[HAL2001 was very interesting, so I think H2K2 should be worth attending too. WEN]
July 12-14 in New York City http://www.h2k2.net by http://www.2600.com/ H2K2 (HOPE 2002) will be the fourth HOPE conference and the first time we've done a new event less than three years after the previous one. We decided to do this because the last one went so smoothly and turned out to be so interesting. We also want to be in synch with the overseas conferences. Since there's a major hacker event every four years in the Netherlands (the last one being HAL 2001), we can always ensure that we'll be part of those and that they in turn will be part of the HOPE conferences. And once every four years (2003 being the next time) there will be a hacker event someplace else that we'll recommend being part of. H2K2 promises to once again be an historic event, again taking place at the Hotel Pennsylvania but this time with a significantly larger space as we've gained access to the 35,000 square foot storefront on the ground floor in addition to all of the space upstairs. More specific information on the conference will be found in other parts of this site. Panels Info Alphabetical Index • Abuse of Authority • Access Control Devices • The Argument Against Security Through Obscurity for the Non-Digital World • Black Hat Bloc or How I Stopped Worrying About Corporations and Learned to Love the Hacker Class War • Bullies on the Net - The Ford and Nissan Cases • Caller ID Spoofing • "The Conscience of a Hacker" • Crypto for the Masses • Cult of the Dead Cow Extravaganza • Databases and Privacy • The DeCSS Story • Digital Demonstrations: Criminal DDoS Attack or Cyber Sit-in? • DMCA Legal Update • Educating Lawmakers - Is It Possible? • Everything you ever wanted to know about spying and did not know who to ask.... • Face Scanning Systems at Airports: Ready for Prime Time? • "Freedom Downtime" • Fun With 802.11b • Fucking Up the Internet at ICANN: Global Control Through the Domain Name System and How to Escape • Fun with Pirate Radio and Shortwave • GNU Radio: Free Software Radio Collides with Hollywood's Lawyers • Hacking for Community Radio • Hacking Nanotech • Hacking National Intelligence: Possibilities for a Public Intelligence Revolution • Hacking the Invisible World • Hardware Q&A • How to Start an IMC in Your Town • Human Autonomous Zones: The Real Role of Hackers • "I Am Against Intellectual Property" • The Ins and Outs of Webcasting • Keynote: Aaron McGruder • Keynote: Siva Vaidhyanathan • "Life in a Distributed Age" • Lockpicking • LPFM Basics • Magic Lantern and Other Evil Things • Making Money on the Internet While Still Saying "Fuck" • Negativland - Past, Present, Future • The New FBI and How It Can Hurt You • Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual • The Password Probability Matrix • The Patriot Act • Protection for the Masses • RetroComputing • Secure Telephony: Where ARE the Secure Phones? • The Shape of the Internet: Influence and Consequence • Social Engineering • Standing Up To Authority • Steganography: Wild Rumors and Practical Applications • Strategic Thought in Virtual Deterrence and Real Offense: The Computer's Role • Teaching Hacker Ethics with a Common Curriculum • Tracking Criminals on the Internet • The Ultimate Co-location Site • The Vanished Art of Human Intelligence or Why the World Trade Center Would Still Be Standing if Defense Against Terrorism Had Been Contracted Out to the Private Sector -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Abuse of Authority Over the years, there have been many stories in the hacker world of law enforcement personnel who have abused their authority. Two of the more dramatic cases in recent memory both come out of Philadelphia. Many of us are already familiar with the horror story of Bernie S. who wound up in dangerous prisons for nearly a year all because the United States Secret Service had a vendetta against him. Then there is the case of ShapeShifter, 2600 layout artist, who was arrested at the Republican National Convention in 2000 (shortly after leading a panel on the RNC at H2K) and held on half a million dollars bail as if he were a terrorist mastermind - all because he had been targeted for speaking out in public. Hear the games the authorities play and how public education really can make a difference in putting an end to such abuse. Hosted by Bernie S. and ShapeShifter -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Access Control Devices There are all kinds of access control devices that we come in contact with every day. They include such things as magnet readers, proximity card readers, fingerprint readers, camera systems, biometrics, and basic standard operating procedures for a business. This talk will be a comprehensive guide to what's out there. Hosted by Mike Glasser -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Argument Against Security Through Obscurity for the Non-Digital World In the world of networked computers, security through obscurity is generally ineffective. Hiding algorithms, protecting source code, and keeping procedures secret might be effective initially, but eventually the cloak of secrecy is penetrated. This talk will examine how security through obscurity is relied upon in the non-computerized world. When can security through obscurity work? What risk analysis should we use to examine the role of obscurity in the non-computerized world? The talk will present and examine the hypothesis that an "open source" mentality should be applied to security procedures for public places. This is a logical extension of the lesson in cryptanalysis - that no cryptographic method can be considered trustworthy until it has undergone a rigorous examination by qualified persons. Similarly, can we trust security procedures in the physical world designed, ostensibly, to protect the public if these procedures never undergo public scrutiny? Hosted by Greg Newby -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Black Hat Bloc or How I Stopped Worrying About Corporations and Learned to Love the Hacker Class War Hackers must deal with governments and ultimately the corporations that wield most of the decision making power within them. Looking over the past few decades of hacker interaction with corporations, we notice some interesting trends in the two worlds that indicate strong influences of the corporate and hacker worlds on the other's ethics and culture, often only hinted at to the rest of the world via biased corporate PR machines in the form of broadcast and publishing media. Hacker posts to Bugtraq become resumes, hacker tech like BBSes and IRC become the technical implementations of every Internet startup's business plan, hackers testify in front of Congress to warn them of impending doom directly resulting in increased federal cybercrime funding, while piracy is accepted by governments and media (but not the public) as theft. Has hacking become the fast venture capitalist track to shiny gadgets that go fast and make noise, a la Slashdot? Should we ignore intellectual property legislation and treaties that are passed solely to make rich people richer? This talk takes a look at where hacker/corporate/government relationships have been, where they are now, and where they could be going - hopefully shedding some light on everyone's motivations along the way. Hosted by Gweeds -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bullies on the Net - The Ford and Nissan Cases We could fill the entire weekend with stories like these and we have no doubt there will be many more such tales in the years to come. With the help of agencies, corporations, treaties, and laws with acronyms like ICANN, WIPO, WTO, and the DMCA, the individual very often finds himself at the mercy of corporate giants with virtually unlimited funding - and seemingly unlimited power. Throughout it all however, there remains hope. Hear the story of Uzi Nissan, who is being sued by the Nissan Motor Company for daring to use his own name on the Internet. We'll also talk about how the Ford Motor Company sued 2600 - and lost. Hosted by Emmanuel Goldstein, Eric Grimm, and Uzi Nissan -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Caller ID Spoofing A demonstration of how Caller ID works as well as methods that can be used to emulate and display spoofed Caller ID messages on Caller ID and Caller ID with Call Waiting boxes using a Bell 202 modem. Details on the technical aspects such as Caller ID protocol for both regular and Call Waiting Caller ID. If all goes well, you may actually see a live demonstration of spoofed Caller ID. Hosted by Lucky225 and Tray Smee -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The Conscience of a Hacker" Probably the most famous single essay about what it's like to be a hacker is "The Conscience of a Hacker" by The Mentor, written in 1986. It's been quoted all over the place, including the movie "Hackers." It remains one of the most inspirational pieces written about the hacker community and it's survived well over time. This year, we're pleased to have The Mentor himself give a reading of it and offer additional insight. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Crypto for the Masses This panel will approach cryptography from the perspective of enabling a 'digital world' where key social schemes are preserved -- personal identity, anonymity, and the right to privacy. We'll talk about the way cryptosystems work, and discuss how they can be applied now to create and enforce cyber rights. We'll also discuss the hurdles faced by crypto and its adopters, and the public at large. We'll also learn just how crypto is being threatened and abused by certain global goons." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cult of the Dead Cow Extravaganza This year, the megamerican computer hackers of patriotism, Cult of the Dead Cow, honor our country with "Hooray for America!" -- an all-star revue including the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales, NASCAR champion Dingus McProstate, and the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Reid Fleming will give a thorough and thoroughly educational description of the history and symbology of the Great Seal (which you can find on the back side of a $1 bill). Grandmaster Ratte himself will lead the audience in a sustained chant of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" Oh, and maybe there will be some new software too. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Databases and Privacy Once again, world renowned private eye Steve Rambam will enlighten and frighten attendees with the latest updates on the personal information that is out there about each and every one of us. Find out which databases contain the most invasive information and who has access to them, as well as what you can do to protect your privacy. There will also be a discussion on truth and accountability on the net as well as live demonstrations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The DeCSS Story At our last conference, we were preparing to go on trial for daring to have the code to DeCSS on our web site. Quite a lot has happened since then. The public perception of entities like the MPAA and the RIAA has gone down the toilet as their true motives became apparent. We were the first in what will be a long line of courtroom battles to defend freedom of speech, fair use, and open source technology. While we lost the case and the subsequent appeal, we still somehow feel victorious. Find out why. Hosted by Emmanuel Goldstein, Robin Gross, and Ed Hernstadt -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digital Demonstrations: Criminal DDoS Attack or Cyber Sit-in? Being able to carry political opinions to the public by showing them on the street is a basic part of democratic rights. Nowadays, a steadily increasing part of our life takes place in cyberspace. Things which aren't happening in cyberspace will therefore get less and less public attention. How can protest be taken into the virtual realm? What strategies for "online demonstrations" have we seen so far? How about the ethical and legal dimensions? Who gets hurt? Host Maximillian Dornseif will present a new approach for conducting online demonstrations without adversely affecting other users on the net. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- DMCA Legal Update Since we last met, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has claimed more victims and been at the forefront of all kinds of legal action. We even had the first instance of a programmer being thrown into prison because of a program he wrote while in his native Russia! Hear the latest on the Dmitry Sklyarov case and others that the DMCA is responsible for as well as what is being done to put an end to it. Hosted by Mike Godwin, Eric Grimm, and Robin Gross -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Educating Lawmakers - Is It Possible? Trying to educate Congress about technology is approximately as useful as teaching a pig to type. It doesn't work and you get one peeved pig. But there are sometimes ways to make a difference in law and policy circles without becoming a wholly owned tool of the Demopublican Party. A discussion with journalist Declan McCullagh and cryptologist Matt Blaze. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everything you ever wanted to know about spying and did not know who to ask.... This is pure balls-out fun. Former spy Robert Steele will answer questions about any aspect of intelligence or counterintelligence, to include covert action in Central America, ECHELON, how and why we completely missed the warnings on bin Laden and 9/11, etc. This can be considered an extension of the H2K session, which lasted for hours. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Face Scanning Systems at Airports: Ready for Prime Time? A talk about the technical problems of face scanning systems being used at airports to pick out terrorists. Will these systems work like the promoters are claiming they will? Or will they fail to catch terrorists and instead turn our airports into round-up zones for petty criminals? Hosted by Richard M. Smith -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Freedom Downtime" A presentation of the 2600 documentary on the Free Kevin movement followed by a Q&A session with some of the key people involved in the making of the film. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fun With 802.11b Would you be surprised if you could turn on your laptop anywhere in the city and find yourself on someone else's network? How about if you were able to connect to the Internet? Or see someone's private data go flying by? It's all possible and it happens all the time - all over the country. This panel will cover 802.11 wireless ethernet networking basics, as well as detecting and monitoring wireless networks with active and passive methods. Community free networks, custom antennas, and methods of securing wireless networks will also be covered. Hosted by dragorn -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fucking Up the Internet at ICANN: Global Control Through the Domain Name System and How to Escape Did you know that the entire Internet domain structure is controlled by a mysterious group called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)? Andy Mueller-Maguhn, longtime member and spokesman of Germany's Chaos Computer Club and currently elected from European users to be on the board of ICANN, will explain the latest developments at ICANN and how the mixture of intellectual property and governmental interests affects the freedom of the Internet. Paul Garrin, founder of name.space and FREE.THE.MEDIA!, will talk about his initiatives to establish rights to access to the legacy ROOT.ZONE, from the historical antitrust action against Network Solutions in 1997 through the US Department of Commerce's IFWP process (the predecessor to ICANN), and Name.Space's $50,000.00 TLD application to ICANN in 2000 (ICANN kept the money and took three TLD's previously published by Name.Space). The question is raised: Is there hope for seeking fair access to the legacy ROOT.ZONE through due process or is it time to treat ICANN as "damage" and route around it? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Fun with Pirate Radio and Shortwave Too few people take the time to appreciate shortwave radio. Even fewer have the opportunity to appreciate pirate radio. Here's your chance to learn more about these fascinating subjects. Allan Weiner will talk about his days operating Radio New York International, a famous pirate station from the 80's that served the New York area before it was raided by federal authorities in international waters. (We have no idea how the feds got away with that.) Today Weiner operates shortwave station WBCQ - along with chief engineer Timtron - which serves nearly the entire western hemisphere from studios in Maine. Craig Harkins joins the panel to talk of his experiences operating Anteater Radio during much of the 90's from an 18-wheeler truck. He received international acclaim from listeners while consistently evading American and Canadian radio police. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- GNU Radio: Free Software Radio Collides with Hollywood's Lawyers The GNU Radio project is building a platform for experimenting with software radios - systems where the actual waveforms received and transmitted are defined by software, not special purpose hardware. One of their projects is building an all-software ATSC (HDTV) receiver. An all-software free ATSC receiver would allow among other things the construction of the mother of all "personal video recorders." Think Tivo or Replay on steroids. The folks from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group (BPDG) have other ideas. They'd like to lock up the cleartext signal and make sure that only members of their club would be allowed to build receivers, modulators, and storage devices for digital TV. A discussion of where this is all likely to head. Panel participants include GNU Radio technical folks Eric Blossom and Matt Ettus as well as representatives from the EFF. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hacking for Community Radio The technical and political struggle to take back the airwaves for the community. A panel discussion about the attempt to build linux based free software that can stream broadcast quality audio over the Internet from a studio to a transmitter site. In addition, there will be discussion on attempts to use wireless ethernet to shoot broadcast quality audio across town with high gain antennas and 2.4 gigahertz amplifiers. Hosted by Pete Tridish from the Prometheus Radio Project, Josh Marcus, Dave Arney, and Roland Aguilar from the Philadelphia Independent Media Center, and K. Clair from the Genderchangers. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hacking Nanotech Nanofabrication technology is an up and coming field that will revolutionize the way humans live on a day to day basis. Host Jim "Cips" tells what the future projections about nanofabrication are - things like robots so small you would need an electron microscope to see them. There will also be an examination of some amazing achievements that have been accomplished already as well as an analysis of the possible ethical problems that may arise with nanofabrication in the future. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hacking National Intelligence: Possibilities for a Public Intelligence Revolution Robert David Steele, author of two books on intelligence reform and sponsor of the Council on Intelligence, will provide a briefing on the state of the world, 21st Century tradeoffs that are NOT being made by our elected leaders, and how citizens can take back the power by practicing the new craft of intelligence to monitor and instruct their elected officials on key national security decisions. Among other major aspects, this would translate into a freezing of the Pentagon budget at $250 billion a year and redirection of $150 billion a year toward global education, public health, water and energy conservation, and "soft power" options including diplomacy and information peacekeeping, a term Steele devised in the early 1990's. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hacking the Invisible World Everything you could possibly want to know about the workings of scanners, frequency counters, intercepting/spoofing RF A/V feeds, STL's, pagers, infrared signs, night vision, electronic surveillance, etc. Hosted by Craig Harkins, Bernie S., and Barry "The Key" Wels -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hardware Q&A Explore a different form of hacking and interface directly with fellow electronics enthusiasts. Javaman and friends will try to answer any questions related to hardware and electronics including but not limited to hardware tokens, radio/wireless technologies, embedded systems, smart cards, and secure hardware design. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to Start an IMC in Your Town At H2K, Jello Biafra urged attendees to become the media. Since then, many people have done just that. One of the most powerful tools in fighting the corporate media's stranglehold on information in this country has been the Indymedia network. Learn what's involved with becoming a part of Indymedia, the various hurdles and roadblocks you can expect to face, and how you can make a difference. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Human Autonomous Zones: The Real Role of Hackers How the role of hackers in society has changed. They used to be a necessary counterbalance to corporate and government power. Now, it's more like hackers are the only ones who understand the technology. They have become a balance to the power of technology itself. A discussion by renowned author Doug Rushkoff. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "I Am Against Intellectual Property" In the words of host Nelson Denoon: "Quit fucking apologizing for filesharing. Intellectual property is evil, filesharing is freedom fighting, and the sooner Jack Valenti is bumming quarters for a living, the better. The question is not how to protect artists, it is how to muster enough force to protect the right to hack." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Ins and Outs of Webcasting While the airwaves have been almost completely taken over by corporate interests, there is a whole world of broadcasting on the Internet just waiting for creative minds. Find out what it takes to get an Internet station going and what kinds of creative programming are possible. Also, learn what the recently mandated RIAA licensing fees will mean to the future of this broadcasting medium. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keynote: Aaron McGruder Just about everyone has at one time or another read the daily comic strip "The Boondocks." Not everyone has appreciated it. In fact, it's generated a share of controversy among the mainstream for its "alternative" views. In addition, McGruder has devoted space to hacker issues, most notably the DeCSS case - which was presented accurately for probably the first time in most of the papers his strip appears in. McGruder is one of those rare individuals with access to the mainstream who actually "gets" the technical issues. Needless to say, he has been targeted relentlessly by censors for daring to speak his mind. Sound familiar? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Keynote: Siva Vaidhyanathan "Life in a Distributed Age" Distributed information systems of all kinds are challenging cultural and political assumptions. The moral of the story is that whether we like it or not, it's time to take anarchy seriously. We have spent the past 200 years thinking centralization of power and information was the greatest challenge to republican forms of government and corporatized commerce. But now, it should be clear, decentralization and encryption have emerged as the most important dynamics of power. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lockpicking Barry "The Key" Wels returns from The Netherlands to provide details of some high security lock weaknesses and to demonstrate some state of the art techniques of exploiting them. He will tell the story of a company that had the famous line "Nobody can pick this lock" on their website. Of course, this was the ultimate motivation for the sport-lockpickers. This panel is where you can find out if a particular lock can be picked or not. Spare locks are always welcome, as TOOOL (The Open Organization of Lockpickers) is short of good locks. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- LPFM Basics Learn exactly how to navigate the LPFM licensing process. Pete Tridish of the Prometheus Radio Project and John Ramsey of Ramsey Electronics will present background about the fight for community radio and explain the absurd technical limitations placed on low-power community FM radio stations by powerful corporate interests. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Magic Lantern and Other Evil Things A talk by Rudy Rucker Jr. on the BadTrans worm and the FBI's Magic Lantern software. Both of these pieces of software are very similar and install keystroke logging software on clients' machines. Rucker has collected a couple of gigabytes of the BadTrans data and will explain how he parsed it and created a web-based tool for people to browse the database. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Making Money on the Internet While Still Saying "Fuck" Pud of fuckedcompany.com will speak about his experiences setting up and maintaining a popular Web site for corporate rumors. How does he handle confidentiality of rumor-mongers, avoid lawsuits, provide custom software to drive the site, and make money from it? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Negativland - Past, Present, Future If there is any one group who personifies the concept of "fair use," that group would have to be Negativland. The Bay Area based band has, over the years, drawn the ire of everyone from rock band U2 to American Top 40 host Casey Kasim to angry parents to confused legislators. Lead singer Mark Hosler hosts this presentation which will focus on media literacy as well as the activism, pranks, and hoaxes that Negativland has engaged in over the years. A number of rare Negativland films will also be shown. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The New FBI and How It Can Hurt You On May 29, the Federal Bureau of Investigation dramatically changed its focus. Now, instead of investigating crimes, its mission is to prevent them, meaning they have virtual carte blanche to infiltrate any law abiding organization or gathering to make sure all is right. And, even better, their third priority of dangerous crimes to stop (next to terrorism and espionage) is "cybercrime." We all know what a wide net that can be. Hear the dangers firsthand from the people who follow this kind of thing. Hosted by Mike Levine, Declan McCullagh, Robert Steele -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual The OSSTMM came about as a need for an open, free security testing methodology in response to the numerous security testing companies who claimed to have a secret, internal, and corporate confidential methodology for testing. It was this methodology that they used to differentiate themselves from other testing companies. The problem was that often it didn't exist and the tests turned out to be no more than commercial scanners set loose on a list of systems. The development of the OSSTMM began as a series of logical steps to make a good test and grew into the need to make the most thorough test. This presentation will show the origin of the OSSTMM and the logic behind it, as well as results of reverse-engineering the reports of corporate tests, commercial tools, and commercial presentations. Hosted by Pete Herzog -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Password Probability Matrix A winnowing method for brute-force password cracking using lossy compression. Cryptologist Jon Erickson will present the specifics for a newly developed password cracking method and perform a demonstration of it. The method is a hybrid between using computational power and storage space for an exhaustive brute-force attack utilizing a compressed matrix of probabilistic values. He will demonstrate the ability to crack any 4 character password with a fixed salt in under 8 seconds (assuming 10,000 cracks per second), using only a 141 meg file. A normal exhaustive brute-force on the same system would take over 2 hours, and flat text storage of the plaintext/hash pairs would normally use over a gigabyte of storage. This translates to 99.9% keyspace reduction and 89% storage compression. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Patriot Act Members of the New York City People's Law Collective will be discussing the dangers of the Patriot Act and providing information on warrants, hacktivism, what is legal and what is not, and ways that hackers, activists, and normal citizens can protect themselves from The Man. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Protection for the Masses Host Rop Gonggrijp gives updates on two projects designed to help people protect their privacy from prying eyes. One is a localhost mail proxy for PGP that is really nice and could "save the world" as the PGP plugins stop working (soon...). The other one is Secure Notebook, a project to create a notebook which runs Windows, yet is secure against theft. Source for all projects will be open for review. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RetroComputing This year's retrocomputing panel will focus on hardware hacking and cloning such systems as the Apple ][ and C64. Also included will be a discussion on homebrew microcomputers and kits from the 70's as well as antique cellphone hacking. Witness firsthand genuine pieces of history. Attendees are encouraged to bring their really old (working) computers for the "retrocomputer neighborhood" in the network room. Hosted by Mr. Ohm, Sam Nitzberg, Nightstalker, and Bernie S. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Secure Telephony: Where ARE the Secure Phones? Panel participants will take a look at the history of secure phones, what's worked and what hasn't, who the players are, and what needs to happen to make truly secure telephony a ubiquitous reality. Panel members include former Starium CTO Eric Blossom and Rop Gonggrijp of NAH6. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Shape of the Internet: Influence and Consequence Network researchers have discovered strong power law relationships in the Internet. These can be interpreted as a direct fingerprint of the fractal structure present on the net. Work has only recently begun on analyzing the implications of such a structure on attack tolerance, government snooping, and the like. In this talk, a review of these topics will be presented, along with a proposed network structure that can avoid such issues. Hosted by Javaman -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Social Engineering A tradition started at the first HOPE conference in 1994, the social engineering panel remains one of our most popular each and every time. It would be wrong for us to tell you what we have planned because then our victims might have a fighting chance of escaping. Suffice to say, we will find someone somewhere who will tell us something they really shouldn't have because they believed we were somebody we weren't. This panel is always open to participants so if you feel you're worthy, just let us know during the conference and you might find yourself up on stage trying to be clever on the phone. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Standing Up To Authority "How is it you folks have gotten away with not getting shut down by the powers-that-be?" is the question most frequently asked of Cryptome (www.cryptome.org) since its inception in 1996. Post-9/11 H2K2 is an opportune time and place to reconsider implications of this question with Cryptome founders John Young and Deborah Natsios, New York City-based architects (of bricks and mortar), who will discuss their means and methods of sustaining activism in the face of opposition, with reference to ongoing cases. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steganography: Wild Rumors and Practical Applications Is Osama bin Laden sending coded messages in the pictures of goods for sale on EBay? Is that MP3 file carrying a secret note that tracks the listeners? Steganography is the art and science of hiding information in digital data and it stretches the boundaries of information theory and philosophy. An artful programmer can hide secret messages in such a way that a 1 is not always a 1 and a 0 is not always a 0. This talk will explore some of the popular schemes for inserting messages and discuss how they're used by hackers, poets, corporate bean counters, and programmers on a deadline. Hosted by Peter Wayner -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Strategic Thought in Virtual Deterrence and Real Offense: The Computer's Role Computers are pivotal components in modern society: daily life, banking, and military. What must be considered and what risks do we all face when they are used in conflict? These concerns are societal in nature and apply to both "minor" and "major" groups, governments, and militaries. There will be opportunity for ample questions from the audience. The intention is to share the overall attendee perspective. The goal is to be thought provoking, not scare-mongering. Hosted by Wanja Naef and Sam Nitzberg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Teaching Hacker Ethics with a Common Curriculum An introduction of a new proposed curriculum guideline for teaching information ethics to students in elementary school, high school, and college. This curriculum is being proposed through the North Carolina chapter of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. The idea is to foster creative, exploratory, effective, and intelligent use of information tools (aka, the hacker ethic), rather than powerless end-user mentality. There are many reasons to desire a common suggested curriculum for different educational levels. We might argue that most major advances in computing were brought about by hackers. We could point out that it's necessary to encourage creative and exploratory behavior for the next generation of computer users to do brilliant things. For today's hackers, the goal is simply to shape tomorrow's hackers so that they will use their abilities to help create a better society. Hosted by Greg Newby -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tracking Criminals on the Internet How certain criminal investigations have been investigated in the past couple of years with perps being tracked by IP addresses, email, and web surfing. Such cases include the murder of Daniel Pearl, the search for Bin Laden, the Melissa virus release, the Clayton Lee Waagner escape, the anthrax attacks, and the Wakefield mass murders. Hosted by Richard M. Smith -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Ultimate Co-location Site Sealand was founded as a sovereign principality in 1967 in international waters, six miles off the eastern shores of Britain. The island fortress is conveniently situated from 65 to 100 miles from the coasts of France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. HavenCo has been providing services since May 2000 and is fully operational, offering the world's most secure managed servers in the world's only true free market environment - the Principality of Sealand. Avi Freedman of HavenCo will talk about the challenges and potential of this unique working environment and what it could mean to the future of the net. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Vanished Art of Human Intelligence or Why the World Trade Center Would Still Be Standing if Defense Against Terrorism Had Been Contracted Out to the Private Sector A collection of videos and analysis by WBAI talk show host and 25 year federal agent Mike Levine. Learn about the dangers of the use of human intelligence in the hands of amateurs and imagine what is about to happen under the new anti-terrorism laws. 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