to university california at Berkeley and I just took up with the cypherpunks I was on the cypherpunks mailing list and on the cypherpunks mailing list. It was great people were talking about all this crap about Making the internet anonymous and providing anonymous communications and making the government irrelevant and being able to provide communications for people to do civil liberties work and Not have to pay the taxes so the government couldn't infringe upon people civil liberties because they don't have a tax base to spend and a bunch of really good ideals which I strongly supported and people talked about how All of the great anonymous technology, which has was basically invented in the 80s would be able to be used to provide for all of this value but Everyone was talking about all this technology that was developed in the 80s and this was in 94 And if the technology was developed in the 80s, why wasn't it being implemented? And most of the people were like, oh, this technology is great Magic fairies from the sky are going to come down and they're going to give us this technology And we're going to overthrow the government and it will be great and we won't have to do any work And I knew that was pretty bogus So I thought well, this is bogus. I should make something happen So I just started a company. I'm like, well, this needs to be done. I've got A little bit of money. I had like a computer my parents gave me A spoke to which was expensive at the time um And just got into a connection and started a company and it was all very confusing because I knew nothing about what companies Company structures were what's all proprietors were what taxes were what is Why didn't you very much? I'm sorry. What was your name again? What's your name to be us everybody? This is to be us. Can you thank him, please? Tobias is an A perfect example of somebody volunteering in the sphere in which he's interested in working You see now, I'm going to remember the guy if he ever wants a job later, you know, not just carrying water either I'm sure you could do cool stuff Go ahead go ahead. Here's my card. It's not a get out of jail free card, but Go buy the fucking jail so So I started implementing a bunch of anonymous services But it turned out that people really didn't want to pay for the anonymous services I had to provide A bunch of people were using them and it was really cool and valuable But I ended up coming up with it with the product Which was actually a software product that I could sell and people would pay a thousand bucks for it Rather than a service. Let's let's just pause there and just okay What year was that again? That was like 1995-96 when I came out with stronghold. Yeah, it was 96 So like 96 so think about that folks. That's a thousand dollars in 1996 dollars. That's what like That's like a vio. That's a vio laptop these days Per per like item, right? Yeah, put a piece of put a bit of software so um The product well Okay, so My company was basically an internet provider. It had all these privacy features on top of it But it was basically just an internet provider. You can get an account. You just didn't have to tell me who you were You could pay anonymously all sorts of things like that um So I had at my site a web server and I was using Apache which was the most popular web server at the time Like I'll just go with the flow. I'll use whatever's the most popular but in Uh That's cool. Let him cry. Let him cry. That's cool Yeah, well skip that story Well, no, so there was a story that I was considering to tell I'll tell that later But anyway, so the product added um cryptography to Apache which is a web server Um, which is the most popular web server in use on the internet And the product's name was strongholded at the time all it did was add cryptography A bunch of licensing and a bunch of um necessary business arrangements that needed to be done In order to make the product useful I think it's worth noting here. I guess that's actually an interesting story because yeah, this is this is this is worth noting The value that I created in selling this in this product was 100% non-technical It's kind of funny because today a lot of people come up to me and they act like I'm a technical person And yeah, I have a technical background. I did cs and school and stuff, but I bailed on that after just a year and a half um So what I did all I did was take a bunch of products that were available for free on the internet I put them all together. I licensed some patents from rsa. I did a business deal with verisign And I had a product that I could sell for a thousand bucks And we talked about that licensing deal a little bit So the margin on that was pretty good because I didn't do any work putting it together On a technical perspective all I did was do all the business set and the business end was a lot of work But it's not something A rocket scientist needs to do It's just something you need to put your mind to doing and you do it and then it's done And then you can start making money off of it. So So in early 96, I came out with this product at the time. I was only charging 500 bucks a copy. I wasn't charging a thousand bucks And Started selling the product and that actually started making money. So I knew that the right thing to do was to follow the money so I I moved away from the privacy services business into this encryption software business now one of the interesting things I learned with respect to the pricing issue Is that the first edition of the product was only 500 dollars And I had all sorts of customers. I was doing great, but a lot of the customers I had were really annoying They would call up on the phone and they'd ask for I still hold their hand and well people would always ask for support and we'd give them support because that's one of the very important values Give to them but The 500 dollar customer was The kind of customer that wants everything for free. They'd pay you their 500 bucks But they'd call you up and they'd want hours and hours of phone support for free just because they gave you their 500 bucks It's like for 500 bucks that doesn't get you a whole lot of support Maybe it'll get you an hour or an hour and a half of an engineer But not the five to ten hours people want an engineer hand-holding them while they're installing it but so these 500 dollar A pop customers would call us up and complain in her ass and we wouldn't We couldn't afford to give them that level of support So we wouldn't but we'd still have our receptionists and our sales staff always having to be nice to them because they are our customers So we still have to be nice to them But but then when we came out with the second version of the product we made the price of thousand bucks When we raised the price to a thousand bucks our customers became so much nicer We call this we haven't phrased they wanted less for the thousand bucks for the twice that they paid Yeah, we had a bunch of people who had been paying 500 bucks before and got upset that we raised the price to a thousand bucks Separating the men from the boys One of the really important things that I learned is not just that people who pay more are willing Expect less But people who pay people who have a brain Want your business to survive Because if someone is buying a product from you And you're charging them 10 bucks and then they think these guys must be losing money charging 10 bucks They're not going to be around another you're charging 10 bucks ahead for their product Then even though you're undercutting the competition and your products better than all the rest If your customer doesn't think you can make money by selling product to them They're not going to buy products from you because they know you're not going to be around any year because you'll have gone out of business So customers who pay a higher price per unit then seem to have more interest in your success. Is that what you're saying? Yeah They have more interest in your success and they generally have more intelligence about it because It's important for customers to be interested in their vendor's success The $500 a unit customers we had were not interested in our success They just wanted to pass this and get stuff from us for free and they didn't end up Getting a whole lot when we raised the price to a thousand bucks. They stopped buying Our sales ended up going up, of course But those customers specifically stopped buying and they didn't get the value that we had to offer to them So that was a very important lesson um if we go on to adam say How many people here So i'm curious people here have a microphone that works How many people here would consider themselves not a brilliant programmer? Someone who would you know people who are better programmers than you? Okay, okay now now i'm in this category and I am i'm about to start working for zero knowledge doing product design product direction and designing the freedom services And the anonymity services that hopefully all of you will be using I think this is really cool. I've been involved with cypher punks for eight or nine years now I think privacy is incredibly important And someone's going to pay me to do it. I think that is just so cool And by the way, can I just ask how many people here wanted his job? It can be honest, you know, you can be honest. Oh, that's bullshit No, seriously, that is bullshit. Yeah, this is something I've wanted to do for eight years And someone is going to pay me to spend my time doing it How many people would like to get paid to do something they've wanted to do for the last 10 years? Okay, thank you so The question is how do you get there? How do you get to a point where Someone will let you walk in the door Tell them what the job you want to do is explain to them Why you should be paid to do it and make this all come together And a lot of it comes from the reputation stuff that that david samir have been talking about reputation is really important If you have the reputation You can go to a conference and meet someone and they'll say, oh I've talked to you online or I've read some of your stuff and that's a really useful thing because It gets past some of the initial. Well, why are we talking with you sort of thing that can happen because time's limited So reputation is really valuable. The other thing that's a really valuable thing to develop Is an understanding of how your pointy-haired bosses think you don't need to think this way yourself you need to understand how they think And you laugh because it feels dumb But you know if you want the job where they will pay you to do what you want to do You have to know how to explain to them Why it's a good idea for them to pay you if you can't do that. You're not going to get the job Actually, I disagree but i'll talk about it later I mean that that's kind of why we're here We're here to prove to you that you can actually be like a little pointy-haired boss yourself and have a Tremendous effect on things like John John here is really a pointy-haired boss, but you can't tell Okay, he's like the coolest pointy-haired boss on the planet probably and you can't tell No, no, no, I'm not talking about looks you're talking about what he does Sure, um The thing that I think would be really important and very good Is if people can get on the internet and do things on the internet and in real life In a private fashion where it's not possible to link the internet persona To the persona in the real world. I think that would be a fantastic thing to have happen And we can talk about why that would be a fantastic thing, but if you take for a minute that I believe that then What we need to do is find somebody Who can figure out how to make money doing that? Right, and if we can find some way to make money doing that then I can do what I want to do Do you see what I'm saying you? Yeah, well in this in my case somebody else figured out how to make money five years ago I sat down and spent three months Trying to figure out a way to make money very similar to what samir was doing and not being able to make money I tried to figure it out didn't find the answer Somebody else figured out the answer and then I went to them and said let's give me a job So this this was made easier just to suck This was made easier by the fact that I had developed over the last years reputation capital Knew some of the people who were involved already and could go to them and say look, you know me. Let's let's have a serious conversation So have another question over here But that person can recommend you Yes, that that person can recommend you you can choose to reveal that that identity is your identity If you're willing to do that there are a number of cypher punks who for a long time have used fake names Who've gone under various names on the list black unicorn lucky green is lucky here Lucky is not around and we're not going to point him out because he may use his real name at the conference And we don't want to tie those together for him But there are cypher punks who like lucky who I now know In the real world and I'm not going to tell you his real name, but you can you can tie those together through selective revelation through Making a recommendation. There's ways to get around that problem. So In a way they're contradictory, but we can deal with those contradictions So let me just finish and then I'll hand over to john by saying that The the things that I see as key are reputation capital and an understanding of the way the business world thinks Because with those two things you can go out you can raise money You can build a business plan and get to do what you want to do So i'm going to pass on to john gilmore who will describe the cool stuff. He's doing Sorry john. Yeah, hello um I guess I can talk a little bit about starting a free software company, which was sygnus solutions and uh, and then go back to I actually like to talk about Your question or your comment So, um sygnus was a free software company. They maintain the gnu compiler and debugger Uh, it was started by me david hankle wallace and mike teamon 1989 And what we originally thought we were going to do was Take over for the compiler departments of big companies like sun or deaf That they would just adopt the gnu compiler because it was better And we'd get the job of maintaining it and charge them a million dollars a year for it or something No, none of them ever bought that though We never convinced anyone to do it, but we stumbled into a different market Which was for cross compilers into embedded systems Where you're you're running on a workstation or a pc or whatever and you're compiling for a microwave oven a networking board or something like this And it turns out all the tools that existed for that were being built by these small companies fairly fat and lazy They were charging half a million dollars for a port to a new chip and 10 000 dollars a copy for the software So um, so we took a piece of free software put in the work We needed to do to make it compete with those And then sort of blew our way into the market and said well, we'll port it to your chip for 300 000 dollars Right and you can give copies away to all your customers And they thought this was a great idea we talked enough companies into this intel in the early days Son we were doing the g plus plus the new c plus plus compiler for son For their research group that was building a whole operating system in c plus plus As long as you can solve somebody's problem They don't care whether you do it with free software or with proprietary what they care is they get their job done And so they'll be glad to pay you the same kind of money They're paying the commercial houses except the result goes into the free software community And it keeps feeding back with updates and improvements from everybody else in the world So That's that was how I tried to combine Making a living and also Doing good for uh software and Yeah, so in talking about your comment Yeah, I think it's possible to have a job and an activism life and the two are separate It's it's a joy if you can actually combine them if you can't you know you live with what you live with But you can help I think you can help by using the activism side using your your moral sense To seek out the opportunities in the commercial world and decide which ones are good for the world and try and get jobs at Those talk to the people at those etc Well, sometimes even when you start your own business sometimes you don't have that freedom In the united states they passed a law about five or six No longer than that 10 years ago that said that A company is not allowed to hire people unless they can prove that they're citizens of the united states And this was to get back at people coming in from mexico And it's clamped down on general people living there and working without permission from other other countries There's a bad idea. I thought and I I said I would never enforce that law I never heard Oh foreigners. Yeah, I think that what you heard was that they raised the number of people allowed in per year to 90,000 people And this year it's been raised to 200,000 people Not the number of dollars that you can pay one of them Yeah on the um on the activism front, I think that From my perspective in order to accomplish social good in the world one actually has to do pretty big things and one can't As accomplish social good just by raising consciousness and telling people what's going on one actually has to accomplish things Get things done get products out there and in order to do that You need a significant amount of capital in order to get that capital You need to start a company and make money with that company so you can Do things in two ways. I think one way Is to start a company whose goal it is is to produce some product Which has a very strong social good such as the freedom product The zoonology systems is putting out and by getting that product out there Using the initial capital you have get the product out there build That product into something large And with that accomplishment you've then achieved a social good that you wouldn't have been able to achieve Just by being active and saying privacy is a good thing that we all should have and it's all good Zero knowledge systems the one adam will be soon working for because If they succeed Then everyone on the internet will be able to have anonymity how many people here have heard of the zero knowledge systems company You just give us an indication. Okay, so there are a lot of people who don't know about it Well, let's tell you a little bit about it first because it's it's a pretty interesting thing This is a good example of how you take cypher punk products and our cypher punk software and productize it in a general way Did you want to say something? Yeah, I was out I think this is a good idea. I want to apologize for Dragging my company that i'm going to be working for in here But I I do believe we can use it for good examples. No, it's okay. It's it's a very good example If you didn't think it was worth working for you wouldn't be working. That's right. Yeah, it's perfectly cool You know a little a little plug here. It doesn't doesn't you know hurt anybody okay, so There are great people to talk about the origin of the thing i'll start off by saying that That the zero knowledge system software implements only they call anonymous internet protocol And it is a combination of a couple of technologies that were developed Both among the cypher punk groups on the lists and also Cypher punks who work in government agencies like the naval research lab As well as commercial software developers who have you know products that are already out there on the market so For example, the cypher punk remailers Started out one of the two guys with john who sort of founded the cypher punks group in the bay area And I guess was peninsulas out san francisco or whatever Was it was eric hughes who worked on the remailer software at uc berkeley And eric was one of the guys who first started the cypher punk archive at berkeley And who I think still kind of maintains it sort of Uh Somebody does anyway probably nakita knows that anyway So the the remailers were a way of sending email through a chain of Remailing devices each one of which would strip the header information off of the proceeding message Thereby somewhat anonymizing it from everybody beyond that hop And if you chained up enough of those you could have a reasonable guarantee of anonymity or pseudonymity at the other end The there were a couple of management problems in the system Uh among them being the reliability of the remailer servers Just the difficulties of working with send mail the fact that it was really more scripting than application development stuff like that Um But it became a very useful thing for a bunch of us to use to send email to each other To each other anonymously or to post a list and honestly or to news groups And that was actually a good thing in the development of the cypher punk movement because It enabled some people to sort of rant and rave on on on lists and some people to you know Give us a really good example of their poor maturity and some people to basically out themselves or get themselves thrown in federal prison or whatever But it's one of those disinfectant things You know that that works really well as well as being a useful way for some people to post technical information Which was very important to people in other countries, for example without having fear of being imprisoned So um that was useful Then somebody at the naval research lab came up with uh with onion routing Which is an interesting protocol for doing the same kind of thing with with uh http packets It was originally intended as a way for military Uh people to be able to surf websites anonymously Yeah, actually Yeah, go ahead on that topic I asked these guys at the annual crypto conference. They presented the onion routing idea Um of forwarding these packets around so you couldn't tell where they came from It's like why is the us navy working on this and why do you want to make it free? Right, why are you giving it to us and they said well, you know We won't have anonymity out in the world unless you do If everything is trackable on the net you'll be able to watch us too And somebody an AT&T picked up on this and uh came up with a marketing slug And that was very clever says anonymity loves a crowd So, I mean this is a really cool point that john brings up It was this military organization That decided to free this idea out into the world so that they could benefit from it But coincidentally everybody else here gets to benefit from it somewhat now I happen to be of the opinion that this would have happened in regards of whether naval research lab Participated or not because we were already on the track But they really you know pushed it a little bit and of course immediately some people found some holes in the protocol And people found implementation problems and stuff like that And adam works with one of those guys adam Yeah, I wanted to to say that the naval research guys are a great example of how you can twist your job Into something that you really want to do If you can figure out a way to sell it to management these guys wanted to build a privacy tool They said, you know, we really need to look at these other countries military websites We can't do it From naval sites. So we need anonymity Gosh, we're going to create this an anonymity tool and give it away to everyone. It's an excellent hack on the navy. Excellent hack. Yeah, it really is phenomenal Yeah But they didn't Right, the important thing to understand here is the guys who did this at nrl are actually cypher punks We know them from various meetings that we've held and they've come and they've shared the idea that and this is networking That I was talking about way way in the beginning We know these guys reasonably well enough to say, you know, the work they're doing is a very is very good evidence of where their hearts lay so You know when john says that this is this is a you know an interesting thing for the military to do and why did they do it I mean, that's a perfect example of guys Doing activism regardless of what their employment is Okay, which is kind of what i'm touching on what john's talking about as well Let me extend that a little bit more and and say that but they didn't is my flip technical answer This this goes back to learn how to think like your bosses You and I understand that there's other solutions available and this might not be The only way to do it. It might not be the cheapest way to do it But if you present it correctly and sell it correctly it gets done No, no, that's exactly the opposite of what he's saying, but it's if you want to make that point as valve But that's exactly the opposite of what he's saying Okay, right between you and the boss. You don't you don't care how he thinks Right, you just need to know how to work within that that system Too minute. I mean, has anybody here heard of a television show called sergeant bilco It's a really old american tv show about this guy who was in the army and he could get anything done His commanding officer came to him when there was any problem because this guy had it down He understood the system so well that if it was a matter of like getting this huge truck or if he needed a You know an aircraft carrier for something. He knew who to call for the favor He knew how to you know manipulate the system. He knew how to fill out the forms whatever needed to be done You do you really have a problem I didn't know that's That's that's not what i'm saying. That's not what i'm saying. That's interesting, but it's not what i'm saying No, no, I I Okay one I did not contribute anything to the actions that the military did. I don't use the naval research lab systems Um, I haven't contributed code to it. I'm not doing anything for it I'm using it as an example Of how people who are working for the military Are doing things that I think are useful now Would I Suggest that everyone go out and use this military system so that they can get anonymity No, I don't think that's a good idea actually they don't have to because your company is going to provide a nice solution, aren't they? Which is really more to the point when someone is working for the military and that's a choice that they've made If they'd like to build technology that I find useful like the gps system Then I may decide to take advantage of that. I don't consider that the military Per se is evil. They do some good things. They do some bad things and we need to judge those Yeah, okay, so Um Forward on to some more bullshit. So, okay I just want to give you some I just want to give you some summary points here That we can argue about over in the tent over there or over in the crypto rights tent um A couple of things that uh floated to the top here one, uh, write your own job description Which is a really useful thing go out and volunteer in that area and network with other people who like to do what you want to do Uh samir suggested that at some point you may want to start your own company if you have the right, you know, constellation of people and finances Maybe target yourself as the first customer. So you know exactly what you're trying to produce and why you're trying to produce it Um go out and find some customers who are like-minded Licensed to any technology that you might need Uh find customers who will pay more because they care about the fact that you're going to survive to provide them with further services Uh develop reputation capital So that you can um, you know, so you can make your way through the technical community you want to work in Uh learn how to think like your boss and understand how they work So you can manipulate what it is that they have to offer into something good Um, you don't necessarily need to start your own company You may actually find somebody who does exactly what you want to be doing and has figured out a way to sell it Join up with them Um and try to solve your problems with free software. It's a really good thing to do for everybody So those are some some of the things that we talked about does anybody want to Uh talk about any of those topics Or anything else Yeah, yeah, okay Okay, so got a question over there and he probably is Which totally cool Yeah, no, no, let me let me just say something here You know, don't don't necessarily take that guy down in order to convince us that you're good because you're probably good I can tell and uh, that's cool. And he's probably good too But you have something to offer for less money and you think you can do his good job Right So so there's snake oil in reputation as well as in software. That's pretty obvious Yeah, we have an anonymizing remailer that you can send email to about that Um, let me let me just say one thing about this Can I just say one thing about this and I think this is a really this is one of my philosophies I hope it works for you guys as well. My philosophy is if all my friends are getting rich, I'll be just fine That's really seriously. I've been thinking that way for a long time. You know, um Every once in a while somebody like gives you a little money or something like that and you think yourself Well, what did I do to deserve that and then you know, you think oh, well, okay So I helped so-and-so make you know way more money than that or you know, whatever The point is that it all comes around to you eventually if you do something really bad working for the military Okay, eventually your ass is going to get kicked somehow, right? You're gonna you're just going to engender that kind of karma and that's the way it is If you don't have to work for the military, you know You're going to fuck yourself up some other way because you're that kind of person, right? If you start thinking about the people around you and not like hacking their local networks So they can't fucking connect to the gateway Right then Then then you're probably somebody who's out there doing good work for a lot of other people And we will find out about you and we will help you're out, you know I mean people come to me now young guys whatever, you know Older guys doesn't matter really and they you know They find out what my gig is and they say, you know, you got any work I say yeah, absolutely or I say no fuck you very much because it's based on you know I don't say right to their face But you know this is this is person who has not contributed at all Or a person has zero potential to contribute or doesn't evidence any interest in other people Then it's not going to do me a lot of good to help them because it'll be like a dead end for me To put my energy into right but on the other hand if it's a guy that writes a really useful tool And he starts giving it away to people free I want this guy to get as much press and as much, you know exposure inside my company as well as to all my customers and Clients as I can possibly give them You know, I mean guys like adam smear john, whatever they're doing. I mean john's, you know Funding essentially a free software product right now with a free swan thing And we're going to be demonstrating that right? Yeah Ongoing during the conference, but at some point it'll be set up between the cypher punk stent and the crypto right stent We'll have two ends of an ipsec telling you can check out Oh, yeah, I think we'll have the ipsec install fest On sunday which means afternoon means that john and hugh will show you how to do it Bring your linux machine will install the ip security stuff on there And you can set up virtual private networks among you and all your friends very cool So anyway, my point exactly is that they're doing stuff like this I mean he's flying himself and a couple other people out here to do this thing Because he's got the wherewithal because he worked inside the corporate thing at the right time and and can now do this You know I can afford to do this. I mean, this is a very good example of somebody who puts his money where his mouth is right So try to make sure that all your friends are doing really well It's a really good way to do this kind of cypher punk stuff really is and free software is an excellent solution Now I must I must tell you that I learned recently that the software that that hugh daniel and john gilmore have been Managing and and getting people to work on all over the world Is considered both by by the icsa and by my company where we have a lab to be the benchmark software for ipsec That's not an insignificant fact in case anybody here is pretty frightening. It is pretty I mean, it means it's really what what do the rest of those guys have I mean Yeah, yeah But this is a great example of how a free software product run by cypher punks Is raising the waters for all the boats out there doing ipsec because everybody is is basically breaking their product against what they're doing Um, okay, so Yeah, more questions. Uh, anybody Anybody have a question about the technical question perhaps? Yeah, we got one right in the middle here. She's been waiting for a while No, no, what we said was that we don't mind using the software the military has developed To do something good That's what we said. Yeah, but it's not like Yeah, there is another point though, okay Adam yeah, adam Oh, okay, well So so the question is if if the technology that we build can be used for good or evil And also should we take money from the military to do things? Are those sort of the questions that you're asking? well, well, let me Let me take the question of um Take building technology for money We built eight nine years ago Remailers we built some web proxies over five years ago There's lots of privacy out there on the internet today Or there's lots of privacy technologies available. No one is using them because they're hard to use So I personally think that people spending money Developing better interfaces more usable systems is a good thing. Whoever those people are As to is military r&d money well spent usually not it's usually a pile of bunk And what we paid for gps is way more than it's worth in all probability But we don't control what the military spends money on about a week ago in the new york times It came out that the u.s. Air force was spending 800 million dollars That congress had told them not to spend to buy a new satellite The the military in the united states goes off and Spends money on things that it wants to spend money on And the reason we brought them up the reason I'm using them as an example Is because some people who were working for the military are still are working for the military found a way to build a useful piece of technology And make it available to people and I think that's a good thing Despite all of the evil things that the military does and that the police forces in the united states do I think that having them build technology is good Yeah, let's let's not let's not get into the rhetoric of like, you know Something done for the military justifies what the military does. It's really not relevant to this discussion Um question. Yeah I think that the definition of the useful Yeah, that's what we have young people from the definition of the useful what a useful technology is That's what we have young people for is because they keep reinventing what's good and bad. Okay We're not pretending to have all the answers You know John dolder than me. I'm older than the smear really doesn't matter at all How old we are at this point because we're just doing as much good stuff as we can do But yeah, eventually we'll croak, you know, and then you guys will be the guys like us in here or whatever You know in the year five years ten years, whatever, right? And then you'll be telling people who are still figuring out what's going on in the world You know where they can go to try and do something useful and it's your personal You know definition of what's useful. I'm not going to tell you what's useful I think it's useful if every corporate network in the world starts using digital cash I have a lot of reasons why I think that's useful That might they may not coincide with your reasons Nevertheless, I think that sort of thing is is going to happen because a lot of people will agree that it's very useful So in a sense doing things that are beneficial to your friends Is a way of keeping in touch with what is useful for a lot of people It's that part about be your own customer first Put build the stuff that's useful to you And spread it around and see what other people say see that they'd say Well, this is this does 90 of my job Can you just add this little bit over here and then you go? Ah now? I know what how I can be better for the world as I put on the little five percent and it's twice as useful How many people here are just really quick question and I want to ask everybody How many of you guys here are creating software of some kind doing an interface? Web form web proxy whatever anybody here doing an engineering product here project Anything like that raise your hands. Just give us an idea of like how many here are producing things. Okay. Well cool Well, there's so there's a few people in the room here who are doing things Do any of those people want to talk about what they're doing and have us discuss that all of us Anybody here doing a useful project? Okay, you're doing it something useful. Good It fits to what he said One of the problems of Especially the technology is that people don't use it The technology is there and Most people here in the room could Encrypt things in all ways that they want to think about But the normal user just doesn't use it Sometimes isn't even aware of it so one thing I started about Like like pgp domo, right? So so this actually goes to to what adam something adam was saying about him um You know not necessarily needing to start your own company for example Well finding somebody else who already has a company that wants to sell your idea Yeah, it doesn't because that that's a way of understanding some boss somewhere or understanding some some business person To the point where you can essentially engineer them to do something good for everybody Right Okay Yeah It's an interesting question. Do do users appreciate the tools that you give them if they're so transparent that they don't know They're even there um But but but but understand something here you you've made a really interesting point But your your interesting point kind of contradicts your example Um, your example is that this boss this client whatever Took two and a half years to figure something out, right? Yeah, yeah, but but the point here the point here is that two and a half years ago They didn't get it, but you did and you tried to explain it to them, right? And I think the point that we were trying to make here a little earlier is there's no way for you to explain to these people Why it should work the way it should work, right? There's no way for you to explain to them They have a very narrowly set, you know very narrowly defined set of goals and they want that, okay If they want that information, it's very simple for you Just don't give it to them go out and find somebody else who wants to do the system the way you want to do it Okay, that can be done So don't get hung up don't get hung up on one particular customer because you should be building a system for yourself Right, if you build it the way you want it to be done people will come and find you and they'll say I'd like something that does that can I please buy it from you? Yeah, but you understand that you didn't teach that customer anything they learned it themselves It took them two and a half years, right? You may have had a impact. Yeah, you had you helped Ah That's the best that's the best one. No, I'm only kidding. That's not the best That's the second best The best one is if they really get it and they really like the way you did it No, that's that's that's an interesting It's an interesting example actually Yeah, I'll give you an example here. John. I think John wants to bail out so John you got somewhere to go? Oh I just want to say bye. Yeah, it's turning into more of a mutual conversation. I was just going to go off the podium Yeah, we can we can talk about this later. I don't know when we're supposed to finish this up But I'll just continue until they throw us out and then we'll leave Okay, um, but I don't want to get to your question And I know somebody over here had something to say and I'll just be quick here I have customers on a daily basis Who want something done a particular way and they don't understand why it should work that way why it should work any other way? And I have to educate them, you know, as best that I possibly can That's one of the downsides of the job that I do is that I do have to go out. Yeah downside That's one of the less good things about my job. My job has lots of good features But I always have to think about, you know, some of the little bummers that I have One of them is that I have to go out and talk to people now Here's what I've done to engineer the situation. So it's it reduces the impact on on my stress And so I feel like I'm still doing what I want to be doing I work for this big company I make a phone call if a customer calls me says We're doing all this security engineering in our, you know, e-commerce product And we're not sure why you specified all these particular ciphers to be used. We think it's you know, it's overkill and And you know, we think des is just fine for what we want to do stuff like that You know, and and you know, why do you want us to do this because it'll cost us x You know 10,000 something dollars to have this engineer fix this thing and then we got to do all this qa it's real hassle And It's it's very easy for me to fix. I have a couple of different strategies one is I tell them As we rev your product we will help you we will provide an engineer to do that and we'll send you a bill for it So it won't feel so bad, you know And some of them do that, you know in other cases we say, oh, well, that's cool You know, no problem But we're not going to give you the seal of approval of our particular little company because We don't believe that that would be a responsible way to conduct those affairs Now I have the advantage of working for a 90 000 person audit company Okay, I I I chose my strategic location very carefully here So you understand what my cipherpunk desire design is on the world, right? I'm out there to try and free up a lot of software encrypt everything give people privacy all that kind of stuff promote human rights Work on things like democratic voting systems that use cryptography, etc And the way that I do it working for the cryptography division of a very big audit company Is that I go in with the auditors And while we have them by the testicles Saying this is how much money you have and we know that you're doing all this stuff And you shouldn't be doing that and this is illegal in this country and all that other stuff We say oh, by the way We won't be using des as the cipher in your new product And they go, yeah, okay And and it works really well because you've got them, you know where it counts It's a really excellent motivating factor in our in our business relationship with all of our clients That that they you know that they find it advantageous to do things the right way So Whether you're doing that or you're selling software or you're selling professional services or you're selling engineering services, whatever Yeah, we're gonna Okay, so we're going to the next question, right? So that's always true. Yeah, please Right So from a licensing perspective The the point in my opinion for software to exist is to serve a need And in order to serve a need you need just And the need that I tried to serve with my software was providing encrypted web communications In an environment where Yes, all software most 99 of software is licensed free software open software proprietary software Shareware free where there's hardly any software that's released into the public domain. It's all licensed It depends on what kind of license you put on it. You can either have an open source license or you can have a proprietary license or whatever um In my opinion the decision about what license you put on your software depends on a large to a large degree on The environment in which the software exists if the purpose of releasing the software is to make it as widely used as possible You don't always you can't always put an open source license on The in a climate when I released a stronghold two very important factors existed which made it impossible for strongholds to be an open source product One was the export controls in the united states which required that we set up a development office outside the united states in the uk And all development had to take place in the uk and all contributions had to be tightly controlled That was the advisor lawyers gave us it is possible to do free software projects In an open source fashion and there's different ways of doing it But in that case our attorneys told us that we needed to tightly control who is contributing to the product And in order to do that we had a proprietary software development effort going on in the uk second to that in order for Someone to deploy a cryptography application within the united states legally You would have to license patents from rsa data security And in order to license patents from rsa data security They require that the product that you sell is not sold is not released under an open source license So When releasing software and when trying to accomplish something it's really important not to be ideological About the license you choose for some reason saying oh all software should be free yada yada yada The point in my opinion for software to exist is so that it can accomplish a human need What humans need to do not exist for the sake of existing And therefore you need to release software under whatever license is the most appropriate for the context you're releasing it I'd like to To amplify that by saying that I think it's very important to take a long term view of what you're doing as well It's very easy to think the short term like if I do this piece of software, it'll hurt the world but in fact sometimes Making a business deal with a company like rsa or whatever is actually a very good thing to do because it gets a particular tool out to more people And you then raise consciousness about the need for other variations on that tool Which end up in secure banking systems that you know people can use poor people in areas where they're not Service by bank branches or any number of other examples of things are useful So yeah, go ahead adam. Yeah I want to call on the next one So Let me ask a question because you started by saying that in Germany It's not easy to design your own career path the way it is in the u.s Is it possible? I know that there there are some companies here in germany Susie linux on that that are doing things It's also possible to work for a company in another country. I know a lot of people who do this um If you can't find the company you want to work for in germany Reputation capital. Yeah, it also it doesn't have to be a u.s company. It could be an israeli company It could be a russian company. There's something that you've done that's really cool Release it to the world so that you can take credit for it You know the projects that you work on in your spare time make them available Developer reputation get to know the people at the company you want to work for And then go to them and say look, you know, I've done abc and d I'd like a job That's why we're here I never said it's easy Okay, so I work for a big company we have labs all over the place including one in germany If you want to talk to me later, maybe we can figure out how to get you some free time on all the equipment there Yeah, actually, let me let me let me respond a little differently Yeah, and say it's difficult for everyone to establish reputation. The internet is a big place It's hard to get people's attention. It's hard to keep it Um, I said earlier. It's taken me eight or nine years Of spending a lot of time giving away my time giving away my energy on other people's projects So that I got to the point where I can do my own thing and get to the job that Really excites me. So yes, you need to start small. It's not possible For someone who's 16 to step out of high school and create their dream job You have to think of this as a career. That's why we're talking about career punks. Maybe you're just a late bloomer No, but really you get you volunteering is an extremely important thing In fact, I would I would say that volunteering continuing to volunteer even after you've got a job is a good thing Yeah, um, it's good to do things. Yeah, and Yeah, man Yeah, baby, I hear you Yeah, yeah, you see But he would appreciate a ride in one The the mythical man month. Yes, excellent book. Fantastic. Yeah Okay, I I have an action item for you, and can you write that on the message board on the refrigerator in the cypher punk stand? So anybody here who wants to can come by and get the title of that book cool all right Also, if anybody has a question they want to ask of anybody in the cypher punks group you can send email to ccc dash punks punks at cypher punks dot to That's cypher punks belt c y p h e r unks Or something like that Sure. Oh, so I think at this point we're we're starting to lose people and I'm going to suggest that we Let's get time to break it up. We the panel will stay up here and answer any questions that anyone has but Thanks very much for coming And we hope that we've been useful to you. Yeah, and and we can be useful to you in other ways later on You may not know about them yet. So come and talk to us one last question before we break one last question Are you already working and you're probably all very good Yes, that's people wear his books or tom de marco is the author of people wear great book Good recommendation. Okay. So anyway, just take it really seriously that that it's good to have a job because that Gives you the opportunity to do a lot of other important stuff that that everybody here will appreciate. So Go out there and if you have any questions, let us know. Thanks