🎤 The Press at DEF CON II
[1994]
Every year in Vegas, there's a hacker convention called DEF CON. The first one I went to was DEF CON II in 1994, which took place in the now-demolished Sahara Hotel.
I was there with my friends Greg and Bapper. I don't recall if we drove there or flew that trip, but no matter: Vegas, baby!
Today DEF CON is massive and draws crowds of over 30,000 people. Absolutely nuts. But in '94 there were only about 200 people there, which made it feel pretty empty. For any particular presentation, there were a handful of attendees, and the main large room was desolate.
The fact that you could buy $1 Heinekens at the nearby casino bar probably contributed to general absence.
And you have to understand, if you're not familiar with hacker types, that we were all pretty much the opposite of well-heeled professional casino enthusiasts. Ratty jeans and T-shirts sporting obnoxious slogans, and computer geeks, all. And about half of them were here to cause a little trouble while avoiding the law.
But the keynote speech was different than the other presentations. It was being given by Phil Zimmerman, author of the encryption tool Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), which is still used to this day. And everyone showed up for that, both attendees and press. The room was packed.
Phil gave his talk, none of which I can recall 30+ years later, but I'm certain you can come up with the gist of it (right to privacy, protection against government overreach, yadda), and we all began to file out of the conference hall, across well-trodden dark patterned carpet, and through the wide exit doors.
Just outside the door, standing steady against the heavy flow of the egressing crowd, was a suited television reporter and his cameraman, heavy 90s camera gear slung atop his shoulder at the ready. The reporter held his microphone pointedly, casting his glance side to side to see which of the hackers he could get on the record.
Now, it should come as no surprise that none of the hackers had the remotest interest in appearing on a television news broadcast that evening. We were all either shy, socially-awkward, people-of-interest, wanted, or some combination of the above, none of which screams "put me on TV".
So wherever the reporter pointed his mic, the crowd parted like the Red Sea. It was like the microphone projected an energy field that effortlessly and effectively cleared the immediate area of all hackers. Have you seen those pictures of the shark swimming through a school of fish and the school just parts to let the shark through? It was like that.
Bapper, Greg, and I just stood in some awe watching this effect, and having a little laugh at the reporter who clearly wasn't going to have any luck.
But the thing is, while we were doing this, we weren't moving. And where there's a shark, you usually want to be moving.
The reporter saw us idling and pounced, closing the distance between us and him with surprising speed. Having the energy-field microphone helped his cause, certainly. The cameraman was already in position just behind, the large cyclops eye of the camera flexing us into focus.
"Are you hackers?" the reporter asked.
"Yes," we immediately replied.
This is a bit of a ... lie. I consider us to be hackers in the classic computer hacker sense, in that we enjoy figuring out how these machines work and what we can make them do. But we were ethical hackers; we didn't break any laws or break into other people's computer systems or anything like that.
But we couldn't have said "no", now could we.
"What do you enjoy most about hacking?" the reporter asked.
Bapper didn't hesitate, and answered with dead-serious delivery. "The power," he said.
Greg and I somehow managed to remain poker-faced and nodded in weighty affirmation.
"How do feel being in the same room with all these criminals?" the reporter pressed.
Bapper pulled a face. "Who do you think runs this hotel?" he answered. We began to walk.
"No, but seriously—" The reporter tried to claw back any faint sense of control he might have had over the sole group of hackers who deigned to give him a soundbite, lest he retreat empty-handed.
We left him frustrated, I fear.
Or maybe not. To this day, I sincerely hope the 6:00 news ran that clip.
The power!