[00:00.130 --> 00:01.490]  Here we go.
[00:11.700 --> 00:13.920]  Wait until the rugby scrum over here is over.
[00:20.600 --> 00:22.080]  Another one got caught today.
[00:22.240 --> 00:23.140]  It's all over the papers.
[00:24.000 --> 00:26.380]  Teenager arrested in computer crime scandal.
[00:26.540 --> 00:28.320]  Hacker arrested after bank tampering.
[00:29.000 --> 00:30.340]  Damn kids, they're all alike.
[00:31.160 --> 00:37.620]  But did you in your three-piece psychology and 1950s techno brain ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker?
[00:38.000 --> 00:39.840]  Did you ever wonder what made him tick?
[00:40.040 --> 00:41.140]  What forces shaped him?
[00:41.520 --> 00:42.440]  What may have molded him?
[00:43.280 --> 00:44.120]  I'm a hacker.
[00:44.420 --> 00:45.380]  Enter my world.
[00:46.580 --> 00:48.380]  Mine's a world that begins with school.
[00:48.700 --> 00:50.300]  I'm smarter than most of the other kids.
[00:50.560 --> 00:53.160]  This crap they teach us bores me.
[00:54.020 --> 00:55.720]  Damn underachievers, they're all alike.
[00:56.360 --> 01:02.260]  I'm in junior high or high school and I've listened to the teachers explain for the 15th time how to reduce a fraction.
[01:02.500 --> 01:03.800]  I think I understand it.
[01:04.240 --> 01:05.780]  No Ms. Smith, I didn't show my work.
[01:05.880 --> 01:06.720]  I did it in my head.
[01:07.420 --> 01:08.860]  Damn kid probably copied it.
[01:09.120 --> 01:09.840]  They're all alike.
[01:10.640 --> 01:12.100]  I made a discovery today.
[01:12.440 --> 01:13.500]  I found a computer.
[01:14.260 --> 01:15.080]  Wait a second.
[01:15.320 --> 01:16.300]  This is pretty cool.
[01:17.020 --> 01:18.500]  It does what I want it to.
[01:18.860 --> 01:21.320]  If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up.
[01:21.780 --> 01:23.380]  Not because it doesn't like me.
[01:23.520 --> 01:25.040]  Or feels threatened by me.
[01:25.240 --> 01:26.700]  Or thinks I'm a smart ass.
[01:27.000 --> 01:29.040]  Or doesn't like teaching and shouldn't be here.
[01:29.900 --> 01:30.480]  Damn kid.
[01:30.720 --> 01:31.860]  All he does is play games.
[01:32.140 --> 01:32.780]  They're all alike.
[01:33.940 --> 01:34.940]  And then it happened.
[01:35.400 --> 01:36.600]  A door opened to a world.
[01:37.200 --> 01:39.960]  Rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins.
[01:40.240 --> 01:41.880]  An electronic pulse is sent out.
[01:42.000 --> 01:43.360]  A refuge from the day to day.
[01:45.140 --> 01:46.700]  Incompetencies is sought.
[01:47.020 --> 01:48.060]  A board is found.
[01:48.660 --> 01:49.440]  This is it.
[01:49.520 --> 01:50.360]  This is where I belong.
[01:50.840 --> 01:52.000]  I know everyone here.
[01:52.480 --> 01:55.940]  Even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again.
[01:56.260 --> 01:57.120]  I know you all.
[01:58.300 --> 02:00.240]  Damn kid tying up the phone line again.
[02:00.440 --> 02:01.140]  They're all alike.
[02:01.660 --> 02:03.400]  You bet your ass we're all alike.
[02:03.680 --> 02:07.020]  We've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak.
[02:07.320 --> 02:10.820]  The bits of meat that you did let slip through were pre-chewed and tasteless.
[02:11.080 --> 02:14.280]  We've been dominated by sadists or ignored by the apathetic.
[02:14.540 --> 02:17.500]  The few that had something to teach found us willing pupils.
[02:17.780 --> 02:20.140]  But those few are like drops of water in the desert.
[02:21.040 --> 02:22.580]  But this is our world now.
[02:22.820 --> 02:24.600]  The world of the electron and the switch.
[02:24.840 --> 02:25.680]  The beauty of the bod.
[02:26.180 --> 02:32.620]  We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons.
[02:32.620 --> 02:33.900]  And you call us criminals.
[02:34.600 --> 02:37.300]  We explore and you call us criminals.
[02:37.860 --> 02:41.100]  We seek after knowledge, and you call us criminals.
[02:41.580 --> 02:47.660]  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias, and you call us criminals.
[02:48.580 --> 02:56.660]  You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder cheat and lie to us, and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
[02:57.980 --> 02:59.360]  Yes, I'm a criminal.
[03:00.280 --> 03:01.820]  My crime is that of curiosity.
[03:02.540 --> 03:07.300]  My crime is that of judging people by what they say and they think, not what they look like.
[03:07.800 --> 03:12.340]  My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you'll never forgive me for.
[03:13.400 --> 03:15.940]  I'm a hacker, and this is my manifesto.
[03:16.640 --> 03:19.620]  You may stop this individual, but you can't stop us all.
[03:20.120 --> 03:21.680]  After all, we're all alike.
[03:23.340 --> 03:26.440]  That was written in 1986.
[03:48.740 --> 03:53.900]  My name is Lloyd, by the way, also known as The Mentor.
[03:55.480 --> 04:04.620]  This was written in 1986, and it was born out of rage and a great deal of frustration.
[04:06.460 --> 04:11.620]  Since then, it's appeared in movies, none of which were very good.
[04:14.820 --> 04:19.500]  It's been in textbooks that have been used in at least four colleges that I know about.
[04:20.580 --> 04:29.020]  It's been read on TV, and if you do a Google search on it, it shows up anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 places.
[04:30.820 --> 04:35.780]  It's got legs, which to this day surprises me a bit.
[04:37.260 --> 04:52.200]  In 1976, I was 11 years old, and we moved from Austin, Texas to a smaller town right before the end of the school year, because my parents thought it would be a great idea for me to get there and make friends.
[04:52.200 --> 04:58.160]  And what it instead meant that I was the new kid for six weeks and got, you know, ignored or beaten up a lot.
[05:00.020 --> 05:14.880]  But that summer, since I didn't know anybody, I started hanging out at the college library in the town and managed to find an account on a PDP-11 that they had there, and that kind of started it all.
[05:16.880 --> 05:36.120]  By 1981, I had convinced my parents to buy me an Apple, and promptly got involved in the Apple wear scene, which led to the need to make, you know, this was a 300 baud modem, so you definitely, if you were going to be downloading stuff long distance, you needed to be able to make free phone calls,
[05:36.120 --> 05:39.760]  which led down the dark, slippery slope of the dark side.
[05:40.100 --> 05:44.760]  And here I end up, 30 years later, 20 years later.
[05:49.470 --> 05:56.650]  In the course of this, as it says in the book, let's go back and let me kind of go over some things here.
[05:57.610 --> 05:59.070]  Another one got caught today.
[05:59.070 --> 06:00.350]  That's all over the papers.
[06:01.470 --> 06:09.010]  I had friends that started getting busted fairly regularly, starting in the early and mid-80s.
[06:09.170 --> 06:17.970]  I was on the board Metal Shop Private, which many of you probably know, that was doing Phrack Magazine, and they started raiding people.
[06:18.970 --> 06:27.310]  And since I was already writing, I was a sports reporter for the local newspaper, I decided to start writing some text files.
[06:27.810 --> 06:29.950]  And some of those were very, very good.
[06:29.950 --> 06:31.330]  I think this one was okay.
[06:32.170 --> 06:40.190]  Some of them are really embarrassing to look back at, most especially my tome on how to make napalm in your bathroom.
[06:41.690 --> 06:44.230]  That's not one of the ones I list on my resume much.
[06:48.690 --> 06:50.390]  But I was already inclined to write.
[06:51.090 --> 06:56.110]  Then in 1986, I got caught inside a computer I should not have been caught in.
[06:57.030 --> 07:04.570]  And as any of you who have ever been in that situation know, your parents are not particularly impressed by it.
[07:05.730 --> 07:08.530]  It makes your home life rather difficult.
[07:08.970 --> 07:11.150]  You tend not to have a computer for a while.
[07:11.650 --> 07:14.170]  This was actually what kind of prompted me to move out of the house.
[07:15.990 --> 07:26.610]  And so the frame of mind I was in when I sat down to write this was a mixture of depression, of rage, because I didn't hurt anything.
[07:26.610 --> 07:28.810]  I was just in a computer I shouldn't have been.
[07:30.930 --> 07:40.470]  And a great deal of empathy for my friends around the nation that were also in the same situation.
[07:41.990 --> 07:44.490]  This was post war games, the movie.
[07:45.070 --> 07:54.810]  So, pretty much the only public perception of hackers at that time was, hey, we're going to start a nuclear war or play tic-tac-toe, one of the two.
[08:00.680 --> 08:12.280]  And so I decided I would try to write what I really felt was the essence of what we were doing and why we were doing it.
[08:14.880 --> 08:22.680]  I'm still getting, to this day, 10 or 15 emails a week from people who have read it and want to talk to me about it.
[08:22.800 --> 08:24.620]  Either to tell me how it's affected their life.
[08:26.800 --> 08:41.920]  One guy I talked to at the convention here yesterday was telling me that he gets to go to a good private school next year that at first his parents weren't going to let him go to until he showed him the manifesto and said, this is how I feel about school.
[08:42.840 --> 08:45.080]  And his parents look at that and said, oh, okay.
[08:52.290 --> 09:02.170]  And I am incredibly touched by that because when I wrote this, I couldn't have even vaguely foreseen something like that going on down the line.
[09:02.170 --> 09:04.410]  Hell, I'm almost 40 now.
[09:04.490 --> 09:05.550]  I thought I'd be dead by now.
[09:07.930 --> 09:28.770]  But I think the three themes that resonate through it are the ideas of intellectual alienation, of disappointment with the public education system in this country, and the ubiquity of these feelings among the hacker community.
[09:28.890 --> 09:30.290]  The fact that we are all alike.
[09:31.330 --> 09:32.230]  I'm a hacker.
[09:32.430 --> 09:33.050]  Enter my world.
[09:33.230 --> 09:34.990]  Mine is a world that begins with school.
[09:35.670 --> 09:37.430]  I'm smarter than most of the other kids.
[09:37.710 --> 09:39.410]  This crap they teach us bores me.
[09:42.010 --> 09:44.110]  That was totally true.
[09:44.310 --> 09:49.190]  In my 12 years of public school, I had three teachers that were worth a damn.
[09:50.030 --> 09:52.150]  Betty Wittenberg, who taught algebra in junior high.
[09:52.410 --> 09:56.870]  Mildred Sessom, who taught Shakespeare my freshman year of high school.
[09:56.870 --> 10:02.030]  And my creative writing teacher, who will remain nameless because he later turned out to be a child molester.
[10:02.570 --> 10:03.930]  And, oh well.
[10:04.810 --> 10:05.410]  But...
[10:07.750 --> 10:08.990]  But that's in...
[10:08.990 --> 10:17.010]  You figure 12 years, probably, you know, an average of 12 teachers per class, or per year.
[10:17.010 --> 10:21.530]  So you've got 150, roughly, teachers throughout my career.
[10:21.930 --> 10:23.770]  Three that were worth a damn.
[10:24.190 --> 10:31.390]  What usually happens is, you end up in the class, and two weeks into it, you're going, you know, I'm really smarter than that person.
[10:31.910 --> 10:33.510]  And I've got to sit here and listen to them.
[10:34.810 --> 10:43.630]  And with most of my teachers, I reached a kind of standoff where they'd let me sit in the back of the room and read a book, as long as I promised not to cause trouble.
[10:44.010 --> 10:46.110]  So, I was okay with that, liked to read.
[10:46.670 --> 10:51.250]  And that was how I went through high school, was sitting in the back reading a book.
[10:54.790 --> 10:58.310]  I've listened to teachers explain for the 15th time how to reduce a fraction.
[10:59.910 --> 11:02.410]  That also, totally 100% true.
[11:03.990 --> 11:11.730]  Cannot handle the... teachers could not handle the idea of somebody who seemed to be naturally gifted at something like this.
[11:13.290 --> 11:18.130]  It's gotten even worse with the mainstreaming that's going on in the classrooms today.
[11:18.270 --> 11:19.670]  My wife is a high school teacher now.
[11:19.670 --> 11:22.170]  And some of the stuff I say she likes, some she doesn't.
[11:22.410 --> 11:25.070]  So, I try not to give this speech in front of her.
[11:32.070 --> 11:40.970]  But, in all the emails I get, this theme of intellectual isolation seems to really be common with people.
[11:41.090 --> 11:45.550]  They feel like they're the only people in their schools that, you know, have a brain.
[11:46.050 --> 11:48.770]  And it's not necessarily social isolation.
[11:48.770 --> 11:52.090]  You know, I played football, I dated cheerleaders, I had a great time in school.
[11:52.370 --> 11:53.410]  I just didn't learn anything.
[11:54.550 --> 12:01.650]  Which actually came back to bite me later when I start trying to get my computer science degree and get to my first calculus class.
[12:02.090 --> 12:06.950]  Well, the highest math they had in my high school was trigonometry.
[12:07.550 --> 12:16.950]  And so, walking into an advanced engineering calculus class for the first time, you know, I don't know what that little squiggly S stretched out thing is.
[12:17.110 --> 12:18.650]  I mean, what am I supposed to do with that?
[12:19.390 --> 12:22.190]  And to this day, that still affects me.
[12:22.370 --> 12:24.710]  I'm not as good as math as I'd like to be.
[12:25.810 --> 12:29.590]  Fortunately, it hasn't affected me that much, but it does bother me.
[12:29.590 --> 12:33.450]  And that's completely because there was nobody there to teach it.
[12:36.390 --> 12:37.750]  So, the intellectual isolation.
[12:39.310 --> 12:42.210]  It's not necessarily... and the people here probably know that.
[12:42.650 --> 12:47.570]  The image of the lone social malcontent hiding in a room...
[12:48.570 --> 12:50.790]  Surprisingly enough, that's not really what you find.
[12:51.050 --> 12:55.490]  I mean, most of the people here have friends, are friendly, can have a conversation.
[12:55.670 --> 12:56.210]  You know, not everyone.
[12:56.970 --> 13:04.690]  But, you know, there's not this, you know, almost autistic hiding out and focusing only on a computer.
[13:05.610 --> 13:10.970]  But, what does happen is you really feel like there is nobody who thinks like you.
[13:12.310 --> 13:14.630]  Sometimes you even feel there's just nobody that thinks.
[13:15.990 --> 13:25.210]  And that can make for a very difficult educational experience and a very difficult high school experience.
[13:26.130 --> 13:27.670]  I made a discovery today.
[13:27.950 --> 13:29.050]  I found a computer.
[13:30.830 --> 13:34.110]  I was hooked immediately, as were probably most of you.
[13:35.350 --> 13:45.770]  I would be willing to bet, especially for anybody over the age of 30, that there was a very seminal event when they realized, wait a minute, technology is really cool.
[13:47.370 --> 13:53.610]  Some of the younger people have, you know, kind of grown up with some of this and are, you know, just as enthusiastic about it.
[13:53.830 --> 13:57.730]  But, there probably wasn't, you know, necessarily this light switch moment.
[13:58.250 --> 14:03.030]  But, you know, I had never seen a computer until I was 12 years old.
[14:03.950 --> 14:11.870]  So, finding it and realizing what it meant and what it could do was an amazing experience.
[14:12.490 --> 14:18.710]  And, you know, to this day, I still, you know, when I flip on my computer, you know, cool, I have a computer.
[14:19.310 --> 14:22.190]  It's something that I find personally very exciting.
[14:28.670 --> 14:35.550]  But, from the point I found that PDP 11 when I was 12, I knew that, okay, this is what I'm going to do for the rest of my life.
[14:35.990 --> 14:37.570]  I was very fortunate in that.
[14:37.710 --> 14:44.550]  I know a lot of people who are, you know, in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, that don't know what they want to be when they grow up.
[14:45.970 --> 14:51.710]  So, meantime, they're marking time and, you know, whatever job they've managed to stumble into.
[14:51.710 --> 14:54.450]  And I think that's really, really sad.
[14:55.930 --> 15:01.290]  The, barring being independently wealthy, and I seem to have missed out on the dot-com millionaire boom.
[15:03.470 --> 15:13.130]  The greatest thing that you can have is a job that you don't lay there in bed in the morning and just go, Oh my God, I have to get up and go to work.
[15:15.070 --> 15:23.430]  So, for those of you who are still kind of looking at your careers and thinking about what you're going to be doing, find something that you like to do, and do it.
[15:23.890 --> 15:26.070]  It beats the hell out of the alternative.
[15:29.160 --> 15:30.500]  A board is found.
[15:30.840 --> 15:31.560]  This is it.
[15:31.700 --> 15:32.560]  This is where I belong.
[15:33.640 --> 15:35.400]  Damn kid tying up the phone line again.
[15:35.520 --> 15:36.100]  They're all alike.
[15:36.920 --> 15:44.480]  As anyone who remembers the BBS scene, it was quite an amazing thing.
[15:44.480 --> 15:49.800]  Jason Scott is making a documentary on the whole BBS scene that should be fascinating.
[15:50.840 --> 15:59.780]  But, that was the first time I really experienced a sense of community with people who I felt had a clue.
[16:00.100 --> 16:08.680]  You know, that were even vaguely approaching being intellectually my equals or, in some cases, my superiors.
[16:10.140 --> 16:13.680]  That was a very powerful and very important moment.
[16:13.880 --> 16:14.360]  Not the alphabet.
[16:15.780 --> 16:20.000]  Because the parents just don't see education as important.
[16:21.360 --> 16:26.160]  They, you know, think that it's school's job to teach that child everything the child should know.
[16:27.000 --> 16:30.680]  And, if the child has any learning problems, it's the school's fault.
[16:30.800 --> 16:31.940]  And it's the teacher's fault.
[16:32.320 --> 16:36.240]  It's not the fact that, you know, you've never read a book to your kid in your life.
[16:36.240 --> 16:37.920]  Maybe because you can't read.
[16:40.520 --> 16:43.420]  But, the school has become the babysitter.
[16:44.820 --> 16:46.720]  As well as the educator.
[16:49.220 --> 16:51.520]  I'm also asked, well, how do we fix this?
[16:51.740 --> 16:52.800]  Well, I'm glad you asked.
[16:54.460 --> 16:55.120]  Thank you.
[16:55.700 --> 16:58.120]  The only way out is more money.
[16:59.020 --> 17:01.220]  And that's when everyone goes, ooh, no.
[17:01.360 --> 17:01.840]  Well, never mind.
[17:01.940 --> 17:02.980]  We don't want to fix it that bad.
[17:04.700 --> 17:08.580]  You know, people who've got kids that aren't in school don't want their taxes raised.
[17:08.730 --> 17:10.180]  You know, why should my taxes go up?
[17:11.680 --> 17:16.120]  Because, you know, your kids can't read or we can't afford to pay teachers a living wage.
[17:18.710 --> 17:22.510]  But they're still wanting to blame the schools for anything that goes wrong with the kids.
[17:26.360 --> 17:41.620]  We've bought into the idea of mainstreaming, which is that, you know, no matter how advanced a kid is, no matter how slow a kid is, we need to cram them all into the same classroom because surely this will improve the educational experience.
[17:42.880 --> 18:00.910]  Instead, what you get are some kids who are very frustrated because the class is too hard for them and the top ten or fifteen percent of the kids are sitting there, you know, jabbing themselves in the eye with a pencil trying to stay awake while the teacher explains how to reduce fractions for the fifteenth time.
[18:04.900 --> 18:19.540]  If you, you know, if you come out of this with anything, as you have kids of your own, and some of you will, as surprising as that may feel, don't settle for mediocrity in their education.
[18:20.210 --> 18:23.670]  My wife and I don't have children and really don't plan to have any.
[18:24.170 --> 18:27.060]  If we did, I can guarantee you they'd be in a private school.
[18:27.060 --> 18:30.950]  If I had to rob 7-Elevens to pay for it.
[18:32.120 --> 18:34.410]  I know there are some good public schools out there.
[18:35.290 --> 18:41.250]  If you've got one, cherish it, work with it, do everything you can to support it because it's a rarity.
[18:44.620 --> 18:45.980]  This is our world now.
[18:46.200 --> 18:48.120]  The world of the electron and the switch.
[18:49.720 --> 18:53.700]  A lot of people still don't get it, and this kind of relates back to education.
[18:53.700 --> 19:06.680]  Over the next 50 years, those people that don't master or at least have a fundamental grasp of technology might as well be squatting around a fire pit in a grass skirt waiting for reruns of Survivor 17 to start.
[19:08.500 --> 19:16.100]  You know, you are not needed in the future unless, of course, you have, you know, an affinity for digging ditches.
[19:17.980 --> 19:21.880]  And even that kind of work is going to dry up to a certain extent.
[19:23.980 --> 19:33.440]  You know, they don't understand why that the fact they hate their job and would be grossly offended if you called them preliterate barbarians.
[19:33.860 --> 19:37.280]  But for all intents and purposes, that's in fact what they are.
[19:38.600 --> 19:45.740]  And anybody who hasn't realized that is in for an eye-opening experience over the next 50 years.
[19:46.100 --> 19:56.120]  In spite of the dot-com bloodbath and in spite of all the high-tech layoffs, if you look at the graph, there's going to be more and more computers in the world, not fewer and fewer.
[19:56.540 --> 20:01.100]  There's going to be more and more people who can operate them and fewer and fewer people who can't.
[20:03.020 --> 20:05.380]  You know, I've taught my mom how to use a computer.
[20:05.560 --> 20:08.580]  I've taught, you know, Whitney's grandmother how to use a computer.
[20:08.820 --> 20:09.820]  Anybody can learn it.
[20:10.640 --> 20:14.180]  But they have to be willing to learn something new.
[20:14.740 --> 20:16.140]  And most people aren't.
[20:20.230 --> 20:24.770]  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias.
[20:25.330 --> 20:26.710]  And you call us criminals.
[20:27.830 --> 20:35.010]  That is the... another of the very strong lessons that I hope everyone here thinks about.
[20:37.470 --> 20:43.710]  And what... you really have to judge people on what they say and what they think.
[20:44.890 --> 20:54.430]  And fortunately, you know, email and things like that have fostered communication between and among people who have never actually met, have never actually seen each other.
[20:55.690 --> 21:01.930]  You know, I think out of everyone at this conference, I may have actually met two people face to face before.
[21:02.450 --> 21:08.530]  But I know easily 20 or 30 people here that I've talked to over the years electronically.
[21:13.010 --> 21:14.750]  That's going to become more and more prevalent.
[21:15.010 --> 21:25.710]  And I think that's one of the best things that has come out of the technology is the ability to bring people people from different backgrounds, different countries, different points of view together.
[21:26.750 --> 21:30.490]  And, you know, have a free and frank exchange of ideas.
[21:31.090 --> 21:36.130]  In spite of the fact that sometimes they just turn into a name calling and pissing matches.
[21:37.730 --> 21:43.490]  It's still better than the automatic assumption that, you know, Oh my gosh, he's Canadian.
[21:45.730 --> 21:46.950]  Hide your children.
[21:58.300 --> 22:02.640]  As most of us have probably been told, though, nobody likes a smart ass.
[22:03.560 --> 22:10.740]  And nothing makes these people angrier than having their own ignorance exposed to public scrutiny.
[22:11.720 --> 22:15.700]  When I first started out, getting caught was rare and difficult.
[22:16.360 --> 22:18.740]  There weren't very many digital phone switches.
[22:19.320 --> 22:24.000]  You know, every call that was made wasn't immediately logged to a tape somewhere.
[22:25.760 --> 22:31.540]  You know, you could get caught, as I did, but it was difficult and the penalties weren't usually great.
[22:31.780 --> 22:35.760]  You know, we ended up just promising not to do it again and it kind of got dropped.
[22:37.320 --> 22:43.800]  By the early 90s, once the internet started getting cranked up, it became a little bit less of a game.
[22:44.340 --> 22:57.120]  Businesses started to realize that they were vulnerable and started paying more attention to bad things or even unusual things such as people logging in and looking around that shouldn't have been that were happening to their computers.
[22:57.700 --> 23:09.500]  Now, this was somewhat offset by the huge growth in the number of systems that were out there so that getting caught was still, while much easier than it used to be, was still not quite as likely.
[23:10.660 --> 23:15.200]  Since last September, however, we're no longer hackers if we get caught.
[23:16.160 --> 23:17.960]  We're potential cyber terrorists.
[23:18.380 --> 23:23.400]  And as our president has proven, the Constitution is no longer applicable.
[23:23.400 --> 23:29.740]  If George Bush goes on TV and says, wait a minute, these are bad guys.
[23:30.100 --> 23:31.680]  We need to have them locked up.
[23:32.340 --> 23:34.240]  Well, okay, all the questions stop.
[23:39.080 --> 23:47.660]  If, you know, asked to prove that they're bad guys, it's wrapped in a shroud of national security and you're told to go away before we arrest you too.
[23:49.200 --> 23:50.120]  Case closed.
[23:50.460 --> 23:52.620]  Enjoy your stay in the federal penitentiary system.
[24:02.320 --> 24:05.280]  Maybe one of Bush's daughters, but I'll pass on George.
[24:15.260 --> 24:18.180]  Okay, here's a story I hadn't planned to tell.
[24:24.040 --> 24:30.560]  The son of a teacher friend of my wife's attended high school with one of the Bush daughters.
[24:30.560 --> 24:32.360]  who will rename nameless.
[24:35.800 --> 24:44.380]  And happened to be sitting by the then governor at a high school baseball game or something like that that he showed up to see.
[24:44.820 --> 24:52.840]  And this is a 17-year-old who comes home and tells his mom that night, you know, he's not very smart.
[24:55.400 --> 25:03.160]  Now, for you to be dumb enough for a 17-year-old boy to notice that you're dumb, you aren't trying very hard.
[25:06.600 --> 25:08.240]  All right, I didn't tell that story.
[25:12.340 --> 25:13.820]  Even as the U.S.
[25:14.320 --> 25:20.180]  drifts further toward fascism, much of the rest of the world is pushing for more freedom.
[25:20.920 --> 25:25.280]  The catalyst for this is the free transfer of information.
[25:25.820 --> 25:29.860]  I was reading an article on one of the fine magazines in the airplane on the way here.
[25:30.660 --> 25:34.200]  And one of the writers said something which really struck me.
[25:34.420 --> 25:43.140]  They were talking about some chemical spill in Russia that was reported on by a Russian reporter on the web.
[25:43.640 --> 25:44.840]  Anybody could read it.
[25:44.980 --> 25:48.900]  If you wanted to talk to that reporter, you could send them email and you could get email back.
[25:50.020 --> 25:54.560]  And he wasn't likely to be shot or sent to Siberia because of talking to you.
[25:55.800 --> 26:06.240]  For those of us who remember when, you know, the duck and cover drills in elementary school so that we could survive the nuclear bombs that were going to rain down on us.
[26:06.240 --> 26:08.800]  That's a very powerful thing.
[26:10.300 --> 26:20.800]  Tom Clancy, who politically is not one of my favorite people, but I will admit to enjoying his books, you know, said it's like a science fiction movie.
[26:22.780 --> 26:25.920]  In China, they're trying to keep the genie in the bottle.
[26:27.500 --> 26:36.100]  But as more and more people get access to the web, it becomes very difficult to carry on and perpetuate a big lie.
[26:37.340 --> 26:43.360]  In the face of dozens and hundreds of different sources pointing out the truth.
[26:49.280 --> 26:56.680]  The people in this room, and those like us who are not here today, are the ones that are supplying the arms for this information war.
[26:58.840 --> 27:04.880]  We are going to encounter opposition and have in the past, and some people in here are going to be taken down.
[27:05.720 --> 27:06.600]  That's a fact.
[27:06.960 --> 27:11.500]  You know, it's sad, but some people are going to get made examples of.
[27:11.660 --> 27:13.680]  They're going to have all their gear confiscated.
[27:14.380 --> 27:16.360]  Bad things will happen to some of you.
[27:19.700 --> 27:20.780]  But we're hackers.
[27:21.700 --> 27:23.280]  And this is our manifesto.
[27:24.460 --> 27:27.100]  And you may stop some of us, but you can't stop us all.
[27:27.720 --> 27:29.740]  Because after all, we're all alike.
[27:30.880 --> 27:31.520]  Thank you.
[27:51.790 --> 27:52.850]  How am I doing on time?
[27:55.170 --> 27:56.330]  How am I doing on time?
[27:58.290 --> 27:58.830]  Pretty good.
[27:59.310 --> 28:00.450]  Okay, we want to do some questions.
[28:00.650 --> 28:06.870]  I think the CDC guys are running a little bit behind, so I'm not going to feel bad on intruding into their time.
[28:08.130 --> 28:10.010]  I'll be happy to open this up to questions.
[28:18.140 --> 28:20.280]  And if there are no questions, I'll be happy to go drink a beer.
[28:25.090 --> 28:25.550]  All right.
[28:25.730 --> 28:26.630]  Well, thank you all for coming.
[28:28.450 --> 28:29.470]  And keep the faith.