And I want to add for those of you who think we were always divided communities: I was an early member of the EFF.Īt the point when DEFCON 1 happened, we had a huge national debate going on, a lot of it was being played out and distorted in the press, because we had cops who didn’t understand the technology we had hackers who didn’t understand why other people were mad at them, and we had the press who couldn’t talk to either of those groups. And we had a bunch of hackers, some of whom were doing exploratory, interesting stuff, some of whom were doing very expensive destructive stuff, which is what led to the prosecutions of the late 1980s and early 1990s that got all the press attention, and it started the debate and led to DEFCON, led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So what we had at DEFCON 1 were a bunch of cops who were suddenly confronting a world they knew nothing about: cops were not using computers then. And even though “Spot The Fed” was a big deal as late as DEFCON 7, and they spotted a bunch of feds and trotted them out on the stage, they never got the FBI agent, and you know why? She was a girl. At DEFCON 7 Kevin Mitnick was still on the lam, and the FBI sent an agent to try and capture him if he showed up. So let’s go back: where were we at DEFCON 1? First of all, I’m thrilled to see how many women are in the audience. You’ve already lost hacking’s illegal in 50 states, the federal government, and a lot of other countries.” And it went downhill from there. It was very interesting for all of us: I got up in front of a very tiny group of people in a very tiny conference room in the old Sands, and I said: “There’s no debate. Gail Thackeray: Good morning, my name is Gail Thackeray and I was at DEFCON 1 I was the only prosecutor they invited to come (who would?), and my assignment then was to debate the issues of hacking, and initially, when Dead Addict called me, I told him I don’t attend such conventions, and later on we had some discussions, and I did go.
Some of the pioneers of Defcon, Gail Thackeray and Dead Addict, take the floor at Defcon 20 to recall how it all started and compare it to where it is now.
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