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What The Hack lecture transcriptions
 
README:

While listening to the opening speech, recorded by the Rehash team and streamed
from an XS4ALL server, I realized that these speeches carry a lot of the spirit
of past, present and future. Audio is, however, not that easy to search in.

So I decided that these videos needed to be transcribed. Within a minute, my
mind was showing me pictures of a book. Wouldn't it be great to spread the word
like that, as well as digitally? We all know the magic of paper, and for those
who don't: it is explained in the opening presentation.

Of course, this data is all plain text. There are plenty of reasons to choose
for this format. I'm not going to give you them, because I expect the reader to
know these reasons already. For more personal reasons, they will be 80
characters wide.

Transcriptions are not subtitles. Although they mostly share the same text, a
transcription has no time information and does have paragraphs. This means that
for those videos that are subtitled as well as transcribed, there is some amount
of duplicate effort. I think that both are important enough to spend this much
time on.

A transcription is not a 100% accurate representation of what is said. Spoken
text and written text do not entirely follow the same rules. This too is where
subtitles and transcriptions differ. The first sentence of the opening keynote
is a good example of how these differ. Originally, Newby's words are: "Good
morning; good morning and welcome; welcome to What The Hack.", but all that's
left in the transcription is: "Good morning and welcome to What The Hack.". 

Some elements typical to subtitles, you will find here. They are LAUGHTER and
APPLAUSE. You can use these while reading to confirm that you're laughing and
clapping at the right moments ;)

In [tt/mm:ss], tt is the tape number that is also included in the .mp4 file
names, and mm:ss is the offset in that tape. These timestamps are chosen around
5-minute boundaries, and do not necessarily indicate a break in speech, other
than one naturally occurring between paragraphs.

Parens, "(" and ")", are used to indicate text that wasn't spoken into the
microphone, or was otherwise perceived as not being part of the rest. For
parnthetical statements, em dashes, "--", are used. The use is somewhat
different from how they are supposed to be used in different languages. Some
language styles prescribe whitespace around them, some prescribe that there must
be none. I chose to use them in the place of parentheses, because that way you
have some visual hint of how they group together: whitespace around, but not
inside. When the em dash is used with whitespace on both sides, that indicates
that it is not an opening delimiter, but instead a separator.

Text and markers that were added by the transcriber are, as is common, put in
square brackets, "[" and "]". One exception to this are ALLCAPS paragraphs,
which indicate action from the audience, or, in case of "SOMEONE", that a
specific but otherwise unidentified member of the audience says something.
Following SOMEONEs are not necessarily the same person.

To choose between American and British spelling, I literally flipped a coin, and
American spelling won. Ispell has shown me that my own use of spelling dialects
in English is surprisingly inconsistent.


###
### What The Hack - Opening Keynote
###
### 2005-07-28
###
### * GN: Greg Newby 
### * RG: Rop Gonggrijp
### * EG: Emmanuel Goldstein
###

[13/00:00]

GN: Good morning and welcome to What The Hack! It's good to see everyone here.

APPLAUSE

I think everyone's ready for a really exciting few days of summer camping in the
beautiful Holland, with beautiful weather -- summer-like. 

I'm going to give a few basic pragmatic remarks, and then we'll get started with
the opening address. My name is Greg Newby in case you might not have seen me
once or twice before. I'm helping out with some of some of the volunteer
coordination, helping out with keeping the sessions flowing and that is what I'm
going to talk about for a few minutes. The main message here, and that we'll
come back to, is that this conference, everything that you see here, is because
of volunteers: people spending their time to contribute their expertise, maybe
contribute a few calories of energy, maybe contribute some knowledge and
guidance. And I'd like to invite everyone here to keep in mind every day all the
time that you're part of it. You're part of why this conference is able to start
today and you're part of why the conference is able to keep running. So please
do feel encouraged, empowered and welcomed to contribute in all the ways that
you can. 

I have a few sort of pragmatic issues.

One thing is that, if you haven't already realized this, we have this great wiki
site at wiki.whatthehack.org. If you go to whatthehack.org, you get redirected
there. That is the site where the latest calendar is kept for the speakers.
We've had a few changes, we'll try to let you know about those at the beginning
of the day and maybe put them on the scrolling bar over at Info point, that sort
of thing.

But continue to check the wiki because we are maintaining that and whenever
anything happens that is a change, we're acknowledging that on the wiki. Also,
the Wiki is the place where you can go to volunteer to see what some of the
needs are. A lot of the teams have been maintaining lists of who they need, how
many people they need, what sort of shifts are available, that sort of thing.
I'll give you a little more detail on that, but keep tracking that wiki because
it's a really good resource for finding out what's going on.

Of course, the printed program that hopefully everyone has -- if you don't have
one, get one at Info point or Speaker's desk, or back at the main entry. -- This
has the program and in it a lot of good information, but several things have
changed since then. So make sure you're keeping track online.

One thing: I'd like to remind people just a few pragmatic things: in these
sessions, it's nice and polite to turn off or mute your cell phone. If you feel
the need to talk on your cell phone, it might be a good time to step outside for
a few minutes. Of course, it might be a little cooler outside the tents as well.
So feel inspired to do that. So: cell phones should be muted.

As some of you heard last night, we do need to make sure that there aren't any
vehicles in the camping area, other than in the official parking spots. So if
you do have a vehicle with you, make sure that that is moved. Hopefully, it
already is. But if you haven't already moved it, please do that as soon as you
can, right away.

One thing that we're doing in these sessions, is we're recording, which is
typical at these conferences. We like to record what happened for posterity, put
them on tape. One thing that is a little bit new and a little bit special is:
we're going to be going ahead and digitize those recordings pretty well
immediately after the sessions. So within maybe half a day, a day, something
like that, the sessions that you see will be up for streaming downloads via the
wiki server. So you can check the AV site for that.

So that's going to be available.

I want to mention one session change for today. There is a session in tent 3
scheduled for 4 pm that we believe will be canceled. That is the session
"Internet Development in Ivory Coast". We haven't seen the speaker for that yet,
so we think that that is going to be a no show. That's one for session three.

No other schedule changes that I am aware of at this point. Like I said, check
the wiki. We'll try to announce them when we hear something new. We also have
the opportunity in the schedule for some additional stuff, particularly in tent
3. So if you have a session that you'd really just love to talk to people about
and you'd like to get on the program, there is still time to that. There aren't
a ton of open slots, but there are some. If you'd like to get scheduled for a
slot, go and speak to the nice folks from Iconiq's in the speakers office.

If you want to do something less formal, like if you have information that
people can meet you in one of your tents or program areas, be sure to update
that on the wiki. If you'd like to put a poster up in the info point, across in
the bar area, that's fine. If you have something that's particularly timely and
you want to get the word out, find me or find the people running the AV and we
can announce that before the sessions start. This is a dynamic conference. We
don't want to say that you're not in the printed program, so you can't fit.
Really everyone can fit. We can try to make sure word gets out.

The last thing I want to mention is a little bit on volunteering. We still have
a lot of needs for volunteers. As you know, we have for the most part four
simultaneous sessions, in four separate tents. We're trying to run the bar, run
the info desk, run the entry desk, keep security running, empty trash, all these
different things. For some reasons, the networking crew doesn't seem to need
that many volunteers. I don't know --maybe they found some special people that
were knowledgeable about networking-- I'm not sure where they found those
people. But everything else that I mentioned plus pretty well everything that
you see in the book and on the Wiki, the different volunteer points can still
use some more staff. If you walk up to someone and they're not quite sure when
can you start, what should you do, please don't get discouraged. Not everyone
has the big picture that's out working. Sometimes you have to talk to the next
person or come back a little bit later. But be assured, there are many volunteer
opportunities here at the conference. And essentially, there's a 24 hour
activity for many of the things that are going on. We have some very long days
in the sessions, and if you think in terms of 2 people per tent just to do the
audio and visual activities, and then maybe another two to keep track, make sure
everyone has their armband, that sort of thing. Well, that's 4 people per tent,
4 tents, for quite a few hours: 13 hours, just today, so we really do need a lot
of volunteers so feel encouraged to participate. The other thing is, as far as
garbage removal, we have to have this site very clean at the end of the
conference, so if you see a piece of garbage on the ground do everyone a favor
and just go ahead and pick that up. Throw out your trash as you leave the
sessions. That's very kind to not only the next people who will be in that room,
but also it's also very kind to the cleanup that will happen in the end.

I think that with the volunteer areas, the Audio/Visual one I'll mention in
particular, because we're trying to get some staff for that. That's happening on
the wiki. If you think you're interested in helping out with running the audio,
helping bringing the speakers up on stage, helping with the camera, then see the
wiki site and there's a sign up. There's an actual grid block to sign up. And if
you think you might be interested in cameras, speak with folks in the AV tent.
It's back on the corner here, it's on the map. See if you can put a camera shift
in. If you think you're more interested in doing some of the audio work:
monitoring the microphones, and so forth, helping with speakers, then you can
find me, or better yet: find the speakers coordination office, the speakers
office, and they'll be signing people up for that.

Info point, you know where that is already. Info point needs volunteers on the
late shifts and early shifts. The bar has been looking for people to put in some
shifts to help. I'm not sure if there's free alcohol involved with that.
Somehow I'm not sure. Security of course is a 24 hour operation. And as you
know, security is --well, maybe not everyone knows this-- we don't have security
problems at conferences like these, because everyone helps. Everyone is a
contributer to keeping things reasonable. And there are a few pages in your
program that talk about what that means, with trying to not get yourself in
trouble, but also more importantly perhaps, try not to get the conference in
trouble. There are a number of city police keeping an eye out for us, but we
have volunteers that will be checking to make sure you have your badge, walking
in and out, maybe when you're walking around the area, and they see that you
don't have an armband, they might ask you to visit the entry desk and make sure
you can get your armband. So please be kind to security people. They're all
volunteers just like you. Most of them are not nearly as tough as they seem, and
they really would hate to have problems escalate, so your patience is
appreciated with them.

I think that's most of what I wanted to mention with volunteering, and with
being a contributer with AV and taping and so forth. Check the wiki as I said.
If you're having difficulty with networking, you know where the FHQ is. There's
a lot of information in the book about the DECT phones, there's information in
the book about the emergency numbers and so forth, and hopefully you'll take a
few minutes to review that good information, but right now I want to encourage
you to consider getting involved as a volunteer. And one way or the other, if
you're volunteering or not, remember that the conference is created about and
for you. 

So let's turn it over to our opening address from someone very famous, imported
all the way...

[13/11:00]

APPLAUSE

RG: We can both stand at this table, but it looks kind of silly, we figured. So
we're going to try to remove this cable. I'm sure I'm messing up all sorts of
carefully drafted AV plans now: Oh my god, he's not going to be where he's
supposed to be. (Is it long enough? Let's go sit over here, ... Okay)

First a small addition to what Greg just said. It looked as if people weren't
showing up from other countries. We have some visa problems. People who did
apply for visa to enter the Netherlands and just never got them, even though
they weren't entered that late. So we have some people who are really trying to
get here, even up to this moment, but really are having problems convincing the
Dutch embassy that this is a real conference, or something silly.

Also, there is a misunderstanding about purple and pink. The misunderstanding is
that... Lots of people now know that the police have pink armbands. We did not
plan this, we had the pink armbands actually planned for another team, until we
heard that the police needed a hundred armbands, at which point we switched
colors. And they got pink.

However, the speakers, those people that are on stage later talking about stuff,
they have purple armbands. Can somebody show a purple armband? There we go. Now,
can somebody show a pink armband? 

LAUGHTER

Okay. There is a difference! Lots of speakers are being harassed for being cops,
which is...

APPLAUSE

Of course, there are speakers who might be cops and cops who might be speakers
in deep underground missions, and God knows what.

I want to talk a little bit, now that we are all here, about how this came to
be. How we got here. I'll start the story really late, something like 3 weeks
ago, when we did the fiber party.

There are probably plenty of people here who were at the fiber party. Raise your
hands. There they are. We strung 2.5 km of fiber and 1800 meters of that were on
one roll. And it went down ditches, in pipes, underneath stuff. We had buried
electrical conduit that we were pushing it through. People had prepared the
whole route and then at the moment supreme, we had like 50 volunteers, doing
that cable. And it was really heartwarming to see the level of
self-organization. We had like total chaos for 20 minutes: Do you have the plan?
No no no, I don't have the plan, he has the plan. And then the other guy
arrives, and says: me? The plan? No, I thought you had...

So, it was total chaos for 20 minutes and people started self-organizing, and
within 20 minutes, we had stuff down, we were starting to unroll. It was
starting to happen. And an hour later, we were on our way, and four hours later,
we had that cable in, which at least in my mind is incredible. We had this crazy
group of people going. I've seen that type of self-organization, the things that
need doing, lots of people grabbing hands, and just doing it. There's a great
story I'll tell at the end about HIP '97 and coke crates, for those who may not
know it. I see some smiles, people remembering the coke crates.

[13/15:00]

Also, this place is HUGE. I'm sure you have noticed that you should have brought
a bike. Now that you are all here, it's for the first time that I notice there's
actually quite a few people here. You think: my God, it's deserted, we haven't
sold enough. Oh my god, we're going to go bankrupt. And now you're all here,
it's like a tremendous load of people. Which I personally really enjoy once I
think about it. It's: Oh my god, we have all this space, we don't need to cram
up in small spaces. It also means that the 15 km of CAT5 cable that we got
sponsored are almost out. We're still looking for a plan B, but if you need like
this really long stretch of 70 meters of CAT5, I would run for it.

Emmanuel last night reminded me that I looked so worried and stressed and needed
to get everything done, and he reminded me of something really cool, and that
is: every day from now on, there's all these worries fewer for the organization.
There's days less to organize. Very important, and I'll get back to that as
we're done, is the tearing everything down day. Monday is really a day where
we'd like at least 5% or 10% percent of you to still be here and help us take it
all down, because otherwise we're just going to stand here with all these
gigantic structures that were built over the course of a week. And we're going
to feel really lonely, and sad, and depressed.

Let me see, what else do I have.

Yes, we're going to do a little bit of market research. We really want to know
what kind of people come to these events, we want to know how these events link
together, how this community ages, how it picks up new people. And for that, we
want to do a sort of market research thing. The easy way to do that --or I think
the more complicated way-- is to pass out forms, and then deal with the forms as
they come in and put them into some nice statistics program, all sorts of mess,
which I don't really feel like, so I'd rather do a show of hands.

This needs at least one camera to film the audience, so that we have the data
afterwards.

LAUGHTER

And, it also means that all of you get the data by just looking into the room,
which is really nice.

[13/17:25]

How many of you were at the Galactic Hacker Party at 1989? Just a few, I
figured. How many of you were at Hacking at the End of the Universe, in '93?
Yeah... And at HIP? A few more, I figured. And at HAL? Quite a few more! That
figures. How many of you are here NOW?

LAUGHTER

Okay. Who has ever been to a CCC camp? Quite a few, okay. Who has been to a CCC
congress? Uh-huh. Wow many have been to a HOPE congress? Still a few, yea.
DEFCON? BlackHat sessions? Okay...

Now, I want to do countries, and this is always a bit sort of scary, because
some people really attach a lot of pride or stuff to their nationality. It's
just a little dotted line on a map, nothing to get confused over, but...

APPLAUSE

We'd still like to know whereabouts you're from. Who here is from the
Netherlands? Okay... Now I'm going to split Germany into three. If you don't
know which part you're in, then just pick one, but just one please. Who is from
North-West Germany? Okay...

CONFUSION

There's North-West, South, and East. So who's from North-West? Who's from the
South? And who's from the East? Belgium? UK?

CHEERING

I knew that! France? Austria? Switzerland? Denmark? Sweden? The rest of Europe?
Okay. And the rest of the the world? Alright! Okay, we're not doing bad!

APPLAUSE

Okay, who here is a medical professional, practicing in the Netherlands and
currently on on call duty?

LAUGHTER

Okay, we got one in the back. Keep your hand up. Ah, we got a few. Who fears
that his or her being unreachable would kill people? We're talking critical
terrorism experts, like the only guy who knows how to disarm the nuclear bomb,
that kind of stuff. Okay, everybody else, turn off your cell phones now.

APPLAUSE

[13/21:00]

I have sort of a prepared speech, because I knew I was going to totally clam up,
which...

LAUGHTER

Are you trying to mess with me? Because you can, you know. I'm on the edge, man.

I have sort of a prepared speech, which I shall shortly briefly touch on,
because I knew I was going to totally clam up, and I wanted something to say if
we're going to have this big time slot. 

Emmanuel is here because I'm going to go a little bit into the history of it.
The history of this event, the history of this community also. And we're going
to be discussing a little bit what our history is. 

I've always held really short speeches. I've said: hey guys, great you're all
here, these are some practical things, and here's somebody else to do a long
story. And sometimes that has been Emmanuel, sometimes that have been other
people, but I've never really held the big opening speech and I think it's time
I do one.

First of all, I don't want to glorify the past. Yes, some things have happened.
We've been part of some really cool stuff. But that's not why I'm doing this.
I'm doing this because I feel we need to understand where we're coming from, if
we're going to understand where we're going to, or something like that.

Let's go back to 1989. Compared to today, there was a few of us. There was a
handful of hackers in Holland, a few more in Germany, some in America, and they
were converging --some at least were-- in the Paradiso in Amsterdam. The
Paradiso was a church, that turned into a hippy cult center, that turned into a
concert hall. And it was mostly filled with people who came to see the hacker
monkeys, this strange new breed. Hackers at the zoo. Patrice remembers, he was
there.

If you look back at that, you can still see all the elements of the hacker
culture. You can see that it wasn't just a bunch of teenagers, bragging about
computers they could get in to. We Lee Felsenstein, and he was telling computers
can be good for democracy. The outlandish notion that computer networks could
somehow help people communicate outside the mass media, which meant completely
nothing to people in 1989. Yet he had been setting up public terminals in
laundromats in 1972. His vision was profoundly alien in 1989. But there was this
small group of people that thought this meant something. We were on BBS's, we
knew that there was something new about the way we were communicating there. I'm
sure you have some memories about the Galactic Hacker Party that you want to
share?

[13/24:05]

EG: Share them right now? Okay.

Well, I just want to start by saying Rop contacted me and said that it's
traditional that: you give opening remarks. And I didn't realize it was
traditional. Because there've been only four of these. There was HEU in 1993,
and yea, I gave an opening remark then, or two, 1997, we did it the same time
and the Beyond HOPE conference, and I think we made some kind of transatlantic
connection where you could hear every other word I was saying, and then in 2001,
I gave an opening remarks too. So I guess there's a tradition of sorts, so,
that's kind of...

RG: We had ISDN lines at HIP that were not done by the POC.

EG: Yea, it was bit of a challenge. But I just wanted to point out that there
are certain points in time that serve as inspiration, inspirational, pivotal
moments. And I think this very well could be one of them. There are a bunch that
I could point to. Meeting certain people, certain key people, being in certain
places at certain times. And when I look back, when I talk to people about
certain things that have happened, they tell me that their live changed, when
they came to HIP, or to Beyond HOPE, when they picked up a magazine or listened
to a radio show or something like that. I think that when we get a number of
people together like this, ... Seeing you all here, it just kind of boggles my
imagination, realizing how many people actually just came to this thing. I
realize that lives are being changed. That people are opening their eyes and
experiencing for the first time, and they're going to take that home with them.
They are going to live their lives differently and create things, and do things
as a result of this. I think it is important not to underestimate that, to
realize that we really CAN change things: we can change our lives, we can
change, in a sense: the world. And certainly a lot of people are trying to do
just that.

Did you want me to talk longer, or do you want to give your talk, or would you
kind of like...

RG: We'll just space back and forth as we go along, because I think we both have
interesting memories and interesting things to say. Or at least I think -- Gee,
that's so pompous. 

Anyway, back in 1989, if hackers got any press at all, it was sensationalism.
It was computer break-ins. And that's something that's been with the subculture
ever since. It's been with the subculture until today. If you say the word
"hacker" to people today, they think viruses, they think: some fool with a virus
creation kit that thought of the name Kournikova for a cool name for his Visual
Basic virus creation kit. That's a hacker. And you can tell them: look, there's
a community of people since the 60's that have been using this name
consistently. And they say: well, no, a hacker is somebody that has to do with
viruses. And we're the media. Who are you to define your own community?

I think it's a sign of strength, if I look back on it, for the whole community,
that we've been able to show so many security failures and get this enormous
amount of press coverage without letting that single issue of computer security
define who we are. I think it's safe to say by now that we've managed to be
more. We've managed to build a community. Yes, some of us were computer break-in
artists. Some of us showed how we broke into computer systems. Mostly to show
people how it's done, to show people that stuff isn't secure. Some of us work in
security today. Some of us still work to show that things aren't secure.

As the general population had not even begun to come to grips with computer
networking, quite a few of us were already dealing on an almost daily basis with
journalists. And I think the practice of slipping in all these other issues was
just a gut reaction mostly of seeing all this spotlight wasted on stupid stuff.
There was this reaction: Oh my god, why don't you go look at this, there's open
source software, or there's this giant conflict between X and Y, or there's this
thing with cryptography. Hackers started pointing that media spotlight
elsewhere, even if it was just for 10 seconds. Just because the waste of just
this other Code Red, or whatever the crisis of the day was the media frenzied
over.

Yet the strategy of using this sensationalist media attention to build a
movement, to reach people to focus on other issues wasn't just dropping out of
nowhere. It wasn't just coincidence. I've heard it very explicitly formulated
very early in the early 1980's by Wau Holland, who also addressed the audience
at the Galactic Hacker Party in 1989. Wau died from brain hemorrhage in 2001,
not even 50 years old. Wau was a brilliant strategist. He was one of the people
that gave this budding community a sense of purpose. He thought the whole
networking revolution all the way to the end, and he had a clear vision of where
some of the political fights would be. He figured: if the fights are going to be
over freedom of speech, then those that know about this new medium, that know
about computers are --by nature-- going to have a major role in that. And that
was his vision for building a community that knew about these issues, knew about
these topics, and would be ready to fight some of these fights. 

I think Wau deserves a tribute. We've never really spoken in this big a crowd
about him in 2001. He deserves a tribute for making the European hackers seem at
least more coherent and more politically effective than if he hadn't been there.
I think he deserves an applause.

[13/30:00]

APPLAUSE

(What the hell? Intermission music. It's not even here; I thought it was from
our speakers. I guess you can all still hear me. Ehm, ...)

EG: 1989 --I was talking about pivotal moments-- I think was one of the times
that my life has changed. My life has changed many times, and 1989 was one of
them, out of necessity. The Galactic Hacker Party, I think, was one of those
moments that just had to happen at a certain time, and that time was perfect for
the American hacker scene to sort of link arms with the European hacker scene,
and it was then, august 1989, when I came to Europe for the first time. One of
the first people, other than Rop here, was Wau Holland. And I just remember that
even though we barely even spoke each other's language --I didn't speak German
at all, and his English was a bit rusty, but-- we were able to communicate. And
it was clear that this was someone who had spent so much time thinking about the
meaning of hackers in the world, in the large. In Germany, how they affect
things culturally everywhere. I realize that the German hacker scene was a lot
more political than the American hacker scene, and I learned a lot from that.
Wau Holland would talk to you for hours about this if you let him. He was a
great inspiration, certainly to me, and I'm sure to anybody who had the honor to
talk to him. So we should definitely remember him as one of our, I guess,
founding fathers.

The Galactic Hacker Party was something that really changed me, because if you
just focus too much on what's around you, what's local, what's in your
particular nation, you might get discouraged --certainly in my nation you
will--, and that's why it's important to reach out and meet people from other
places. When I saw there were people from England, people from Holland, people
from Germany, and other places, who were interested in the same things, who were
playing around with phone systems, blue boxing, hacking voice mail systems,
playing with computers, exploring Unix systems. Back then --we're talking about
the 1980's. The 1980's were very different than whatever this decade is called.
What, the 00's? I don't know what you call this decade. You had to explore other
people's systems if you wanted to learn how they worked. There just was no
other way. You couldn't buy a Unix system and have it in your home, or some of I
guess could, but most of us couldn't. So that's why a lot of young hackers, and
old hackers too, were out there kind of wandering around, exploring commands and
learning. Very few destructive people, but of course the authorities don't
really care about that. They saw a potential for loss of control, and they
reacted much the same way they still react the same way. 

The 1980's were a very inspirational point for so many of us. Because we got the
fever, the hacking fever, where you just reach out and play with machines, log
onto BBS's. How many of you have ever logged on to a BBS? Quite a few, okay,
more than I thought.

Back then --this was pre Internet as we know it-- the way that you traded
information and met up with people, and basically learned, was by setting your
modem on redial, and calling over and over again on 300 --and if you were lucky,
1200-- baud, and waiting for that busy signal to go away, and logging onto a
bulletin board with one line. Now some boards admittedly had two or three lines,
but they were few and far at least in the mid-80's. And that is how we
communicated, that's how we found out about each other, that's how we linked
arms and became a community. Of course, there are people who were part of the
60's and before, because hacking isn't necessarily just about computers or even
just about phones. It's a state of mind. It's something that any good journalist
is, somebody who asked a lot of questions, someone who keeps trying to get the
answer, no matter how many times they are told they're not allowed to know.

The 1980's represented a time where a new form of technology became a vital part
of the hacker community. We basically grew as a result of those phone calls to
BBS's, as a result of those rudimentary explorations of voice mail systems, and
the inspiration that we drew from TAP Magazine, back in the 1970's, that's when
they began, they went up until the mid-80's, which was about when we began with
2600. They inspired us a lot. Because no matter what you read on bulletin boards
--and to this day, no matter what you read on the Internet--, I still don't
think there's anything to compare with actually holding something in your hand,
and reading it, and passing it around. There's something about the printed word
that somehow endures a lot longer than the electronic equivalent, and all of us
who have lost our hard drives know this. You can save magazines and read them
40 years from now. How many of you, do you think, will be reading the same hard
drives 40 years from now? I don't know. Things get lost all the time, things
get changed all the time. The other interesting aspect to all this is that there
is something sacred about the printed word: you don't mess with free speech, you
don't mess with things that are written down. They don't see it quite so easily
when it comes to electronic data. They should, and that's something we should
try to get them to understand. It's part of the growing pains of technology.

[13/36:07]

1989 was a very pivotal year for me, because that's when I came over here for
the first time, to Holland, and met all these people and realized: you know
what, it's not dying, it's just beginning. No matter what stage you are at, and
I guarantee this is true today: there are people around you who will say: the
hacker world is dead, it's at its end, it's not like it was, there's nothing
left to do. It's equivalent to music, you know. Popular music, there are always
idiots around who say: music's dead, it's not going anywhere, it's done
everything it can possibly do. And then somebody does something new and
different. But of course, they'll say: it's not like it was. Of course it's not
like it was. If it's like what it was, then it wouldn't be worth anything, would
it? We have to keep moving, we have to keep changing. Computers, technology, all
of that changes with time. Our methods of doing things change with time, but our
hacker spirit is what remains the same. What I see around us now, I see it
growing phenomenally. I mean, this would have been unheard of, even 10 years
ago, getting this many people together. And certainly 20 years ago, it would
have been unthinkable. More people know about what hackers are all about today
than ever before. And yet there is a lot of distortion. The media gets it wrong,
the media tries as hard as they can to make it into something sensationalistic,
so you'll be afraid and buy more newspapers, and read about it and turn on the
11 o'clock news and be scared to death. Because fear sells. 

We need enemies. I think that back home in the United States, we've proven that
we really need enemies because we don't know what to do without them. And that's
why we start wars, and that's why we create enemies where there are none. And it
allows for our culture as it were to thrive. That is something that we have to
be very careful of, that we don't get subverted into that mind set. What we do
is not the same thing that the authorities think of us as. We are not cyber
terrorists. We are not people who go around plotting the overthrow of Western
civilization, or any civilization. We're people who are curious. We're people
who play around with things, who want to learn, who want to design, who want to
explore, and build. And that's what we've evolved into, since the 1980's. And
that's what we're continuing to evolve into. People who now have our own unix
systems, people who now are designing our own open source software, people who
have systems like Asterisk, that can make the free phone calls that we were
trying to make in the 1980's. That's really all we wanted to do you know, we
just wanted to make free phone calls. 

LAUGHTER

And now we have, and now it's time for the next step. Figuring out ways to link
arms, to talk to people, to communicate. And believe me, that's a real threat to
the powers that be, when people start communicating. People from different walks
of life, different parts of the world, when they start reaching out and talking
to each other and realizing: hey, we're not so different, you know, we like the
same things, we hate the same things, and we can get along, despite our
governments!

APPLAUSE

So now you know why you are all the threat, because that's something they don't
want us to realize, they don't want us to achieve. And we just have to keep
moving on, and not giving up, and not listening to the people who are saying
it's dead, because it's not. Again, it's still just beginning. There are so many
things for us to continue to create with the acceleration of technology, with
the changes that are occurring. They're really exciting, they're really
different. And I think at this conference, apart from camping out and having a
great time, go to the panels, because I've seen so many interesting things that
are being discussed. Such a wide diversity of topics. They really deserve hats
of for putting together a tremendous program.

[13/40:05]

It's evolved so much over the years. When we first started these conferences, I
remember the first HOPE conference in 1984. We had one track. We had maybe about
a dozen talks total over a weekend of just two days. And here we are with four
days, and how many talks do we have?

RG: I think it's up to somewhere near 150

EG: That's incredible! 150 different talks. So, you see, it's growing. So many
more things to talk about, so many more people to participate. We need to keep
the excitement injected into this. Spread the word, get more people involved.
Explain to them what you do, what you're interested in. A lot of people see
hackers as just people who just waste time on computers, and you know, okay,
maybe so, but there's a reason why. There's a reason why people spend endless
nights pouring over computer screens and talking to each other about various
cryptical stuff. The important thing also though is not to get lost in that
world. The important thing is to reach out to the other people.

I'm in the middle of a world wide voyage, which some of you may know about. I'm
going all the way around the world, by land and by sea, not taking airplanes or
anything like that. The reason I'm doing that --nothing against airplanes, I
just want to take my time doing it and I want to appreciate how big this globe
is, and let me tell you, the Atlantic Ocean is pretty fucking big. It took 6
days to cross it, and I was on this ocean liner, that some of you may have heard
of, the Queen Mary II. It's not my usual life style, the rich and famous, but
sometimes you sort of have to hack your way into some place you don't belong,
and that's kind of what I did. 

But while I was there, with these what I call Tuxedo Gangs, because that's what
they are: literally, people just walk around for 6 days in tuxedos and look down
on anybody who's not wearing one, and it's really weird. I got into some
conversations with people about exactly what we do, about computer hackers. And
you'd be surprised. A lot of people appreciate what hackers are all about.
People who you would not think appreciate it. People who are rich and famous and
powerful. They know we're not the cyber terrorists, they know that we're not Bin
Laden's allies. 

They know that we're individual people, that are simply curious. And the cheer
every time one of us figures something out and spreads it around and shows the
world that, hey, guess what, there's no security at all with the credit
reporting agencies, or this credit card company has everybody's private
information on a public website, or look how easy it is for somebody to change
their grades.

There are so many aspects to technology that can be covered. We cover it in
2600, we cover it on the radio shows, at conferences like this we talk about it.
They think it's an amazing thing that people are spreading this information. Of
course, they'll never say it publicly, because they're afraid. They're afraid of
what their bosses might say to them, of what their coworkers might think of
them. But deep down, when they're watching those movies about the
individualistic hacker type, who bypasses all the rules and gets to the heart of
the matter, and learns the truth about how corrupt the corporations and the
governments really are, they're cheering just like everybody else. 

And there's a reason for that. Because what we're doing does have worth, does
have value, and that's an important thing to not let go off. It doesn't mean: go
around and just simply break into every computer system you can imagine and try
and bring it to its knees. That's not what it's all about. It's about not
censoring yourself. Not not-learning, like they want you to, when they say:
you're not supposed to know this information, that's a secret, that's something
that is for certain people only and not you. You keep digging, you keep finding
out until you get that answer. And then, you tell people about it. You don't
keep it secret like they want you to. 

And that's how you build better systems. That's how you educate people, that's
how you get privacy actually respected, which is something that we've lost in
the United States. We've lost a lot of things in the United States, but privacy
is yet another one. People like us have the unique ability to do this, but only
if we continue to communicate with each other, continue to move ahead and learn.

I didn't mean to turn this part into a speech, because I have more things to say
too, but I want to turn back to Rop.

RG: Thank you.

[13/44:39]

[Text missing due to tape change]

[14/00:00]

... in America, and it would inevitably be the surviving system. We would not be
using some corporate video text system over 1275 bps to network our world. That
yes, the Internet had its own problems. That yes, the only way to navigate it
currently was telnet and gopher. But we could see, clearly, and with our eyes
open that this technology was made to be extended, that it had the minimum
number of things defined that you couldn't change anymore instead of the maximum
number of things defined that you couldn't change anymore, and that alone made
it ready for the type of growth that it needed. 

There was 500 people, even 14 year old kids, at Hacking at the End of the
Universe, who knew something about how radically the world would be changing in
just a matter of a few years, and everybody in the outside world didn't. I've
had people come to me at that time, who weren't involved in the scene --some
people who are now very involved--, and they said: I didn't understand one word
of what was going on, it was like one big technical mystery to me, but I
understood one thing very clearly, that is: if so many people so clearly saw
where it was going, it had to be going there. That was a very interesting vibe,
a very interesting thing to see happening to people that were there. 

The time was right, also. Everything was there. Here in Holland, we had a very
early start with the Internet. Partly that's because we did XS4ALL, partly it's
because of the Digital City, and some stuff that this community was very
involved in. But then, lots of it was also chance events. The Postbank, one of
the larger banks here, had been spreading modems for almost free, because they
wanted to move people to the cheaper modem banking. They were spreading modems
like crazy, and everybody all of a sudden had a PC and a modem. They could just
download a program, and they could use bulletin boards and they could do stuff.
So we had this critical mass developing all at the same time.

Lots of things were happening. In '93, I published the last issue of Hack-tic,
my magazine. I have a problem of doing things very intensively for a long time,
it's just one of the things I cannot do. I needed to move on, I needed to do new
things. Providing Internet, setting up XS4ALL, was my way of doing something
new. I've told the history of XS4ALL to audiences like yours so many times, I'm
not going to do that again. Just understand how closely linked the Internet
history, not just XS4ALL, not just the Digital City, Internet history in Holland
and in mainland Europe, is to this event and to the 1989 event. Not just because
of that, but also because the people that later did Cistron met up there. It's
also because the people that did VPRO Digitaal met up there. All the important
events in Holland in the Internet are very closely linked to these events. 

I had this very cynical moment, as we had this problem with the Mayor of Boxtel,
who was thinking we were somehow a danger to public safety. I had to find out
how Boxtel politics worked: what parties are there, and how does this whole
thing work? And I went to this boxtel.nl website, and it had everything. It was
so clearly what we had been pushing for, what this crowd in this tent had been
pushing for, in 1989 and in 1993. It just hit me. Just like: shit, I'm trying to
get permission to be able to meet, to have my constitutional right to assemble,
and I have to say "please" now. With this guy, this whole community, the whole
thing that he runs, the municipality, has completely changed because of things
that we started. It's a really weird realization.

Anyway, back to '93. That time, I think all of the Netherlands was on barely
more than a 64 kilobit line, I think they just upgraded. IP telephony didn't
exist yet, neither did the World Wide Web. Everyone was connected over coax
Ethernet and only very brave people dared unplug it, because it had HUGE voltage
differentials across it. I've seen people really almost fall down. Phone
phreaking was big at the time and lots of international calls were being made
from the phone lines we provided.

[14/05:00]

We were on a camp ground rented from the ANWB, which is the Dutch roadside
assistance monopolist. Somebody must have tried to call them to convince them
that we were some shady gathering that they had allowed, and they're like a
really conformist sort of crowd. I think they've put out a press statement
afterwards, after somebody called them, saying that they regretted having rented
the camp ground to us, and that it was now unfortunately too late, but they
would never do it again. They regretted having been connected to all these
negative things. No crimes were reported in 1993, although the phone company
feebly attempted to get us to pay a rather hefty amount for something they
called an "estimated phone bill", which is an...

LAUGHTER

interesting phenomenon.

I also very clearly remember how organizing Hacking at the End of the Universe
scared the living daylights out of me. Would it work? Hackers in the Great
Outdoors? People had an image of hackers that wasn't very outdoorsy, it wasn't
very sort of being in the wild: kids locked up in basements and attics, very
thick glasses, very bleak skins, complete lack of ultraviolet, except maybe what
came off the monitor. I knew a lot of people that were different, that I knew
had a problem solving ability that extended away from the keyboard. However, so
many people looked at me funny when I sort of proposed the idea to them. By the
time it rolled around, I was putting the chances of success into single digits. 

When it was all over, people had seen TV news images of hackers climbing trees
with cables between their teeth.

LAUGHTER

People the world over had a new image of hackers, and hacker culture had a new
form of expression, and I was really happy it was all over. During the years
that followed, ... Maybe you want to do some Hacking at the End of the Universe
stories, if you have any.

EG: Well, the biggest HEU story I can think of is that it really got me kind of
angry, because I kept thinking to myself, after GHP, in 1989, which was in an
indoor place, HEU was outdoors and completely different to anything I'd ever
seen. I just kept thinking to myself: why won't this work in the United States?
Why can't we do this? How many different reasons can we possibly come up with,
why this would never happen in the States? It just got me more and more angry
about all the restrictions that we had to deal with, and how crippling they
were. Seeing how things were in Holland back then, seeing how things were in
Europe, where people were freely expressing themselves, organizing things,
building campsites. It just inspired my through my anger, to say: fuck it, let's
do this in the middle of New York City, the exact place they're not going to
expect us to be, and make it happen somehow. HOPE 1994 happened as a direct
result. More HOPEs happened every few years after that, and we're up to number 6
next year. That is my HEU story. Without HEU, I don't think we would have had
any of the HOPE conferences. I think the HOPE conferences themselves have
inspired other conferences to be organized in the States, and I think that's a
good thing, you know. If we're getting together in all different regions, all
different places, and spreading information and trading stories and things like
that, that's a great thing. The thing is, we were convinced back then that we
couldn't do it. But we could, we did it! When you're told you can't do something
enough times, you start to believe it. If you're told that you're a certain type
of person enough times, you start to act that way. I think there's a certain
thread there, both in the things we're told we can't do, and the things that we
are labeled as. And we have to sort of distance ourselves from that and just
take a good look from a kind of detached way, and say: no, that's not who I am,
that's not what I want to do, this is what I want to do. And then do it. 

It's not really an HEU story, but it's what inspired me.

RG: During the years between '93 and '97, we all saw the first email addresses
and URLs appear on trucks and bill boards, and I think it hit us all, how big it
was going to be. Even the people the people that were right there, doing
Internet providers, working at a university as a sysadmin, even the people that
intimately were familiar with the technology, didn't realize how big it was
going to be, until we saw the URLs splattered all over the society. I thought:
oh my god, it's happening.

[14/10:00]

We had the privilege of being part of some of the well publicized fights over
the new arena: who controls it, censorship, will existing models of media work
in this new arena? We had interesting adversaries. We were lucky to get the good
ones, that were like really evil, like the Church of Scientology. At that time
still the German state were really fighting each other, so we were hoping we
could find a clever trick to step from between.

Anyway, we had some interesting fights, some interesting ideological debates.
They came nice and early, which I think was very important, because it made
people realize --at least in Holland, and I know it's different in other
countries in Europe, where the Internet came much later and was perceived as a
commercial thing from America, brought by companies--, over those years between
say '93 and '96, when mass Internet came around, that Internet provided a place.
That networks in general provided a place. That you as an individual could have
some control over, or you as a group. And it changed --in my mind-- permanently,
the way the Dutch people, and later culture in general viewed the medium. Which
I think is mostly a lucky being-early thing.

Then came HIP '97. XS4ALL was by that time already a large corporation. HIP '97
showed how diverse and how much larger the whole hacker universe had become:
1500 people. The first do-it-yourself hacker city. It wasn't just a tent with a
bunch of people camping around it. This was a city! We were generating --because
everybody still had desktop computers, nobody brought laptops, or at least not a
majority-- a megawatt of power, on that field. Far more than we generate today.
The media, the mass media, some fraction of which, was ready for something more
than cheap thrills --like computer break-ins and evil kids--, got to print crazy
stories. The New York Times printed a story of volunteers in their swim trunks
--because it was very hot--, proofreading OCR'ed pages from PGP source code,
that had been exported legally in book form, because the law did not allow the
restriction on exported books. So they had exported the source code of PGP, and
they were OCR'ing on the field. I think that at the last night of HIP, the first
compiled version of PGP 5, that was international and did not have any export
restrictions on it, was released. The US government then gave up its
restrictions on the free availability of strong encryption for export, as a
direct result of those events.

The media actually reported that. They saw these crazy things happening. The New
York Times had an article on hacker hippy Woodstock in Holland, and we had like
all these strange people suddenly realizing that this was a huge community and
how many people and how many sub communities were part of it. I think, if
anything, that's what I enjoy most of these events: it's how much it's a meeting
of sub communities, of communities that maybe don't even realize they have a
link until they show up here and say: hey, those are my objectives too, or: hey,
that sounds like I can help you, or you can help me, or we can scratch each
other's backs. It was also a taste of how some of these really strange, obscure,
subculture battles --the fight over encryption export-- were slowly creeping
towards the center stage. How all of a sudden these weren't topics that you
could not talk at a party about and having everybody go "huh?". They were
things that people knew about and perceived as important: yes, that's important
in the world today. Also, in '97, some very overzealous police officials
attempted to tell two foresters, who rented the place to us --we rented the
place from the Dutch National Forestry Service--, in a nice cabin in the woods
who also controlled this nature camp ground for groups which we rented --these
were really neat people, they could tell you all about the nature there--, that
this was a band of evil anarchists, and that they needed to retract renting to
us. 

[14/15:00]

They now had gotten around to dealing with people renting to us, before the
actual event. One of these foresters was really interesting, because he said:
look sir, I have been studying law for three years, before I realized that I
would be spending my life indoors, and I know that this is total boloney; Could
you please, if you have a problem with these people, go arrest them or
something? Which is a stroke of luck that we would have later on still. 

This event has an angel on its shoulder. I don't know what it is, but we've been
lucky quite a few times.

No crimes, again, were reported in 1997, by the way.

EG: It's interesting because getting that media attention to focus on the good
things, ... Lots of time the only way is to do it yourself: write your own
magazines, papers and do your own radio shows. That is something that Off The
Hook has become a vital tool for us. How many of you listen to Off The Hook,
just out of curiosity? That's a good number! Off The Hook, for those who don't
know, is our radio show that we do once a week out of New York City, on WBAI.
That's another thing: I talk about being in the right place at the right time,
and having certain pivotal moments in your life, and here I am talking about
these issues. 

I am in New York City where there just so happens to exist a 50000 watt
non-commercial radio station in the middle of the dial that reaches three
different states. This is before the Internet even made podcasting or live
streaming a possibility. We had this amazing tool, they actually let us go on
the air talking about these issues. What that led to, is an incredible means of
reaching out to people who had no knowledge whatsoever, except for what they
might have read in the mass media --God help them--, about what computer hackers
were all about. Here they were able to actually listen to computer hackers on
the radio, they were able to call in, ask their questions, have us answer them,
and we were able to build a whole new community based on that. That's part of
the magic of being able to spread information, and reach out to people who you
don't already know. 


I try to stress that as much as possibly: it's great to get together and talk
technical stuff to people that you know, but it's wasted if you don't reach out
to other people who may otherwise never understand what it is that you want to
do and what you stand for. That is why things like this conference, things like
Off The Hook, things like 2600, they are vital in getting to those people. And
those people are vital in moving us ahead. Because that's how I'm able to talk
to people on luxury liners who get what we're trying to say, who understand it,
because they've heard that message some place. It got through to them. And
that's how we survive, that's what's really important. I think we have survived
because those people have been there for us.

Rop here mentioned that he was targeted by the Churched of Scientology, I have
to say that that is really impressive, but we targeted by the Motion Picture
Association of America

BOO

And you don't know what it's like to piss somebody off until you piss them off!
These guys, they have the most highly paid lawyers that you could be imagine.
There's one legal firm that has their office in Time Square in New York City,
and when I want there to be to pose --to pose is basically to answer a lot of
hostile questions from the other side in this little conference room--, I must
have gone up about maybe 30 stories in this building, and the elevator would
stop on every single floor. And every single floor would have the name of that
legal firm on the wall. So there you are on these floors, and God knows how many
lawsuits they were filing that day alone. But I came face-to-face with pure
evil.

LAUGHTER

That's what it felt like. But I got through it because I was able to talk about
it, because I was able to reach out to people, and they were able to hear about
it. There are so many instances of this: there are people who are sent to prison
for the most absurd things, like the whole Kevin Mitnick case that we were able
to get out and tell people about, through the radio show and making our own
documentary, of which of course many people said: it's a waste of time, it's
never going to do anything, it's never going to get anywhere. There are always
those people; don't let them influence you. There was Bernie S., Bernie's here
now, who was put away in prison for two years, for absolutely ridiculous events.
And there are many cases like this, that will never be heard unless there's a
way of expressing them to people, of getting it out there somehow. And that's
why we need to be in control of the media to some degree. We need to take
advantage of self publishing, we need to take advantage of the Internet,
especially in the times ahead. And not to sound too much like it's a prophecy of
doom, but really, we're in perilous times. Things are happening around the
world, and back home. The last Dutch conference was HAL 2001, that took place
in... Was it July or August 2001?

RG: August

[14/20:12]

EG: August 2001. Well, you all know what happened in September of 2001. From
that point on, my country has not been the same, and I dare say a lot of the
world has not been the same.

[RG strikes out text in his papers]

LAUGHTER

EG: I'm sorry, you were going to cover that, weren't you? Well, there's plenty
to say.

What basically happened was, the rules changed. Because the people who were in
power saw an opportunity to really scare the shit out of people, and use that to
impose all kinds of draconian laws and policies. The danger of that, ... I
don't know how many of you have grown up and seen things change, and then talk
to people in a younger generation. I'll give you an example: when I grew up, I
went to a local high school. We had what was known as an "open campus", that
meant: if you didn't have a class, you could leave and hang out at a bagel store
for an hour and then come back. But now, you have to go through a metal detector
every time you go into the school. Nobody is allowed to leave, nobody is allowed
to do anything. There are drug tests, there are lie detector tests, there are
security guards and cops inside the school. And you know what? None of the kids
there have any idea it was ever any different, because that's what they're used
to. 

That's how society changes, not overnight, but gradually. In 10 years, people
will just assume that there were always barricades around buildings, that there
were always soldiers walking down the streets of New York City, that there were
always people in the subway searching your bags, because: we are going to get
used to it. But the thing is: if you keep speaking about it, if you keep letting
people know, if you don't give in, and let them win, and impose these changes,
then it will be a lot harder. I'm not saying they won't win in the end, because
they are going to keep trying. Remember, they've been trying to do these things
well before 9/11 happened. 9/11 really has very little to do with it. They were
ready to go with the Patriot Act so quickly after 9/11 that you have to wonder
that they just had it there waiting for the opportunity to introduce it. It
doesn't take too much to realize that 9/11 was the best thing that could have
happened to a lot of these people. It's a horrible thing to have to say, but I'm
afraid it's true.

Remember the Clipper chip? That was well before 9/11. All kinds of attempts to
spy on people, to make encryption something evil, and basically to just treat us
all as potential criminals. Now, there is something they can really focus on and
really scare us with. Every time something happens in the rest of the world, it
is emphasized even more. We had the 11th of March 2004 in Madrid. However, the
people there reacted very differently. They voted their government out of power
the next couple of days.

APPLAUSE

Because they were smart enough to see that their government was lying to them,
and they weren't short sighted enough to just latch onto the fear that they
perhaps were feeling at the moment, and just do whatever they were told. A lot
of us in our country have yet to learn that. We just had the horrible events of
the 7th of July in London, I was just in London, and obviously the police were
panicking. I'm sure all of you have heard of the case where the police shot an
unarmed and innocent person to death, because they thought maybe he was a
suicide bomber. That kind of sickness is insane! However, the people that I
encountered, that I talked to, that I saw, they are holding up quite well.
They're not letting their lives be lived in fear, and they're not living
apparently like these police are living. So hopefully the cops can learn
something from the people over there.

But there is something else that I think that a lot of us should be paying
attention to. England is very different from the United States in a couple of
ways. One thing that they have over there, that we don't have, for some reason,
is a large number of surveillance cameras. Everywhere you go, you're on camera.
Every train, ...

SOMEONE: More cameras per head than anywhere anywhere else in the world.

EG: Heh, are there also more cameras than people? I don't know what it is.
Maybe it's because everyone loves the prisoner or something like that, but
everywhere in England there are allowed speakers and cameras. And they just LOVE
using these things. So they already exist, and I'm sure more of them are going
to exist as a result of the events of the 7th. In fact, there were news reports
of how stock in those companies, surveillance camera companies, was rising
immediately after the attacks. What a sick world we live in. But that means that
that is going to be spreading. That's going to be here, that's going to be in
America, that's going to be all over the place. I don't know if there's much we
can do to stop that, because they're just going to install these things
everywhere.

[14/25:00]

But it doesn't mean that we have to live our lives in fear, not express
ourselves freely, and agree to things like having our bags searched on trains,
and other impositions of really horrible things. We're facing tough times. No
doubt hackers and anybody interested in this technology, people who publish
freely, people who use encryption, we're all going to be subjected to a lot of
scrutiny. We're going to be accused of all sorts of things that we have
absolutely no involvement in and no interest in. So it's very important that
we're ready for that. It's very important that we are able to speak up for
ourselves, and for the other people who understand what we're all about, who
don't have the technical knowledge. Because --believe me-- the Patriot Act may
have just been renewed, or is about to be renewed in the United States, and
that's a horrible thing. It really is. The Terrorism Act in the UK is going to
be allowing the police to hold people for 90 days without charge. We now go
around torturing people around the world as a matter of policy, in the United
States. These are really dark times, that we are facing.

But we don't have to accept it. We don't have to say: yea, that's how it is,
that's how I always remember it. We can be standing out there, saying: this is
wrong! And continuing to say it until enough people listen, and enough people do
something about it. I think that will make a difference. We're in a very unique
position, because we're able to reach more people, we're able to design
computers and communication systems, and be very creative. Plus the whole Net
community has this sense of the right of free speech, the right of unpopular
views to express themselves.

We occasionally get email at 2600 and Off The Hook, from people that say: hey,
look at these people over here, they're saying horrible things, can you launch a
denial-of-service attack and shut them down, please? And to them we say: you
know, you just don't get it. Even if we don't agree with these people, even if
they're horrible or whatever, they still have the right to express themselves.
Let the words condemn them. Our actions are simply going to make them stronger
if we try to silence them. That's the same of any group of people: if try to
silence us, we do become stronger. That's an important thing to remember. So,
let's not fall into the same game, and try to silence those people that we
disagree with, and let's instead try to WIN. 

That's pretty much it.

APPLAUSE

RG: Okay, another fast forward now to 2001. We convened on the grounds of Twente
university, who courteously invited us to have our event on campus. Again, a
much larger ground than in '97. Many more people were on the scene than our
lecture facilities could possibly have fit. We rented this humongous central bar
tent, even bigger I think than this tent, and it had lots of things going on in
it. (Maybe it wasn't bigger, I don't know.) It was turning bigger, and bigger,
and bigger.

We also noticed that our community was getting used to being at an outdoor
event. The Chaos Computer Club had its Chaos Camps. People knew how to pitch a
tent, they knew what was expected of them, and they were sort of bonding much
more easily to get stuff done. You could ask for a bunch of volunteers, and they
would get up and do stuff. People would self-organize and figure out: hey,
there's a problem, let's go fix it. That's always a very comforting thing if you
are organizing one of these. I would not organize this type of event,
personally, for any other community, because the level of involvement from the
beginning is very high, but from a relatively low number of people. Scaling it
up the way this event scales up in the last two weeks, I would find hard to
imagine in any other crowd. And I thank you for it, because it makes our lives
easier, and it sort of gives us this cushion that things will never really get
out of hand, because there's always this group of people around that just fixes
the problem before you even get there. That's really nice, thank you.

APPLAUSE

Also, in 2001, the College of Deans of the University received a letter from the
police commissioner --I'm sure it was in the closing speech of HAL 2001--, a
friendly letter that informed them that: yes, you can have these hackers on your
campus --academic freedom and all--, be our guest, however, you, the College of
Deans, personally, will be held as accomplice, not just sort of civilly liable,
but as a criminal accomplice, to any criminal events happening there, in fact,
to any criminal events coinciding with this happening there.

[14/30:10]

That was a threat coming from the police chief from that whole region, a threat
that would not have been taken lightly by the College of Deans. And why would
they have taken it lightly? They would kick us out, and then sort out the legal
problems and contracts later. That's grounds for breach of contract, if a police
commissioner says: this is really dangerous. That's legal grounds: they could
have kicked us and nothing would have happened. 

That was three or four weeks before the event. Again, our little angel, the one
that's on our shoulder. The deans were already out on holiday, and the secretary
figured probably: I don't want to bother them on their holiday. And they asked
one of the higher staff members directly below the deans. One of them got the
job of answering on behalf of the College of Deans. They have all these people
on site that can do all the medial stuff on behalf. This happened to be the guy
that got us there.

LAUGHTER

Praise $deity

APPLAUSE

So through him, our lawyer got to basically write the answer. It was an
interesting sort of very friendly telling them where to, ehm, anyway... It's
very interesting to be perceived as this dangerous, and then everybody that's
there sort of says: oh, you guys are fun! It's really weird.

I'll fast forward to the present. These cops that are there, the Boxtel cops,
the chief cop that was here yesterday. He had been talking to between 20 and 30
people yesterday that were enjoying themselves, sitting in the grass, talking to
each other, and he was sort of curious what these people were doing. And they
explained to him what they were doing and why they were here and how their
community fit in and what their links were and how they came to happen on this
field. They were sort of believable stories, most of them.

LAUGHTER

And somehow, the criminal element was missing. He didn't connect. So, after a
while, he started asking people: but can't you break into computer systems? And
some of these people were OpenBSD kernel hackers, and they said: yea, sure, but
WHY?

LAUGHTER

I think he got it. At least to me, he presented like he got it. He agrees with
me, that what's going on behind that office is the most humongous waste of
police effort ever. We have about a cop per 100 visitors in the afternoon, or
something like that. These are computer crime professionals. I don't know what
these people are thinking, but it's fine by me. They can learn, they can come,
they can watch the show. Probably some of them would have paid for their ticket
if we didn't give them free armbands, but I can deal with that. I think we all
can. We should be friendly to them, we should explain how we come to be, that
no, we're not going to launch missiles... any time soon...

LAUGHTER & APPLAUSE

By the way, the field that we keep empty for the emergency helicopter is also in
their planning, as the field where they sort of convene with their larger number
of troops, in riot gear.

LAUGHTER

So, in their emergency planning, that's where the riot police sort of make their
units complete. What the fuck?!

LAUGHTER

[14/34:30]

The present is also a time of lots of unknowns. It's a time where I sense some
of the vibe that I sensed in '93. '97 and 2001 were fun, but I sense some of
that vibe, the same being aware of changes. We decided early on that HAL 2001
was fun, but it did not scale. We could turn into some giant big hacker
Oktoberfest, have 15000 tents, but we wanted people to be part of it, we wanted
people to get the same kick that we got in '93, '97 and 2001, which is the kick
of organizing it by ourselves. We could turn bigger, we could turn more
professional, we could rent companies to do everything. It wouldn't work. So
instead, we said: we're going to do something that is again community based,
we're going to split up into villages. Because we already saw that already
happening in '97 and 2001: people were already forming completely
self-sufficient villages that just needed to plug in here, and the village is
up. And we wanted to strengthen that, so we told people: bring your crew, bring
whatever you need to function as a unit, as a little sub society. That's been
working! We've seen crazy things happen on the field. OpenBSD is a big
community, but there is lots of other villages happening on the field -- very
important. 

As I said, it's very important that all these sub communities meet. It's very
important to see that whether you're working on free software, whether you build
the network here, show flaws in hyped-up commercial products, or whether you do
really cool stuff with DECT telephones, like the POC has been doing here. Let's
give them a round of applause, by the way.

APPLAUSE

Whether you fight software patents, whether you work on community wireless
networks, whether you reverse engineer modern electronics, or whether you are
spend your days helping to kill the data retention legislation, it's important
to realize how connected you are to all these other things, and how pointless
some of these are without all the other things. It's important that we all meet,
and that we sit down, at the bar, or in a hammock, or in the grass with our
computers, or in a tent if it's raining, or wherever we are, we sit down, we
chat, we communicate and try to make projects together. 

One of the biggest thrills of having organized one of these things --well, the
biggest thrill is when it's all over and the field is clean, but right right
after that-- is listening to people two or three years down the road goad: oh,
yea, we met at HIP and then we started this, or: yes, these people met there and
then they started talking to so-and-so, and then these communities connected.
That's what --at least for me-- makes me take this: watching how much of our
community connects at these events. Not just here, but also the Chaos Congress,
the Camps, HOPE conventions. It's really watching it all click together, and
that is really a thrill.

Anyway, where was I?

As I said, it's the first time since '93 that I sense the same kind of vibe.
The feeling that we're near the center of something large. The feeling that
threw information that's maybe a little bit more common in our sub cultures than
elsewhere. Maybe, just maybe, we hold some clues to where it's all headed.
Maybe we have a clue.

This time it's not the prospect of helping to introduce to the world this great
and shiny Internet wonder machine that miraculously makes censorship, mass media
and telco monopolies obsolete. It's a more diffuse vibe this time. We ride wave
after wave of really cool technology. We still see some great things that are
possible with it. We enjoy some of the power we have gained, some of the
influence, and the infrastructures we've built. We're winning some of the fights
if we work together. The whole fight against software patents had a major
victory a month ago. 

Oh, I have 5 minutes... Whoops... We're screwed, no, I'm screwed.

Anyway, if these events have shown anything, it's that if we work together, we
can be really successful. And somehow, the way we work together, the way we
organize, is the way a lot of other activists from other worlds are looking at:
how does this self-organization work, how does this wiki stuff work, how do
people...? The whole software patents thing has been an eye opener for activism
far outside of the world of computer geeks, and hackers, and nerds. It's been
everywhere.

Let me quickly skip through a lot of stuff that's really not necessary. Ehm,
wow, I thought I had so much less than we had time.

EG: He's going to come up with the best stuff from the next couple of pages, and
give that to you.

[14/40:00]

I just wanted to say, to emphasize what Rop has been saying, there's so much
diversity of people here. So much diversity of thought, of opinion. It would be
great if everybody just kind of reached out, met somebody new, and went to a
talk that perhaps they would not have normally gone to, and just learn
something, so that four years from now, when we do this again hopefully,
somewhere in Holland, we can say: wow, we met back in 2005 at What The Hack, and
look what we started then. There's a lot of potential there. 

It is also important not to get stuck in just your particular field of
expertise, to branch out and introduce yourself to new people, new thoughts, new
ideas and new ways of doing things.

And on that subject --I want to do a little bit of self-promotion here--. We
have --I don't know how we did this-- a 2600 barracks, that is not yet set up.
It will be set up over the next couple of days. And I mentioned before...

LAUGHTER

Somehow, no soon, really, by tomorrow. It'll be the weekend thing.

I mentioned I was going around the world, just sort of picking in various
things, and talking to different people from different countries. We're involved
in making another movie, called Speaker's World, which basically takes the
concept from Speaker's Corner in High Park in London, which is where people go
to stand on soap boxes and just speak about whatever is on their mind. We're
going around the world, asking people to do that, in their own native languages
and whatever subjects they want to talk about. And I think it would be great to
have dozens of people from this conference appear in the film, talking about the
things that are important to them, just sharing their ideas, their opinions,
their jokes, whatever it is that you guys have to share with the whole rest of
the world.

I'm going to be going through Russia, China, Mongolia, Japan, talking to people
there as well, so I'm going to get as much diversity as possible. We're going to
be set up in the 2600 barracks. I don't know where it is, but it's somewhere and
it'll have 2600 on it, it's over there somewhere. So please stop by and it's
starting tomorrow anytime. We'll be there with cameras and stuff. Back to Rop.

RG: Alright. I have a number of things to say, which I'll just quickly skip
over.

As you may or may not know, this country has gone slightly mad over the past 3
or 4 years. We have had some political setbacks, political murder even.
Basically, our politics have gone slightly bonkers. As a result of which a lot
of the issues which involve privacy and a lot of those issues, are driven home
more forcibly here than they maybe are in the rest of Europe. But I think in
this community in general, the realization is sinking in that we have lost the
20th century privacy wars. Profoundly lost.

Conflicts globalize, just like everything else globalizes, and we must all live
in the presence of a terrorist threat that may not go away in our lifetimes. As
it turns out, a lot of what we figured were inalienable rights, were in fact
mere privileges. I'm not sure about anyone else, but the prospect of watching
democracy itself slip from our fingers, is much more threatening in many ways
than terrorism itself.

APPLAUSE

At least here in the Netherlands, and I think in many other places, we face a
population that's scared into submission, and not likely to question any of this
any time soon. In short, I think there's trouble, I think we all know it, and I
think this community has a role to play. It's all a much longer story. Maybe
outside the scope of this speech, especially if I only have 5 minutes... eh, 3
minutes. But I think a lot of it is already obvious to many of us. It's a matter
of figuring out what needs to be done, and then work on what we can do as a
community to help. 

I think, in general, the world needs to learn that democracy is not this thing
that is in the way when fighting terrorism. People need to be told that martial
law and prison torture don't provide a solution to, but instead the feeding
grounds for terrorism.

APPLAUSE

And that the creation of an all seeing and all aware government is only
acceptable the day democracy comes with at least a 50 year warranty. One part in
making people see these things is to help show that a lot of these measures that
are being proposed are overwrought. Apply our knowledge of how security works,
and how it does not work to the stuff we see around us. Show that the measures
don't even serve the purpose they're said to serve.

A lot of these measures today are technical of nature, and our community has
somewhat of a reputation for seeing through the bullshit, for showing that the
Emperor is not always particularly well dressed. 

[14/45:05]

We can also play our part in making sure that the means of communication remain
accessible, whether by fighting closed and monopolized standards, by opposing
--or even better: breaking-- mandatory digital rights management, by building
community networks or by strengthening the public domain. 

The hacker world is an essential little wheel in a global infrastructure without
which, governments and corporations would have long shaped how we communicate
today. We have a role to play in education. There are things that I need to
convey to my kids, that we all need to convey to people younger than us, simply
because nobody else will. We need to convey that learning how stuff works is
never a crime, show that there are right and wrong things to do with the power
of technology, even if the lines between right and wrong, sometimes are not
where government or corporate interest think they are. We need to share not just
technical skills and knowledge, but also a sense of community, the sense that
even though we disagree on many things, we can still define some common
objectives and work together. 

We need to show people that may be scared of the word "hackers" that hacking is
not a crime. 

But most importantly, we need to show that hacking in fun.

Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of all the people that have been working really
hard to make this happen, I sincerely hope you enjoy What The Hack!

APPLAUSE & CHEERING

[14/47:02]

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