DEF CON is an annual underground computer party for hackers held in Las Vegas every summer for the past seven years. Over those years it has grown in size, and attracted people from all over the planet. Well, no one from North Korea has shown up (that we know of) but if they did I'm sure we would convince them to tell us elite government sekrets. That's what it is all about. Meeting other spies, er, people and learning something new.

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Capture the Flag

5,000 hackers attended this year’s Defcon in Las Vegas, my seventeen-year old son and I among them.

About half of the conference-goers emulated the look of the really mean SOB in Road Warrior who dukes it out with Mel Gibson in the final scenes. Black is the favorite color. For clothes. Blue and pink are more popular colors for hair. After talking with a few people, I concluded that the Goth stuff is for show. Underneath the facial jewelry and jackboots, these folks are not so different from the late shift at any company in Silicon Valley.

Everyone here identifies himself (it’s 85% male) as a hacker but very few do anything illegal. Many are security professionals. Others are corporate programmers and system administrators by day. True to the legends, some are Feds. Remember the episode of the X-Files where the Lone Gunmen meet one another at a bizarre security tradeshow? That was Defcon a few years ago.

Events include the Spot the Fed contest. Instructions say, “If you see some shady MIB (Men in Black) earphone penny loafer sunglass wearing Clint Eastwood to live and die in LA type lurking about, point him out….”  Capture the Flag features Bastard Operators from HELL (the servers), the L(USERS) who use the servers, and the Hackers who win by putting their team name or handle in a file in the root directory of any host on the network (It’s a virtual flag.) The bars serve hacker drinks made with Jolt and Red Bull.

Interesting tatto

Kinda hurts my ears

A dead cow elder





A see-through backpack

In an early session, a former Air Force computer scientist described a Kafkaesque miscarriage of justice as clueless investigators and a clueless judge attempted to convict a USAFA cadet of hacking when it was obvious he was not the culprit. This added to the general paranoia and camaraderie. The man is out to get us, man.

Noise (many folks go by a handle rather than a name) gave a presentation on autonomous remailers, “a key to keeping our freedom,” she told us. The next day the Cult of the Dead Cow talked about various security breakthroughs and transitioned into a skit featuring a crazed gorilla who destroyed a laptop and overturned the tables, an obscenity-spouting man in a cheetah-skin cowboy hat screeching as he walked through the audience, and a mock execution that left the stage littered with various cuts of meat. The crowd loved it.

Richard Thieme took the group to higher ground. He was Moses to the assembled worshippers of the Golden Calf. When you’re looking for what’s important, check out what kids are playing, what the military is doing, and the online sex industry. The kids don’t have blinders on, the military can afford the best toys, and the sex industry? When people who can’t afford it will pay $4 a minute to watch a 2” x 2” image of a cyberdoll, something important is going on.

Traditional boundaries are dissolving. Transglobal and metanational entities are replacing sovereign states. Bechtel is taking over. There is no Big Brother. A faceless enemy sifts through our datastreams in search of pattern anomalies. The only defense is the relentless pursuit of knowledge across boundaries.

Concerned about declining sales of books in the thirties, book publishers approached Ed Bernays, the father of public relations. Bernays cajoled a group of Nobel laureates to endorse a statement that books are the key to the very survival of civilization. These he took to the association of homebuilders, convincing them that every new home should be constructed with built-in bookcases. An empty bookshelf begs to be filled. Now we, the people in this room, are building the digital bookshelves.

Every successful idea starts as a minority opinion. Breakthroughs occur on the edges, not at the center. By the time consensus arrives, it’s no longer true.

Cyborg life is coming. We already have implanted hearts, eyes, kidneys. How long until we have organ farms? Richard’s son recently toured a plant in Silicon Valley where thousands of headless frogs in open vats of nutrients are growing organs for scientific experiments. And with society becoming more and more networked, how long until we fill our heads with wireless communications chips? Our definition of what it means to be human is changing. We will only know ourselves by our memories and persistence.

Sun Tzu said that all war is deception, aimed at the mind of the enemy. Think about it. Who knows you? Channel the soul force, surf the power of the universe.

Sarah Gordon talked about viruses and the End of Innocence.

Funded by IBM, Sarah had talked with hundreds of virus authors, finding most to be socially aware, responsible, good people. Even virus-writers are generally okay, just kids or newbies dabbling in something that’s hardly rocket science.

Sitting in the front row listening to Sarah gave me an opportunity to watch the sign language interpreters very closely. (The entire event was signed.) Sign language communication involves acting out lots of emotions. The man and woman somehow translating this rapid-fire, jargon-laden presentation managed to keep up, gesticulating as in a silent movie. Their faces were more animated than Sarah’s. What if broadcast presentations displayed half a dozen boxes on screen simultaneously? One for the speaker. Another for PowerPoint. Perhaps one for sign language. And the other three for emotional interpretation -- exaggerations of the speaker’s emotional presentation. Bet that would keep you aware.

The Ghettohackers won the Capture the Flag contest. One tech wizard explained how the team bored through layer after layer of network security, often rewriting programs on the fly to perform the way they wanted them to. Waves of applause celebrated the ingeniousness of the Ghettohackers in burrowing through four firewalls to reach the root directory and plant their <flag> file.

The Ghettohackers: "Who's the head rabbi?" shouted a voice from the audience.

Then the captain of the team said, “Let me tell you how we really did this.” Before the Network Operations Center was fully operational, he showed up at the door. The Security Guard told him admittance was limited to people on his list. “I’m not on there? Let’s look. Oh, here’s the guy who owns the box inside; I’ll go get him.”

Back in his suite, the Ghettohackers printed a set of fake credentials for an accomplice, and the two returned. They convinced the guard they were legitimate. One guy diverted the guard, explaining how he should set up his DSL line for faster access at home. The other intruder found a live terminal (“This one’s mine.”) and grabbed a password for their return visit.

Soon the Network Operations Center was under 24-hour surveillance but the secret was out. Such irony. Not to diminish the skills involved in cracking other security layers, but here a bunch of codebreakers had to rely on “social engineering” to overcome their technical challenge.

At the close of the conference, Dark Tangent asked for feedback and described suggestions he’d heard for the next Defcon. Should we invite the press? Encourage them? They never get the story right anyway. We don’t really care what they think. Also, once again we caught the video cameras scanning the audience, even when we’ve specifically instructed them not to. The hackers clearly feel misunderstood and abused. The event ended as Bad  Kitty handed out the final prizes of the day, a backpack with horns and a new Compaq laptop.