Reverse Engineering: Hacking Documentary Series
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Nirenberg, Michael Lee
Buchwald, Dave
We will present a sample scene and panel talk on our documentary series Reverse Engineering to the hacking community, which has been in the works for 4 years. We have dozens of interviews spanning the first 3 decades of computer hacking, ultimately there will be hundreds. It's a big story, but for the purposes of DEF CON, we've put together a 17 min. Scene covering the 80s WarGames/Legion of Doom-era of computer hacking in the US. We've spoken to great people, but there are other viewpoints—this is a history that needs to be told by 1st person accounts. The accuracy and strength of our completed series is tantamount to the quality of who we interview and the questions that get asked. Accuracy is particularly important, there's been no shortage of media hype and lies regarding hacking since the 1980s. Our vision for this film series is inclusive and collaborative. We'd like to hear from attendees how to best tell the origin story of hacking to new generations, and more so the outside world who've been fed a lot of myths by the media. Those are the lawmakers and citizens of tomorrow that we need to reach. Little attention has been paid to the pioneering hacker spirit that has literally changed every aspect of life. We want to address and correct that.
 Alright now I'll hand it over to the reverse engineering team. Thank you. Defcon 26, thank you. My name is John Tarani and I am the producer and editor of the project that we are presenting, Reverse Engineering. I've been working in entertainment for the past 15 years with a specialty in unscripted content. We're going to tell you about a great project that we've been working on, a project about you. And we're going to tell you how you can get involved and help bring the project to completion. Because after all, it is about you. So right now let me bring up the, well let me introduce the producer and director of Reverse Engineering, Michael Lee Nirenberg. Thank you John. Thank you Defcon 26 for having us to give this presentation. Some of you this weekend thought I might be a narc, which is not the case, I'm on your side. My partner is a nice suspect, we find a receptive audience here. And so thank you again for having us. I'm at times a writer, filmmaker, and probably most known as a commercial artist in movies and TV. I directed a documentary on Hustler Magazine that came out four years ago because my dad was our director in the 70s and 80s. So if you're interested in watching, it's easy to find. The reason I'm speaking to you today is that four years ago we set out to make a documentary about the history of computer hacking. And to get this right involves bringing it to you because this is what you do. John. Okay, I'd also like to introduce another producer. You might know him as Bill from RNOC, Dave Buckwald. Hey. Thank you. What's cooking Defcon? My true given name is Dave Buckwald and I'm a hacker and I'm a filmmaker and a visual artist. And dog willing on the 13th, I'm going to be 23 years sober. This was movie magic, water. Okay. Well, we've been working on this project. Mike, how long have we been working on this for? Funny you should ask John, four years. I started when I was gifted a copy of this book, Masters of Deception. Led me to Bruce Sterling's hacker crackdown. Stephen Levies hackers. John Markovs with the door mouth said, Phil absolutely exploding a phone, a number of others that were landmark books of the early years of this thing. So after doing the research, I found that there was no major documentary much less a major docu series on the subject. And so we found a wormhole in the culture and the lane was open. So after doing the research, we just started finding people and filming them. The first being John Perry Barlow, which in retrospect turned out to be quite prussian. I've always been attacked like many I came of age in the 90s. And it's fascinating by the early web, but I really didn't get really into it to the beginning of consumer broadband in the early 2000s. At that point, hacking the infancy had just passed. Now, there are great documentaries about specific hacking moments. I've turned out to be incredible resources for what we're doing. But after doing the research, we realized that there hasn't been a single film that speaks about this thing, the beginning of this thing to the broader non hacker world. And there's a lot of people who don't understand it or afraid of it. And it impacts their lives every day. Now, one of the things that made me want to be a part of the project was the connection to New York City. Now, upon meeting the hackers that we were interviewing like Dave, most of them are New York based and I'm a lifelong New Yorker. So while I was reading Masters of Deception, yeah, while I was reading Masters of Deception, I was able to visualize a lot of the places that they were talking about. I knew about the Green Acres Mall and the Radio Shack there where the kids would go to buy their computer parts and their modems and stuff. So I was able to visualize a lot of the places because I had already been there. And upon meeting Dave and the other people that from MOD and Masters of Deception, Legion of Doom, I was able to really identify with them just because I felt that I was like them and I would have been friends with them in school. So bringing Dave on as a producer for me was a no brainer. And it would have been hard to be friends with me in school because I wasn't at school that often. I was behind my computer most of the time. And I'm here because in 1983, 1984, I got an Apple 2e and a little bit later a blazing Apple Cat, blazing fast Apple Cat modem. And very soon after that, discovered text files and TAP Magazine, BBS's, later 2600 Magazine. And I was the lead singer of a group called Legion of Doom until I was busted by the Secret Service in the summer of 87. And I got my first taste of working in the film industry as a hacking consultant on a movie Hackers, which is not an documentary. Many of you have probably seen this wonderful piece. In the 90s, I was working as a computer security consultant with my old hacking buddy Fiberoptic until the.com bubble burst. And I got sick of making money anyway, so I decided to become a film editor. And I've always observed that the more you know about any given subject, the more kind of media distortion there is and the public perception gets so skewed. And working on this film is kind of my way of giving back to the hacker community and really presenting, not just for a new generation of hackers, but for general audiences, a kind of true depiction of what went on and what brought us to where we are now in an entertaining and non-didactic way. So along with my two partners from the Hustler movie, John, Tarani, and Flynn Hunhousen, who couldn't be here tonight, we met Dave while tracking down members of the early 90s, late 80s group, Legion of Doom. And turn out he was also in Brooklyn like the rest of us and made sense to join the team being a film editor so he understood what we were trying to do. And it turns out to be a damn good film producer, which is how we ended up here. That's what I told him. I primarily do picture editing and producing. And I've always stayed close to my roots in the hacker world. I've been the cover artist in residence for 2600 Magazine doing all the covers since about 2001. And designing their t-shirts, it's funny, I see so many people wearing t-shirts here that I designed behind my little computer, so that's always cool. And it's funny what kind of started as just like an impromptu interview in my boiler room has bloomed into this like herculean task of trying to document hacker history. So I alluded to, we're going to show the 20 minute clip. We alluded to this earlier, but there's very few documentaries about the original hacker generations. Currently, there's a great many of them being made about contemporary hacking because it's much more sexy to film. But it's easier to do. The existing documentaries are their basic cable or homemade YouTube documentaries designed for other hackers, more or less. Some of them have been quite good. My personal favorite is Annalisa Savage's Unauthorized Access because she was the first and he captured these guys in the moment before the law closed in on them. There's also a manual Goldstein's Freedom Down Time, which is about Kevin Mitnick, and his case and Jason Scott's ambitious eight-part documentary series on BBS boards. So we're doing something different so we can entertain, like I mentioned earlier, the non-hacker community and pandering to the old-school media, sort of bullshit scare tactics by talking to people who are actually there. So John, you want to set up the scene? Sure. Right now, we're going to show you guys a chunk of the movie. Now, all three of us had our hands in making this. And please remember, it is a work in progress. Right. It's important to note that none of the music has been cleared because it's only tipped in. When you have the lawyers, you do the last step because it costs so much money. They sound the colors and mixed yet for the same reason. And we feel this stage is only right that we share it, with the hacker community, so we can get your input, see what else we could do with it. Because it's big. It's going to be three parts. I have to watch it with you because I'm tethered to the thing. I can't walk away. So we're just terrifying. Yeah, John? Yeah. Well, I mean, no one's going to walk out because it's edited really well, whoever edited it. So let's show it to you now. He's all right. But after we're done here, we're going to explain what the three parts are. And we can't dim the lights because it's the rules. Pretend that you're in a movie theater right now. The ambiance, the chandeliers. Can we take these down, though? No. No, not that. Can't do anything. I don't know. All right. Enjoy. Today, five hackers were indicted on federal wire fraud charges. And NBC's Gary Matsumoto found their leader in an unlikely setting. That's fiber optic with a pH, described by some as a computer genius, by others as a computer anarchist. When you're a little kid growing up, you kind of feel like you don't really have any control over what's going on. As far as what was going on in the news around us, in the 80s, the Soviet Union was still a very real thing. We were worried about nuclear war. Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev are negotiating this stuff. And you're hoping it turns out OK. But you really don't know from one day to the next if one day everybody's just going to blow up. This permeated culture. It was in movies. It was in music. And it was some scary shit. Getting online and becoming part of this computer underground was something that we felt that we had control over in a world that we had really no place in. York was nothing like how it is now. It was the crack epidemic of huge proportions, drugs in the street, violence everywhere. So you have to be constantly aware. And that sort of hyper-awareness translated into breaking into computers. And out of that came a new class of people, hackers, young people that had new technology inside out, had grew up with it, and could see the networks that were evolving right before our eyes, and could see where it was going, and play with it, build around it, interrupt it. In some ways, the kind of curiosity that could only be generated inside a busy place like New York City. At the very beginning, it was about a shared interest in an illicit world of information. And initially, there were no barriers. This was a world that was free to it's worth. And subterranean and secret and accessible. At that particular time, the internet existed. But most people weren't really on it unless you were at university, or worked for one of the various agencies in the scientific or military. But there was a rise of these online BBSs and these networks. BBS stands for Bulletin Board System. And this was how people would communicate with other people that also had personal computers. Once a computer is equipped with a modem, it can both send and receive messages to and from any other computer in the world that is also equipped with a similar sort of modem. The first time that I tellmatted another machine halfway across the country, and realized that I was connected to that computer way over there, it was a religious experience. A friend showed me this, and he said, yeah, I'm calling up these Bulletin Board Systems and you can do all these things with them. You would call a phone number, put it into a cradle, and then it would answer and you'd be able to talk to the computer. And then you end up with a bunch of strings of characters and people's names. And I just thought this was insane. I thought this was the greatest thing ever. It was very, very slow. It would take days for messages to arrive sometimes. The kid whose parents had an extra phone line would leave his computer hooked up to the phone all the time so that you could call to that computer or someone who calls into some other computer far away. And this computer called that one called that one. So it was a completely kind of ad hoc mesh of computers. You don't know where this is. You don't know how it's being done. And at the time, that's beyond belief. The first one I got on was called Q-Link, which was the precursor to AOL. And I got on there and I didn't fit in at all. I'm like, yo, who here likes Bismarck-E? And they were like, yo, nobody likes black music. I was like, oh, man. And I got trolled by a guy. His name was like NKOTV, New Kids on the Block. And there's a whole bunch of posts about hacking. And I'm like, holy shit, hacking, breaking into computers sounds kind of cool. The computer underground in the 80s was the age of exploration. And that's in stark contrast to whatever semblance of an underground exists today. It's not about exploration. It's about theft. It's about bank fraud. It's about monetary gain, unfortunately. You're related to computers, huh? Yeah. What are you doing? Dying into the school's computer. They change the password every couple of weeks. But I know where they write it down. One of the biggest films, I think, had the huge impact on me that came out in the early 80s was War Games. About a kid who's looking for a video game company. He's a hacker. A lot of the things they show in the movie are true to life. As far as how he goes about looking for systems, scanning telephone exchanges, for modems, and so on. I can't tell you how many different hackers I've interviewed. He said, I watched that film. I asked for a modem for Christmas. It was at that point that the word hackers, which nobody really knew in society, took on a new meaning. Hacker before had been someone at MIT AI who was a programmer and nobody ever saw them. And hacker after War Games was a kid with ACME who was about 15 who broke into computers. These bands of teenagers would begin exploring these things and they would do sometimes fun things, sometimes listen things. All these bulletin board geeks were a funny bunch. They were basically just punkers and if somebody took their skateboards and gave them modems, it wouldn't make much difference. It was not unusual to find a system with a default login with no password, even on some relatively important systems. And is this wrong or right? It doesn't really enter your mind. You're really doing it more out of curiosity. I was a phone freak and a hacker. It's like I love telephones. So just a computer itself was too small. I liked networks. And there was no computer network as large as the PSTN, the public switch telephone network. The first modem I got was a family friend who was getting rid of an old 300 block modem. That was pretty much the beginning of my road to sort of being a hacker into what I do now. There's this big machine. How do you get inside it and take it apart and play with it? And then also, how do you use it to create mischief? Eventually, I was able to finagle an Applecat out of my parents. Applecat could generate sound effects. So you could actually use it as a blue box and do all kinds of things with it that you could do with an ordinary modem. That one was life-changing because it was a very programmable modem. You could produce any tone that you wanted, including the control tones for in-bends, signaling, and phone networks. You can basically take control, become an operator, and just do anything that you wanted. It's pretty magical when you're a kid and you suddenly realize, hey, I can control the phone system. Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, there really weren't any other hackers there. The big scene in the early 80s was primarily centered around New York, New Jersey. And so that's where I ended up gravitating. And that's where I ended up meeting a bunch of like-minded people. There began to appear hacker groups, which were loose affiliations of kids typically that never met each other. They didn't know each other's identity or any of that. They came up with an alias, a handle. And that's how they affiliated on these BBSs. I picked Eric Bloodaxe because I had read a really cool book about Vikings. Sounded cool. My first name's Eric. And so Eric Bloodaxe went from bulletin board to bulletin board around the United States. Now you have this knowledge base that's forming of systems, how to use them, and how to maintain access to them. It was those early BBSs that turned into what we referred to as the elite BBSs. 13 of us will form the most powerful and sinister group the world has ever seen. From now on, we'll be known as the Legion of Doom. Legion of Doom was a super group of hackers who were, let's say, the very top of the game. I read about the Legion of Doom. And I said, like, fuck it. These guys can do that. I can do that. And I basically went out and became the head of the Legion of Doom. It was like a popularity contest. I had this kind of overview of the inner workings of AT&T better than maybe any one single employee. I would get off on being able to listen in on a phone call, or prank pulling. Like, you know, you turn somebody's phone into a pay phone. Somebody picks up the phone. That was the phone to make a phone call. And they get a recording coming up to the positive quarter, or taking a pay phone and turning it into a home phone. That was what would help you gain popularity. If somebody hacked you, you try to figure out a way how to hack them back. It was sort of a pranksterism. We broke into a ton of shit. I mean, I broke into companies that you would just be like shocked at the level of data that's stored. There's a very, very strong ethos among hacker underground communities to keep quiet. If you're calling attention to yourself through these kind of audacious hacks and groups, guess who's going to come knocking? It was really hard to get in trouble unless you were just doing something really wrong or really misguided. That you were drawing unnecessary attention to yourself. People considered Legion of Doom to be sort of a pinnacle of the computer underground. That didn't just end at the edge of the computer bulletin boards. People within the regional bell operating companies knew who Legion of Doom was. People within the FBI and the Secret Service knew who the Legion of Doom was. People in corporate security for credit bureaus knew who Legion of Doom was. Law enforcement didn't really know how to deal with it, I think, at the time, because it was so new. There were laws going back to the 30s from telecommunications like Wirefraud, the Wirefraud Act, which could be considered most anything. There was in, I think it was around 1986, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which was largely untested. It certainly was never tested on anyone in the mid-80s. By the late 80s and early 90s, it was the thing that they were using to prosecute a lot of us. But they were really just trying to make a lot of noise to show the public and the government that they were doing something about the problem. It's a threat to big business. It's some kind of threat to infrastructure. And this is how to stop it, by kicking indoors and seizing computers. You know, they weren't that tech savvy, the Secret Service, in those days. Seemed more like they just wanted to shut it down and make everyone stop doing what they were doing. So they came to my house in a UPS truck. And an assistant district attorney rang my doorbell and said he was from UPS. And he asked my dad to sign the clipboard. Dad signed the clipboard. He says, where's the package? And he goes, bring in the package. The back of the van rolls up. And guys with sledge hammers, and there were guys with guns drawn, come out of the back of this UPS van, or taking computers and taking notebooks. They weren't trying to put anybody in jail. They were just basically trying to scare people into stopping. There was one guy I knew that said that when the FBI came to his parents' house to arrest him, they took all of his computers, but left all these very important computer security books that had tons of information because they didn't actually know what they were. There was a kid, I think he was in Indiana, he got arrested for some kind of calling card fraud. They saw he was all involved in computers. They said, you're a computer hacker. Are you a legion of doom? He goes, no. But I know some people who are. And that ultimately led to me being raided. Well, I don't think you have to be that smart to know that if you get raided by a three letter agency and you never go to jail, you must have sung like a bird. Our top story at five, a massive offensive by the US Secret Service against illegal computer hackers. Search warrants are going out here in Chicago and a dozen other cities coast to coast in an effort to stop computer fraud that is costing companies and consumers millions of dollars. When law enforcement really started making its presence known, busting into people's homes and seizing their computers, this affected a growing number of people that I knew, there were certain individuals who kind of thumb their nose at the whole thing and kind of had a more daring attitude at a time when what modesty probably would have been a better course of action. It was probably around that time that I had falling out with a particular LOD member who by de facto found himself in charge of the group. Trying to put together one of the Legend of Technical Journals, I was trying to map out different packet switch networks to identify all the computers that existed on a particular network. I knew fiber optic and access to information about the internal setup of the X25 network used by Ninex, which was the New York telephone company. And I was like, all right, well, can you give me a breakdown of what's on the Ninex packet switch network so I can include it in the directory? And he said, yeah, yeah, sure, I'll get that to you. He says, if I give you that, you need to give me this other thing. I was like, well, that's not mine to give. So then later on, Mark calls this other friend of ours, a guy named Bob. He says, hey, Bob, Chris told me to call you and get the log in for this system. He didn't have it handy, and I need it now because I'm trying to work on this thing, and he needs something from me. So if you just give me the log into this machine, so Mark got the account, ended up getting that account locked out. So now we lost our access to that system. So I found out about this later on, and I called everybody else and we did a doom, and I said, we need to kick this guy out. So he hooked up with a bunch of his friends in New York and started another group called Masters of Deception. LOD was falling apart. People were getting busted by the government. Now, a group that we had once respected, that I myself was affiliated with, was going off on a strange path that we didn't really agree with. MOD was supposed to be just a joke, playing off of LOD a little bit, but evidently, there wasn't enough room for both of us on the networks of the world, and it erupted eventually into something called a great hacker war, where we start trying to hack each other, which was a lot of fun, but also caused a lot of trouble. From then on out, the deal was, let's get Goggins, let's get LOD. Great hacker war was basically a disagreement between guys that I knew and one of the members of LOD who, let's just say, we thought was engaging in some questionable behavior as far as potentially turning in other hackers. Wasn't really considered a war until the media turned this into a gang war in cyberspace, especially in the 80s. Gang violence was common. So, I mean, just writing off hacker groups as just the online version of violent gangs made it easier for law enforcement or people to visualize, oh, this is wrong, this is bad. We are experiencing a crime wave in the computer area that is just astronomical. We can't keep up. Nobody who's working in this field can keep up. This is not victimless crime. We are all victims. Well, the media needs to have a villain. And in something involving computers or technology, very easy to label somebody who is smart and a bit mischievous as the villain, because nobody's really going to ever understand what it is they're doing. And they generate fear. The problem wasn't really ever identified. It was just sort of a speech that was repeated over and over again by prosecutors and law enforcement that there is some kind of hacker menace. It needs to be stopped by sending kids, teenagers to jail. And for you, catch the man. I hope he caught you. Seems about the same amount of people, I think. That was better than I thought it would be. Yeah. Yeah, so who wouldn't want to be a part of that? OK. So, yeah. That's where am I? Well, again, I'm glad that some of you stayed. And I'm interested enough to hear us out. We're doing the series in three parts, because it's so big we can't compress into the old 90 minute documentary format. So part one is about the origin story of computer hacking. Several concurrent trends were evolving to create the conditions that led to the personal computer. In this section, we meet the first generation of phone freaks. The corporations have created the personal computer, and the first hackers emerged from MIT and Stanford. The government developed the ARPANET. All these unique conditions are just right to develop the personal computer. John? Now, for those of us who were born after 1990, Dave, can you explain what phone freaking is? Yeah. Talked about a little bit in the clip we showed. The phone network was the largest, vast, wide-ranging network in the world. And back then, I try to tell this to my kids now, phones didn't have cameras or apps or touch screens. And my bell was a cheap mother, but you could pick up your phone, you could make a couple of tones, and be connected to anyone anywhere in the world, make a bell ring in somebody's house at 3 in the morning on the other side of the world. And the hacker spirit was there. And I knew there was a lot going on beneath the surface. And the trick was finding out about it. And there wasn't Google, and there weren't BBSs that you could log onto. But there were technical journals, and internal manuals, and reverse engineering that the early groups of freaks learned to figure out this network from the inside out. And part of the beauty of a lot of these early networks is security was an afterthought if it was there at all. And it was kind of uncharted territory back then. And I remember an old phone freak friend of mine told me, and this is back when I was a little, little kid, that you used to be able to call into the White House, and you get the switchboard operator, and you politely get them to get off the phone with you. And you just sit there, and you're on an empty line. There's no sound at all. And then a minute later, you hear a click. And the next inbound call coming into the president is connected to you. So as many of you know, hacking meant something different at first, and why this is very obvious to DEF CON attendees, as I broadly know. And I mentioned the great many books on the origins of computer phone hacking. There was a pranksterism that wasn't yet malicious. But aside from freaking, there was a moment where a big university computers were being installed in universities. As I mentioned earlier, much of the hacking movement can be traced back to 1960s MIT and Stanford's AI lab. The grad students in electrical engineering became interested in these machines, which had the time share. They hacked the test of boundaries, which is where we get the term from. They never would have predicted all the things you were doing. Now, much like the title Reverse Engineering suggests, we kind of have to work backwards as filmmakers. So we're always asking who came before them and who came before them. Right. The lore of Steve Jobs and Steve Watson creating Apple's a story we all know. But the culture that they emerge from is far undervalued and is for our purposes, but we're interested in exploring. So part two is about the personal computer and the individual. Like the last section, several concurrent trends emerge at the same time. Electrical engineering students get jobs at places like Intel, Xerox Park, IBM, Hewlett Packard, the Humber Computer Club, and the People's Computer Company. Start up and computer hobbies get together. After hours of exchange information, freakers too become interested. There's a race to invent the personal computer. This is well known. Bay areas, rock culture, psychedelic drugs, self-help gurus, and hippie scenes emerge with the NASA Silicon Valley. The third part of the series where you saw an excerpt from we were thinking of as the war games and post war games generation. And I mean, who thought at the time that this film would come out that would kind of motivate a whole generation of teens and pre-teens to get into computers and go out fit their computers with modems? Right. And part three we concentrate on the kids that grew up with the modem and how that changed the worlds you saw in the clip. Personal computers make their way into the market and popular culture. Modems open up the early web in creating a population explosion. Teen hacker cultures emerge. Government closes in law and arrests result, and the internet goes mainstream. So Dave, can you tell us a story from when you were a little boy? Sure. When I was a teenager exploring other people's computer networks, it was a simpler time. I remember my dad used to regale me with stories about, when he was a kid, they would go to the movies with 12 cents and they'd be able to take a trolley to the movies and have something to eat and go back home again. And he also used to tell me, like, 1,200 baht is the fastest you're ever going to get dated to travel over a twisted copper pair. And it was simpler times than times change. And back in the 80s, you would find systems that were wide open with default passwords or no passwords at all, with documented source code and compilers on board. And we would backdoor these systems. So even if we were discovered, by that point, the point was moot. One of my favorite things we used to do was make it that if you would type P Floyd at the login prompt, you'd be dropped down to a root shell. And things got backed up and passed on to the upgrades of the systems as they went on. One of the things that's important to really keep in mind is a sense of history and how things like plastic whistles and punch cards will give way to teens depositing source code on open source GitHub repositories and landing these cush jobs at Google and Amazon by the time their peach fuzz is turning it to neck beard. And how each iteration of hackers gives into the next generation until we wind up here today at DEFCON26. Right, we're almost done. Before we open the Florida questions, I'd like to make some few points that we recognize it's an international story. And because it's a medium with time space limitations, we have to limit it to American hacking from the late 50s to the early 90s before it becomes mainstream. So it's pretty well covered by other people after a certain time frame. And we haven't quite defined where to land it. What was happening in the early 90s with Kevin Mitnick's story seems to be a good place as any. But we're interested in maybe figuring out what really is the end of the first generation of it. And it's a nonlinear story, so maybe you can help us figure out where the line is. So thanks for your time. And thanks for staying. Yeah, I mean, just that we need help. And insight is important, which is why we wanted to bring this out to the hacker community now while we're still in the process of taping interviews. We need help finding the kind of buried stories that shape the world that have been forgotten. And also, finally, the old timers before they become buried people, and kind of find the anonymous people who wouldn't give an interview 10 years ago, and the unsung heroes, and even like the telco security dudes and prosecutors and feds that were around in that time period who helped kind of shape the perception and shape the community. So before we take questions, I just want to thank everyone for coming. We've got stickers on the table outside. Everybody grab a sticker on your way out. Most importantly, I need to clarify this presentation. Although we are still looking for investment partners, we are looking for investment partners, this presentation was not about that. That's not what this presentation was for. That's what the bar is for. OK, so we're going to be here all weekend. Please come find us. We'll also be at Snack is Maximus. We saw the Snack is Maximus, so we're going to hit that too. So at one of the- And the pool party is a pool party. Karaoke, this karaoke tonight, we'll be at that. We will now open the floor to questions. Oh, great. There's no questions. You, sir, glasses. Well, really, anybody, we want to put this into plain language that anybody can understand. Mike and I are lay people. We are not, right? Is that the word? Yeah, we went to a couple of other talks to see what they're like. And the whole time, we're like, Dave, what the fuck are they talking about? What is this about? Oh, OK. There was a guy, there was a kid in here before. I just thought he was wrestling with his pen. He kept going like this with his pen. And I had no idea what his thing was about. So we're going to try to put it into plain language that anybody can understand. Because it's fascinating nonetheless. I mean, from a cultural standpoint, aside from the tech aspect of it, it's, as a cultural phenomenon, changed the way we live our lives. Anybody else? You, sir, also glasses and beard. How far are you along in the process? Well, we were talking about this earlier. Basically, we've done about 19 or 20-some odd interviews. But we've got about 100 interviews we want to do. We've got a lot of people who've come out and said they want to be interviewed. And so there's other people who are seeking out. And there's other people that have approached us. So it's just people are starting to find out about what we're doing. It's difficult with the whole multi-generational layer to it. And finding people that were active in this stuff in the mid-60s puts them in there, some of them in their 80s now. Oh, yeah, we've got to get the dead people. It's like, actually, we've got to dig up dead people to get them. OK, you sir, over there. Hell, yeah, we are. Yep. We're going to see the service of one. Yes. Yes. Do you know him? We can get him. I know someone who knows him. Yeah, I don't think that's a hard one to get. But yes, definitely. Yes. You in the center, you saw your hand go up. What was the name of the documentary? Reverse Engineering. This one? Yeah. Reverse Engineering. Boom. Boom. Uh, who else? Anybody else got a question? Anybody got a suggestion? What didn't you like? What was not good about it? Oh, what did you didn't like? Criticism. Oh, you. Also glasses, back to you. Oh, hell yeah. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. This, I mean, the thing which is difficult about playing such a small, each of the parts that we talked about is going to be, if we're doing it as feature length, it's going to be running approximately an hour to an hour and a half and go in, kind of drill down with that detail on the different areas and the different things. And what we showed is not to be construed as a picture of what there was. It's just like it's a scene from a section, not the entire section per se. Which is why we want to do in three parts, because it's a massive story. I mean, it's not as simple as like, like we were talking about the old documentary format, which was 90 minutes. Like the Hustler movie that him and I did, when that came out, we were only able to get a major distributor because it was 90 minutes, because it was the package. And that was like four years ago. Now it's changed. Like everything is. Everything is stretched out. Yeah. I mean, with better. And it's a learn. Streaming services and, you know. Everyone wants a series. Looking, you know, talking, you know, HBO and Netflix and things along those lines. It allows for like longer form documentary series to allow you to cover the big picture. Yeah, you can stretch out. So that was a compliment. Any more compliments? It was a compliment. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, you, sir, in the blue shirt. Is it available online anywhere to view for other people? The clip is we're still making it. Yeah. I want to talk to you, Tuck. I know about you. The sample scene that we showed is on our website. And there's also a short sales reel. It's like a two minute sizzle. We'll take it. We'll take it. I hate. But there's a short sizzle reel as well as the sample scene. Oh. Find us at the bar. We know him already. That's our man. Wait. Is that Steve? Oh, yeah. That's Steve. That was good. What up, Steve? Thank you. So how do we reconcile what the modern? Well, no, it turned out somewhat dystopian. It started out with all this utopian promise, especially you look at the stuff from the 60s at the dawn of the psychedelic Bay Area. It all comes together under this utopian shell. It did change everything. It may not be the way that the computer culture had wanted it to be. I think some of the utopia is a carrot on a stick. It's always as new technologies emerge. It's always like, oh, but networking is going to save us. And the internet of things is going to save us. And it's always something to strive for. And some of it is still quite utopian. Some of it, it's not all terrible. Some of it's terrible. It's an election hack. I saw we had three. All right, you first. All right. Have you considered going past calling three and covering modern days? We'd love to. It's just hard enough finding the money for the original part. But yeah, we'd love to. I mean, I'd love to do 12 parts. We're super ambitious. Yeah, there's no shortage of source material. I mean, part of the thing in the filmmaking standpoint is we want to have as much firsthand and first-party account as we possibly can in first-person interviews. And with the time frame that's going on, we're on the far end of the curve now. And we need to do, like we have John Perry Barlow, and we sat down with him for four and a half hours. That's not possible today. And it's a shame because it would be nice to go back to him after we talk to other people and say, well, some of these other people said this. And what else can you say about this to be in a different part? And it's not possible anymore. So especially when you're documenting the past, that has to be given priority because it's fleeting, unfortunately. One more point on this is the last documentary I made with him, that the one on Hustler Magazine, there's five people in it who are dead, which is, you know, the clock is always running. One of them even went to the electric chair. Well, lethal injection. But anyway. Guy from Moe, were you at MohawkCon? Yeah. Yeah. Did you win? I think we're being given the time signal. Oh. Oh, sorry. I didn't see it. One minute. OK. MohawkCon, your last question. A little off topic, but what did you think about working on as an advisor and a hacker at the time? What did I think at the time? It was pretty funny. I mean, it was right after this Esquire article about hackers had come out and the Michelle Pfeiffer on the cover of the issue. And I mean, Rafael, who wrote the screenplay, came to a lot of the 2600 meetings and knew a lot of local New York people and tried to bring them in either personality wise or handle wise. And then the whole thing got Hollywood-ed and then with a layer of British directing of American events on top. It was fun. I mean, I enjoyed it. I like filmmaking. So I enjoyed it on that level. But I mean, it's storytelling. And it's fictional. I expected you all to dress like that. Can we take any more? We'll see you later tonight. We don't know what to do. OK. Can we take one more? Are we good? Add time. OK. All right. Thank you so much. Defcon26, thank you. Thank you.
 Alright now I'll hand it over to the reverse engineering team.  Thank you. Defcon 26, thank you.  My name is John Tarani and I am the producer and editor of the  project that we are presenting, Reverse Engineering. I've been  working in entertainment for the past 15 years with a specialty  in unscripted content. We're going to tell you about a great  project that we've been working on, a project about you. And  we're going to tell you how you can get involved and help bring  the project to completion. Because after all, it is about you.  So right now let me bring up the, well let me introduce the  producer and director of Reverse Engineering, Michael Lee  Nirenberg. Thank you John. Thank you Defcon 26 for having us  to give this presentation. Some of you this weekend thought I  might be a narc, which is not the case, I'm on your side. My  partner is a nice suspect, we find a receptive audience here.  And so thank you again for having us. I'm at times a writer,  filmmaker, and probably most known as a commercial artist in  movies and TV. I directed a documentary on Hustler Magazine  that came out four years ago because my dad was our director  in the 70s and 80s. So if you're interested in watching, it's  easy to find. The reason I'm speaking to you today is that  four years ago we set out to make a documentary about the  history of computer hacking. And to get this right involves  bringing it to you because this is what you do. John.  Okay, I'd also like to introduce another producer. You might  know him as Bill from RNOC, Dave Buckwald.  Hey. Thank you. What's cooking Defcon? My true given name is  Dave Buckwald and I'm a hacker and I'm a filmmaker and a  visual artist. And dog willing on the 13th, I'm going to be 23  years sober. This was movie magic, water.  Okay. Well, we've been working on this project. Mike, how long  have we been working on this for?  Funny you should ask John, four years. I started when I was  gifted a copy of this book, Masters of Deception. Led me to  Bruce Sterling's hacker crackdown. Stephen Levies hackers.  John Markovs with the door mouth said, Phil absolutely  exploding a phone, a number of others that were landmark books  of the early years of this thing. So after doing the research,  I found that there was no major documentary much less a  major docu series on the subject. And so we found a  wormhole in the culture and the lane was open. So after doing  the research, we just started finding people and filming them.  The first being John Perry Barlow, which in retrospect turned  out to be quite prussian. I've always been attacked like many  I came of age in the 90s. And it's fascinating by the early  web, but I really didn't get really into it to the beginning  of consumer broadband in the early 2000s. At that point,  hacking the infancy had just passed. Now, there are great  documentaries about specific hacking moments. I've turned out  to be incredible resources for what we're doing. But after  doing the research, we realized that there hasn't been a  single film that speaks about this thing, the beginning of  this thing to the broader non hacker world. And there's a lot  of people who don't understand it or afraid of it. And it  impacts their lives every day. Now, one of the things that made  me want to be a part of the project was the connection to  New York City. Now, upon meeting the hackers that we were  interviewing like Dave, most of them are New York based and  I'm a lifelong New Yorker. So while I was reading Masters of  Deception, yeah, while I was reading Masters of Deception, I  was able to visualize a lot of the places that they were  talking about. I knew about the Green Acres Mall and the  Radio Shack there where the kids would go to buy their  computer parts and their modems and stuff. So I was able to  visualize a lot of the places because I had already been there.  And upon meeting Dave and the other people that from MOD and  Masters of Deception, Legion of Doom, I was able to really  identify with them just because I felt that I was like them and  I would have been friends with them in school. So bringing Dave  on as a producer for me was a no brainer.  And it would have been hard to be friends with me in school  because I wasn't at school that often. I was behind my  computer most of the time. And I'm here because in 1983,  1984, I got an Apple 2e and a little bit later a blazing  Apple Cat, blazing fast Apple Cat modem. And very soon after  that, discovered text files and TAP Magazine, BBS's, later  2600 Magazine. And I was the lead singer of a group called  Legion of Doom until I was busted by the Secret Service in  the summer of 87. And I got my first taste of working in the  film industry as a hacking consultant on a movie Hackers,  which is not an documentary. Many of you have probably seen  this wonderful piece. In the 90s, I was working as a  computer security consultant with my old hacking buddy  Fiberoptic until the.com bubble burst. And I got sick of  making money anyway, so I decided to become a film  editor. And I've always observed that the more you  know about any given subject, the more kind of media  distortion there is and the public perception gets so  skewed. And working on this film is kind of my way of  giving back to the hacker community and really presenting,  not just for a new generation of hackers, but for general  audiences, a kind of true depiction of what went on and  what brought us to where we are now in an entertaining and  non-didactic way.  So along with my two partners from the Hustler movie, John,  Tarani, and Flynn Hunhousen, who couldn't be here tonight,  we met Dave while tracking down members of the early 90s,  late 80s group, Legion of Doom. And turn out he was also in  Brooklyn like the rest of us and made sense to join the  team being a film editor so he understood what we were  trying to do.  And it turns out to be a damn good film producer, which is  how we ended up here.  That's what I told him.  I primarily do picture editing and producing.  And I've always stayed close to my roots in the hacker  world.  I've been the cover artist in residence for 2600 Magazine  doing all the covers since about 2001.  And designing their t-shirts, it's funny, I see so many  people wearing t-shirts here that I designed behind my  little computer, so that's always cool.  And it's funny what kind of started as just like an  impromptu interview in my boiler room has bloomed into  this like herculean task of trying to document hacker  history.  So I alluded to, we're going to show the 20 minute clip.  We alluded to this earlier, but there's very few  documentaries about the original hacker generations.  Currently, there's a great many of them being made about  contemporary hacking because it's much more sexy to film.  But it's easier to do.  The existing documentaries are their basic cable or homemade  YouTube documentaries designed for other hackers,  more or less.  Some of them have been quite good.  My personal favorite is Annalisa Savage's Unauthorized  Access because she was the first and he captured these  guys in the moment before the law closed in on them.  There's also a manual Goldstein's Freedom Down Time,  which is about Kevin Mitnick, and his case and Jason  Scott's ambitious eight-part documentary series on  BBS boards.  So we're doing something different so we can entertain,  like I mentioned earlier, the non-hacker community and  pandering to the old-school media, sort of bullshit scare  tactics by talking to people who are actually there.  So John, you want to set up the scene?  Sure.  Right now, we're going to show you guys a chunk of the  movie.  Now, all three of us had our hands in making this.  And please remember, it is a work in progress.  Right.  It's important to note that none of the music has been  cleared because it's only tipped in.  When you have the lawyers, you do the last step because it  costs so much money.  They sound the colors and mixed yet for the same reason.  And we feel this stage is only right that we share it,  with the hacker community, so we can get your input, see what  else we could do with it.  Because it's big.  It's going to be three parts.  I have to watch it with you because I'm tethered to the  thing.  I can't walk away.  So we're just terrifying.  Yeah, John?  Yeah.  Well, I mean, no one's going to walk out because it's  edited really well, whoever edited it.  So let's show it to you now.  He's all right.  But after we're done here, we're going to explain what the  three parts are.  And we can't dim the lights because it's the rules.  Pretend that you're in a movie theater right now.  The ambiance, the chandeliers.  Can we take these down, though?  No.  No, not that.  Can't do anything.  I don't know.  All right.  Enjoy.  Today, five hackers were indicted on federal  wire fraud charges.  And NBC's Gary Matsumoto found their leader in an  unlikely setting.  That's fiber optic with a pH, described by some as a  computer genius, by others as a computer anarchist.  When you're a little kid growing up, you kind of feel  like you don't really have any control over what's going on.  As far as what was going on in the news around us, in the  80s, the Soviet Union was still a very real thing.  We were worried about nuclear war.  Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev are negotiating this stuff.  And you're hoping it turns out OK.  But you really don't know from one day to the next if one  day everybody's just going to blow up.  This permeated culture.  It was in movies.  It was in music.  And it was some scary shit.  Getting online and becoming part of this computer  underground was something that we felt that we had control  over in a world that we had really no place in.  York was nothing like how it is now.  It was the crack epidemic of huge proportions, drugs in  the street, violence everywhere.  So you have to be constantly aware.  And that sort of hyper-awareness translated into  breaking into computers.  And out of that came a new class of people, hackers,  young people that had new technology inside out, had  grew up with it, and could see the networks that were  evolving right before our eyes, and could see where it was  going, and play with it, build around it, interrupt it.  In some ways, the kind of curiosity that could only be  generated inside a busy place like New York City.  At the very beginning, it was about a shared interest in an  illicit world of information.  And initially, there were no barriers.  This was a world that was free to it's worth.  And subterranean and secret and accessible.  At that particular time, the internet existed.  But most people weren't really on it unless you were at  university, or worked for one of the various agencies in the  scientific or military.  But there was a rise of these online BBSs and these networks.  BBS stands for Bulletin Board System.  And this was how people would communicate with other people  that also had personal computers.  Once a computer is equipped with a modem, it can both send  and receive messages to and from any other computer in the  world that is also equipped with a similar sort of modem.  The first time that I tellmatted another machine halfway  across the country, and realized that I was connected to  that computer way over there, it was a religious experience.  A friend showed me this, and he said, yeah, I'm calling up  these Bulletin Board Systems and you can do all these things  with them.  You would call a phone number, put it into a cradle, and then  it would answer and you'd be able to talk to the computer.  And then you end up with a bunch of strings of characters  and people's names.  And I just thought this was insane.  I thought this was the greatest thing ever.  It was very, very slow.  It would take days for messages to arrive sometimes.  The kid whose parents had an extra phone line would leave  his computer hooked up to the phone all the time so that you  could call to that computer or someone who calls into some  other computer far away.  And this computer called that one called that one.  So it was a completely kind of ad hoc mesh of computers.  You don't know where this is.  You don't know how it's being done.  And at the time, that's beyond belief.  The first one I got on was called Q-Link, which was the  precursor to AOL.  And I got on there and I didn't fit in at all.  I'm like, yo, who here likes Bismarck-E?  And they were like, yo, nobody likes black music.  I was like, oh, man.  And I got trolled by a guy.  His name was like NKOTV, New Kids on the Block.  And there's a whole bunch of posts about hacking.  And I'm like, holy shit, hacking, breaking into  computers sounds kind of cool.  The computer underground in the 80s was the age of  exploration.  And that's in stark contrast to whatever semblance of an  underground exists today.  It's not about exploration.  It's about theft.  It's about bank fraud.  It's about monetary gain, unfortunately.  You're related to computers, huh?  Yeah.  What are you doing?  Dying into the school's computer.  They change the password every couple of weeks.  But I know where they write it down.  One of the biggest films, I think, had the huge impact on  me that came out in the early 80s was War Games.  About a kid who's looking for a video game company.  He's a hacker.  A lot of the things they show in the movie are true to life.  As far as how he goes about looking for systems, scanning  telephone exchanges, for modems, and so on.  I can't tell you how many different hackers I've  interviewed.  He said, I watched that film.  I asked for a modem for Christmas.  It was at that point that the word hackers, which nobody  really knew in society, took on a new meaning.  Hacker before had been someone at MIT AI who was a programmer  and nobody ever saw them.  And hacker after War Games was a kid with ACME who was about  15 who broke into computers.  These bands of teenagers would begin exploring these things  and they would do sometimes fun things, sometimes  listen things.  All these bulletin board geeks were a funny bunch.  They were basically just punkers and if somebody took their  skateboards and gave them modems, it wouldn't make much  difference.  It was not unusual to find a system with a default login  with no password, even on some relatively important systems.  And is this wrong or right?  It doesn't really enter your mind.  You're really doing it more out of curiosity.  I was a phone freak and a hacker.  It's like I love telephones.  So just a computer itself was too small.  I liked networks.  And there was no computer network as large as the  PSTN, the public switch telephone network.  The first modem I got was a family friend who was getting  rid of an old 300 block modem.  That was pretty much the beginning of my road to  sort of being a hacker into what I do now.  There's this big machine.  How do you get inside it and take it apart and play with it?  And then also, how do you use it to create mischief?  Eventually, I was able to finagle an Applecat out of  my parents.  Applecat could generate sound effects.  So you could actually use it as a blue box and do all kinds  of things with it that you could do with an ordinary modem.  That one was life-changing because it was a very  programmable modem.  You could produce any tone that you wanted, including the  control tones for in-bends, signaling, and phone networks.  You can basically take control, become an operator, and just  do anything that you wanted.  It's pretty magical when you're a kid and you suddenly  realize, hey, I can control the phone system.  Growing up in San Antonio, Texas, there really weren't  any other hackers there.  The big scene in the early 80s was primarily centered around  New York, New Jersey.  And so that's where I ended up gravitating.  And that's where I ended up meeting a  bunch of like-minded people.  There began to appear hacker groups, which were loose  affiliations of kids typically that never met each other.  They didn't know each other's identity or any of that.  They came up with an alias, a handle.  And that's how they affiliated on these BBSs.  I picked Eric Bloodaxe because I had read a really cool book  about Vikings.  Sounded cool.  My first name's Eric.  And so Eric Bloodaxe went from bulletin board to bulletin  board around the United States.  Now you have this knowledge base that's  forming of systems, how to use them, and how to maintain  access to them.  It was those early BBSs that turned into what we referred  to as the elite BBSs.  13 of us will form the most powerful and sinister group  the world has ever seen.  From now on, we'll be known as the Legion of Doom.  Legion of Doom was a super group of hackers who were, let's  say, the very top of the game.  I read about the Legion of Doom.  And I said, like, fuck it.  These guys can do that.  I can do that.  And I basically went out and became the head of the Legion  of Doom.  It was like a popularity contest.  I had this kind of overview of the inner workings of AT&T  better than maybe any one single employee.  I would get off on being able to listen in on a phone call,  or prank pulling.  Like, you know, you turn somebody's phone into a  pay phone.  Somebody picks up the phone.  That was the phone to make a phone call.  And they get a recording coming up to the positive  quarter, or taking a pay phone and turning it into a  home phone.  That was what would help you gain popularity.  If somebody hacked you, you try to figure out a way how to  hack them back.  It was sort of a pranksterism.  We broke into a ton of shit.  I mean, I broke into companies that you would just be  like shocked at the level of data that's stored.  There's a very, very strong ethos among hacker  underground communities to keep quiet.  If you're calling attention to yourself through these kind of  audacious hacks and groups, guess who's going to come knocking?  It was really hard to get in trouble unless you were just  doing something really wrong or really misguided.  That you were drawing unnecessary attention to  yourself.  People considered Legion of Doom to be sort of a pinnacle of  the computer underground.  That didn't just end at the edge of the computer bulletin  boards.  People within the regional bell operating companies knew who  Legion of Doom was.  People within the FBI and the Secret Service knew who the  Legion of Doom was.  People in corporate security for credit bureaus knew who  Legion of Doom was.  Law enforcement didn't really know how to deal with it, I  think, at the time, because it was so new.  There were laws going back to the 30s from telecommunications  like Wirefraud, the Wirefraud Act, which could be considered  most anything.  There was in, I think it was around 1986, the Computer  Fraud and Abuse Act, which was largely untested.  It certainly was never tested on anyone in the mid-80s.  By the late 80s and early 90s, it was the thing that they  were using to prosecute a lot of us.  But they were really just trying to make a lot of noise to  show the public and the government that they were  doing something about the problem.  It's a threat to big business.  It's some kind of threat to infrastructure.  And this is how to stop it, by kicking indoors and  seizing computers.  You know, they weren't that tech savvy, the Secret Service,  in those days.  Seemed more like they just wanted to shut it down and  make everyone stop doing what they were doing.  So they came to my house in a UPS truck.  And an assistant district attorney rang my doorbell and  said he was from UPS.  And he asked my dad to sign the clipboard.  Dad signed the clipboard.  He says, where's the package?  And he goes, bring in the package.  The back of the van rolls up.  And guys with sledge hammers, and there were guys with  guns drawn, come out of the back of this UPS van, or  taking computers and taking notebooks.  They weren't trying to put anybody in jail.  They were just basically trying to scare people into stopping.  There was one guy I knew that said that when the FBI came  to his parents' house to arrest him, they took all of his  computers, but left all these very important computer  security books that had tons of information because they  didn't actually know what they were.  There was a kid, I think he was in Indiana, he got arrested  for some kind of calling card fraud.  They saw he was all involved in computers.  They said, you're a computer hacker.  Are you a legion of doom?  He goes, no.  But I know some people who are.  And that ultimately led to me being raided.  Well, I don't think you have to be that smart to know that  if you get raided by a three letter agency and you never go  to jail, you must have sung like a bird.  Our top story at five, a massive offensive by the US Secret  Service against illegal computer hackers.  Search warrants are going out here in Chicago and a dozen  other cities coast to coast in an effort to stop computer  fraud that is costing companies and consumers millions of  dollars.  When law enforcement really started making its presence  known, busting into people's homes and seizing their  computers, this affected a growing number of people that  I knew, there were certain individuals who kind of thumb  their nose at the whole thing and kind of had a more daring  attitude at a time when what modesty probably would have  been a better course of action.  It was probably around that time that I had falling out  with a particular LOD member who by de facto found himself  in charge of the group.  Trying to put together one of the Legend of Technical  Journals, I was trying to map out different packet switch  networks to identify all the computers that existed on a  particular network.  I knew fiber optic and access to information about the  internal setup of the X25 network used by Ninex, which  was the New York telephone company.  And I was like, all right, well, can you give me a  breakdown of what's on the Ninex packet switch network so I  can include it in the directory?  And he said, yeah, yeah, sure, I'll get that to you.  He says, if I give you that, you need to give me this other  thing.  I was like, well, that's not mine to give.  So then later on, Mark calls this other friend of ours, a  guy named Bob.  He says, hey, Bob, Chris told me to call you and get the log  in for this system.  He didn't have it handy, and I need it now because I'm trying  to work on this thing, and he needs something from me.  So if you just give me the log into this machine, so Mark  got the account, ended up getting that account locked out.  So now we lost our access to that system.  So I found out about this later on, and I called everybody  else and we did a doom, and I said, we need to kick this  guy out.  So he hooked up with a bunch of his friends in New York and  started another group called Masters of Deception.  LOD was falling apart.  People were getting busted by the government.  Now, a group that we had once respected, that I myself was  affiliated with, was going off on a strange path that we  didn't really agree with.  MOD was supposed to be just a joke, playing off of LOD a  little bit, but evidently, there wasn't enough room for  both of us on the networks of the world, and it erupted  eventually into something called a great hacker war, where  we start trying to hack each other, which was a lot of fun,  but also caused a lot of trouble.  From then on out, the deal was, let's get Goggins,  let's get LOD.  Great hacker war was basically a disagreement between guys  that I knew and one of the members of LOD who, let's  just say, we thought was engaging in some questionable  behavior as far as potentially turning in other hackers.  Wasn't really considered a war until the media turned this  into a gang war in cyberspace, especially in the 80s.  Gang violence was common.  So, I mean, just writing off hacker groups as just the  online version of violent gangs made it easier for law  enforcement or people to visualize, oh, this is wrong,  this is bad.  We are experiencing a crime wave in the computer area that is  just astronomical.  We can't keep up.  Nobody who's working in this field can keep up.  This is not victimless crime.  We are all victims.  Well, the media needs to have a villain.  And in something involving computers or technology, very  easy to label somebody who is smart and a bit mischievous as  the villain, because nobody's really going to ever understand  what it is they're doing.  And they generate fear.  The problem wasn't really ever identified.  It was just sort of a speech that was repeated over and over  again by prosecutors and law enforcement that there is some  kind of hacker menace.  It needs to be stopped by sending kids,  teenagers to jail.  And for you, catch the man.  I hope he caught you.  Seems about the same amount of people, I think.  That was better than I thought it would be.  Yeah.  Yeah, so who wouldn't want to be a part of that?  OK.  So, yeah.  That's where am I?  Well, again, I'm glad that some of you stayed.  And I'm interested enough to hear us out.  We're doing the series in three parts, because it's so big  we can't compress into the old 90 minute  documentary format.  So part one is about the origin story of computer hacking.  Several concurrent trends were evolving to create the  conditions that led to the personal computer.  In this section, we meet the first generation of phone  freaks.  The corporations have created the  personal computer, and the first hackers emerged from MIT  and Stanford.  The government developed the ARPANET.  All these unique conditions are just right to develop the  personal computer.  John?  Now, for those of us who were born after 1990, Dave, can  you explain what phone freaking is?  Yeah.  Talked about a little bit in the clip we showed.  The phone network was the largest, vast, wide-ranging  network in the world.  And back then, I try to tell this to my kids now, phones  didn't have cameras or apps or touch screens.  And my bell was a cheap mother, but you could pick up your  phone, you could make a couple of tones, and be connected  to anyone anywhere in the world, make a bell ring in  somebody's house at 3 in the morning on the other side of  the world.  And the hacker spirit was there.  And I knew there was a lot going on beneath the surface.  And the trick was finding out about it.  And there wasn't Google, and there weren't BBSs that you  could log onto.  But there were technical journals, and internal  manuals, and reverse engineering that the early  groups of freaks learned to figure out this network  from the inside out.  And part of the beauty of a lot of these early networks is  security was an afterthought if it was there at all.  And it was kind of uncharted territory back then.  And I remember an old phone freak friend of mine told me,  and this is back when I was a little, little kid, that you  used to be able to call into the White House, and you get  the switchboard operator, and you politely get them to get  off the phone with you.  And you just sit there, and you're on an empty line.  There's no sound at all.  And then a minute later, you hear a click.  And the next inbound call coming into the president is  connected to you.  So as many of you know, hacking meant something different  at first, and why this is very obvious to DEF CON  attendees, as I broadly know.  And I mentioned the great many books on the origins of  computer phone hacking.  There was a pranksterism that wasn't yet malicious.  But aside from freaking, there was a moment where a big  university computers were being installed in universities.  As I mentioned earlier, much of the hacking movement can be  traced back to 1960s MIT and Stanford's AI lab.  The grad students in electrical engineering became  interested in these machines, which had the time share.  They hacked the test of boundaries, which is where  we get the term from.  They never would have predicted all the  things you were doing.  Now, much like the title Reverse Engineering suggests, we  kind of have to work backwards as filmmakers.  So we're always asking who came before them and who came  before them.  Right.  The lore of Steve Jobs and Steve Watson creating Apple's  a story we all know.  But the culture that they emerge from is far undervalued and  is for our purposes, but we're interested in exploring.  So part two is about the personal computer and the  individual.  Like the last section, several concurrent trends emerge at  the same time.  Electrical engineering students get jobs at places like  Intel, Xerox Park, IBM, Hewlett Packard, the Humber  Computer Club, and the People's Computer Company.  Start up and computer hobbies get together.  After hours of exchange information, freakers too  become interested.  There's a race to invent the personal computer.  This is well known.  Bay areas, rock culture, psychedelic drugs, self-help  gurus, and hippie scenes emerge with the NASA  Silicon Valley.  The third part of the series where you saw an excerpt from  we were thinking of as the war games and post war games  generation.  And I mean, who thought at the time that this film would come  out that would kind of motivate a whole generation of teens  and pre-teens to get into computers and go out fit their  computers with modems?  Right.  And part three we concentrate on the kids that grew up with  the modem and how that changed the worlds you saw in the  clip.  Personal computers make their way into the market and  popular culture.  Modems open up the early web in creating a population  explosion.  Teen hacker cultures emerge.  Government closes in law and arrests result, and the internet  goes mainstream.  So Dave, can you tell us a story from when you were a  little boy?  Sure.  When I was a teenager exploring other people's  computer networks, it was a simpler time.  I remember my dad used to regale me with stories about,  when he was a kid, they would go to the movies with 12 cents  and they'd be able to take a trolley to the movies and have  something to eat and go back home again.  And he also used to tell me, like, 1,200 baht is the fastest  you're ever going to get dated to travel over a twisted  copper pair.  And it was simpler times than times change.  And back in the 80s, you would find systems that were wide  open with default passwords or no passwords at all, with  documented source code and compilers on board.  And we would backdoor these systems.  So even if we were discovered, by that point, the point was  moot.  One of my favorite things we used to do was make it that if  you would type P Floyd at the login prompt, you'd be dropped  down to a root shell.  And things got backed up and passed on to the upgrades of  the systems as they went on.  One of the things that's important to really keep in  mind is a sense of history and how things like plastic  whistles and punch cards will give way to teens depositing  source code on open source GitHub repositories and landing  these cush jobs at Google and Amazon by the time their  peach fuzz is turning it to neck beard.  And how each iteration of hackers gives into the next  generation until we wind up here today at DEFCON26.  Right, we're almost done.  Before we open the Florida questions, I'd like to make  some few points that we recognize it's an  international story.  And because it's a medium with time space limitations, we  have to limit it to American hacking from the late 50s to  the early 90s before it becomes mainstream.  So it's pretty well covered by other people after a certain  time frame.  And we haven't quite defined where to land it.  What was happening in the early 90s with Kevin Mitnick's  story seems to be a good place as any.  But we're interested in maybe figuring out what really is the  end of the first generation of it.  And it's a nonlinear story, so maybe you can help us figure  out where the line is.  So thanks for your time.  And thanks for staying.  Yeah, I mean, just that we need help.  And insight is important, which is why we wanted to bring  this out to the hacker community now while we're still  in the process of taping interviews.  We need help finding the kind of buried stories that shape the  world that have been forgotten.  And also, finally, the old timers before they become  buried people, and kind of find the anonymous people who  wouldn't give an interview 10 years ago, and the unsung  heroes, and even like the telco security dudes and  prosecutors and feds that were around in that time period who  helped kind of shape the perception and  shape the community.  So before we take questions, I just want to thank everyone  for coming.  We've got stickers on the table outside.  Everybody grab a sticker on your way out.  Most importantly, I need to clarify this presentation.  Although we are still looking for investment partners, we  are looking for investment partners, this presentation  was not about that.  That's not what this presentation was for.  That's what the bar is for.  OK, so we're going to be here all weekend.  Please come find us.  We'll also be at Snack is Maximus.  We saw the Snack is Maximus, so we're going to hit that too.  So at one of the-  And the pool party is a pool party.  Karaoke, this karaoke tonight, we'll be at that.  We will now open the floor to questions.  Oh, great.  There's no questions.  You, sir, glasses.  Well, really, anybody, we want to put this into plain language  that anybody can understand.  Mike and I are lay people.  We are not, right?  Is that the word?  Yeah, we went to a couple of other talks  to see what they're like.  And the whole time, we're like, Dave, what the fuck are they  talking about?  What is this about?  Oh, OK.  There was a guy, there was a kid in here before.  I just thought he was wrestling with his pen.  He kept going like this with his pen.  And I had no idea what his thing was about.  So we're going to try to put it into plain language  that anybody can understand.  Because it's fascinating nonetheless.  I mean, from a cultural standpoint,  aside from the tech aspect of it,  it's, as a cultural phenomenon, changed the way  we live our lives.  Anybody else?  You, sir, also glasses and beard.  How far are you along in the process?  Well, we were talking about this earlier.  Basically, we've done about 19 or 20-some odd interviews.  But we've got about 100 interviews we want to do.  We've got a lot of people who've come out and said  they want to be interviewed.  And so there's other people who are seeking out.  And there's other people that have approached us.  So it's just people are starting to find out  about what we're doing.  It's difficult with the whole multi-generational layer  to it.  And finding people that were active in this stuff  in the mid-60s puts them in there, some of them in their 80s  now.  Oh, yeah, we've got to get the dead people.  It's like, actually, we've got to dig up dead people to get them.  OK, you sir, over there.  Hell, yeah, we are.  Yep.  We're going to see the service of one.  Yes.  Yes.  Do you know him?  We can get him.  I know someone who knows him.  Yeah, I don't think that's a hard one to get.  But yes, definitely.  Yes.  You in the center, you saw your hand go up.  What was the name of the documentary?  Reverse Engineering.  This one?  Yeah.  Reverse Engineering.  Boom.  Boom.  Uh, who else?  Anybody else got a question?  Anybody got a suggestion?  What didn't you like?  What was not good about it?  Oh, what did you didn't like?  Criticism.  Oh, you.  Also glasses, back to you.  Oh, hell yeah.  Oh, hell yeah.  Yeah.  This, I mean, the thing which is difficult about playing  such a small, each of the parts that we talked about is going  to be, if we're doing it as feature length,  it's going to be running approximately an hour to an hour  and a half and go in, kind of drill down with that detail  on the different areas and the different things.  And what we showed is not to be construed as a picture of what  there was.  It's just like it's a scene from a section,  not the entire section per se.  Which is why we want to do in three parts,  because it's a massive story.  I mean, it's not as simple as like,  like we were talking about the old documentary format, which  was 90 minutes.  Like the Hustler movie that him and I did, when that came out,  we were only able to get a major distributor  because it was 90 minutes, because it was the package.  And that was like four years ago.  Now it's changed.  Like everything is.  Everything is stretched out.  Yeah.  I mean, with better.  And it's a learn.  Streaming services and, you know.  Everyone wants a series.  Looking, you know, talking, you know, HBO and Netflix and things  along those lines.  It allows for like longer form documentary series  to allow you to cover the big picture.  Yeah, you can stretch out.  So that was a compliment.  Any more compliments?  It was a compliment.  Yeah.  Thank you.  Thank you.  Oh, you, sir, in the blue shirt.  Is it available online anywhere to view for other people?  The clip is we're still making it.  Yeah.  I want to talk to you, Tuck.  I know about you.  The sample scene that we showed is on our website.  And there's also a short sales reel.  It's like a two minute sizzle.  We'll take it.  We'll take it.  I hate.  But there's a short sizzle reel as well as the sample scene.  Oh.  Find us at the bar.  We know him already.  That's our man.  Wait.  Is that Steve?  Oh, yeah.  That's Steve.  That was good.  What up, Steve?  Thank you.  So how do we reconcile what the modern?  Well, no, it turned out somewhat dystopian.  It started out with all this utopian promise,  especially you look at the stuff from the 60s  at the dawn of the psychedelic Bay Area.  It all comes together under this utopian shell.  It did change everything.  It may not be the way that the computer culture had wanted it  to be.  I think some of the utopia is a carrot on a stick.  It's always as new technologies emerge.  It's always like, oh, but networking is going to save us.  And the internet of things is going to save us.  And it's always something to strive for.  And some of it is still quite utopian.  Some of it, it's not all terrible.  Some of it's terrible.  It's an election hack.  I saw we had three.  All right, you first.  All right.  Have you considered going past calling three  and covering modern days?  We'd love to.  It's just hard enough finding the money for the original part.  But yeah, we'd love to.  I mean, I'd love to do 12 parts.  We're super ambitious.  Yeah, there's no shortage of source material.  I mean, part of the thing in the filmmaking standpoint  is we want to have as much firsthand and first-party  account as we possibly can in first-person interviews.  And with the time frame that's going on,  we're on the far end of the curve now.  And we need to do, like we have John Perry Barlow,  and we sat down with him for four and a half hours.  That's not possible today.  And it's a shame because it would be nice to go back to him  after we talk to other people and say, well,  some of these other people said this.  And what else can you say about this to be in a different part?  And it's not possible anymore.  So especially when you're documenting the past,  that has to be given priority because it's fleeting,  unfortunately.  One more point on this is the last documentary I made with him,  that the one on Hustler Magazine, there's  five people in it who are dead, which is, you know,  the clock is always running.  One of them even went to the electric chair.  Well, lethal injection.  But anyway.  Guy from Moe, were you at MohawkCon?  Yeah.  Yeah.  Did you win?  I think we're being given the time signal.  Oh.  Oh, sorry.  I didn't see it.  One minute.  OK.  MohawkCon, your last question.  A little off topic, but what did you think about working on  as an advisor and a hacker at the time?  What did I think at the time?  It was pretty funny.  I mean, it was right after this Esquire article about hackers  had come out and the Michelle Pfeiffer  on the cover of the issue.  And I mean, Rafael, who wrote the screenplay,  came to a lot of the 2600 meetings and knew a lot of local  New York people and tried to bring them in either personality  wise or handle wise.  And then the whole thing got Hollywood-ed and then  with a layer of British directing of American events  on top.  It was fun.  I mean, I enjoyed it.  I like filmmaking.  So I enjoyed it on that level.  But I mean, it's storytelling.  And it's fictional.  I expected you all to dress like that.  Can we take any more?  We'll see you later tonight.  We don't know what to do.  OK.  Can we take one more?  Are we good?  Add time.  OK.  All right.  Thank you so much.  Defcon26, thank you.  Thank you.
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