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Phuk Magazine Issue 01 Phile 04 of 10
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PHUK MAGAZINE - Phile 4 of 10
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DEFCON ][ , Las Vegas, July 1994 - Otaku
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Since I have been nagged to write a space filling article for this
inaugural issue of PHUK, here are some person observations about the
DEFCON ][ conference held this summer.
Unlike Winn Schwartau, I am not a writer/lecturer on security issues,
but those of you who want another view of what went on at DEFCON ][
should read his account "Cyber-Christ meets Lady Luck" in PHRACK 46 ,
file 19.
In January 1994, before I had decided to go to DEFCON ][, I saw an
article in alt.2600 from a journalist wanting to meet "hacker/phreaker
types". I suggested that he go to DEFCON ][ in July and perhaps report
as follows (looking back, I must have been psychic, because some
things happened just as predicted !):
>Judging by the press coverage of last year's HEU event in the Netherlands,
>someone needs to educate the media/government, perhaps you can help.
>Here are some suggestions 8-)
>Unlike the HEU event, you should be able to write your story from the
>comfort of an air conditioned bar. Editors too old fashioned to
>believe the authenticity of email might be convinced by a creatively
>constructed expenses claim for bar room interviews of "sources".
>With Las Vegas as a background, you can pique your editors interest with
>quotes from Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"
>Go on to draw attention to the similarity of the physical look and atmosphere
>of Las Vegas at night and most of the literary visions of Cyberspace from the
>likes of William Gibson ("Neuromancer") and Neal Stephenson ("Snow Crash").
>Since you are in the desert, you could even drag in references to Wild Palms.
>(Culture & technology)
Winn Schwartau mentions Hunter S.Thompson in his article, so perhaps I had
the right idea !
>If you can tag along with the right people, you will no doubt visit all
>the sights of Vegas. See if you can persuade someone with a cell phone scanner
>to show you how to track the call girls being despatched to the
>various hotels.
>(Sex and technology)
The call girl/cell phone stuff was done: a couple of potential
customers were warned off by "the voice of God" breaking in on their
cell phone conversation and warning that it was a police setup. At
least one drug deal was also scotched in a similar manner.
>This could lead you nicely on to the other Vegas cliches of pondering the
>enormous amount of money flowing about the place and all the computer
>and telecomms technology used to provide the infrastructure to the casinos.
>Recount the stories of the computer assisted Blackjack hackers.
>(Money & technology)
>No doubt there should be various law enforcment types lurking about.
>Ask them about the Steve Jackson affair and about Phiber Optik.
>(Legal issues & technology)
I heard that an approach had been made to one of the delegates, asking
if he could "hack into the the Sands Casino Baccarat high-rollers
list". Since this game accounts for more than half the profits of a
casino, the few mega-rich gamblers who choose to lose at baccarat are
feted with free rooms, food, drink, women etc. A suitablly impressive
looking data file was constructed, and Gail Thackery's name was put on
it. She was a guest speaker, and also the District Attorney who was
involved in the farcical Operation Sundevil affair involving Steve
Jackson games.
>Ask people about PGP. Compare and contrast the arguments about freedom,
>privacy and strong public key encryption from the Cypherpunks, to the right
>to bear arms arguments of the NRA. Ask what Bill Clinton and Al Gore are up
>to with the Clipper chip proposal. Will access to the new Digital Superhighway
>if it gets built be as free as this Internet ?
>(Government & technology)
Phillip Zimmermman, author of PGP was one of the speakers
>A few photos of people with reversed baseball caps posing with laptops and
>cell phones in front of the various casinos (at night for best effect)
>and you might be able to sell the story to the mainstream media.
There were plenty of reversed baseball caps, but only one person had
gone so far as to get a computer chip implanted next to his tatoos
(seriously !)
The conference was held in the Sahara Hotel, which is not the newest,
biggest or most luxurious, but was a whole lot more comfortable than
either the Dutch campsite which hosted HEU or the New York flea pit
that apparently hosted HOPE.
I fell in with the organiser of the conference, Dark Tangent, a law
student from Seattle, as well as TDK (one of the elite few from the
UK), MTV, Tagger and a man with no nickname.
"Lets's go and see the MGM" :this is the biggest casino/resort hotel
in Vegas, 5000+ rooms, the usual huge casino, a seven story lion
guarding the entrance and a theme park similar to Disneyland. Since we
were here to enjoy ourselves, we headed off in a couple of cars.
We toured past the Las Vegas Hilton, which used to have the largest
illuminated neon sign in the world (worth $2 million, over 100 feet
high). Unfortunately it had collapsed into a heap of twisted girders
and broken glass the day before I arrived.
The MGM is huge, even by Vegas standards, but of course every punter
is treated like a VIP, so there is obligatory valet parking at the
entrance. We got out of the two cars we had cruised up in, whereupon,
the man with no nickname got managed to lock the keys to one of the
cars inside it, in the middle of the valet parking lane.
The car valets then proceeded to give us a demonstartion of car
repossession techniques using flexible metal strips known as "slim
jims" which they inserted between the rubber seal and the glass of the
car window. They were trying from both sides, with little apparent
success, but those musical Vegas words "there will be a big tip for
you" were uttered and both driver's and passenger's doors sprang open
as if by magic ! We decided to christen the man with no nickname
"Repo Man" in honour of his part in our entertainment and education
but upon reflection "Repo-Spazz" seemed to stick.
The evening was a cool 90 degrees Fahrenheit, so we headed indoors to
the air-conditioned casino, which was impressive enough in scale, but
held little interest for us as we headed off to the amusement park on
the other side.
We watched an amusing slapstick/stunt performance involving costumed
pirates and much leaping off walls and diving into water. Piracy seems
to be a theme in Vegas. There is hotel called Treasure Island, in
front of which, just to draw the crowds, are two full sized pirate
ships on an artificial lake, which periodically stage a performance
involving crews of actors, sword fights etc. One of the ships then
"sails" towards the other and fires cannon etc.
The rides were ok, and we did not have to queue as this was late in
the day. We were nearly ejected from one ride, a flight simulator type
"ride to the centre of the earth" , when one of our number could not
resist the temptation to spit into one of the pools of water lit by a
red light which was supposed to represent a pool of molten lava
(there are security cameras everywhere in Vegas !).
We had more fun on a proper roller coaster type ride, which happened
mostly indoors, and so although short, was quite fast and aggressive
in its twists and turns. MTV lost his precious baseball cap, which he
had to go back for later and Dark Tangent was taken by the video photo
of a girl in one of the cars following us. At the point where the
cameras flashed, she was holding on to herself in such a fashion that
Dark Tangent bribed the photo clerk for a copy. It may appear on the
DEFCON ][ WWW and ftp site at dfw.com under Aleph1' s pages.
Nearly midnight, and Vegas keeps on going (they pump extra oxygen into
the casino air conditioning in the wee hours of the morning to keep
the staff and punters awake, and also make sure that there are no
visible clocks or windows to give you time clues), but, hey, there is a
conference due to start tomorrow !
We went back to Dark Tangent's room and I helped stuff an extra sheet
into hundreds of copies of the conference program. I got my
psychodelic conference badge (#1 no less!) and various stories were
recounted. The infamous Oregon State vehicle licence/voters roll
CD-ROM was displayed and discussed. This contains the names ,
addresses , telphone numbers and social security numbers of thousands
of citizens in the state of Oregon , legally obtained by paying the
appropriate fee to the proper authorities, in exactly the same way as
the credit bureaux and marketing database companies do. Somehow the
act of translating it from 9 inch tape format to CD-ROM format and
making it available to the public caused quite a stir in Oregon. As
the warning on the label says "Do not use this to create false
identities, apply for credit cards etc-"
Who says phone phreaks are a menace to society ? One of the female
conference delegates was having difficulties with the hotel phone
equipment. Within 5 minutes the jack was out of the wall and various
soldering irons were in use and her phone was repaired without any
need to call hotel maintainance at 1am in the morning. Perhaps this
was when it was discovered that the trunking which held the phone
lines to your room, also had the wires for most of the rest of the
same floor 8-)
The hotel had given us a conference room the size of a couple of
tennis courts for free providing that Dark Tangent could supply the
requisite number of hotel bookings. Normally this works well for the
hotel, e.g. there was also a convention of Railway Signalmen booked in
at the same time, who spent much more on beer and at the tables than
the DEFCON crowd did.
Dark Tangent organised the registration process, but of course there
were people who had pre-registered, of whom no record could be found
("computer problem") and there was much waiting around for things to
happen. The DEFCON tshirts were popular, and Dark Tangent learned
that black outsells white which outsells green.
Once the various speakers got going, things were fine, but generally,
unlike HEU, there was hardly any technology on show for people to play
with. The most desparate email addicts did get a 'Net connection' on
Zak's portable Sun clone via a Macintosh modem and several hours of
social engineering of the hotel operator.
Much of Dark Tangent's promised equipment failed to turn up in time.
Since Zak is from the UK, and TDK sorted out some of the PA and
overhead projector problems, and I lent my portable for some German
Videophone type stuff, the very small UK contingent aquitted itself
better than the native Americans in terms of conference
hardware/software.
The point of such a conference is not to have an online
hacking/phreaking session, or to play with the Internet, but to meet
interesting people.
I had interesting chats with Philip Zimmerman, the author of Pretty
Good Privacy public key encrpyption (he is working on a PGP for
voice/audio which will do what the infamous Clipper chip is meant to
do, without government interference). I got to chat with Padgett
Petersen, an anti-virus expert and also with Winn Schwartau and other
more anonymous people, including the winner of the "I am a Fed" tshirt
in the "Spot the Fed " contest.
Winn's book "Information Warfare" has some details of High Energy
Radio Frequency weapons, which although military in origin, can
apparently be home brewed to produce a 16 megawatt directed pulse
which can frazzle a computer at a distance. He raised the possability
of a HERF gun demo perhaps at the next DEFCON, out in the desert,
providing that the attendees do not have pacemakers etc. The
implications of this sort of technology are as significant for us in
the UK as they are in the USA. What would have happened if the IRA had
used a HERF gun or a similar EMP/T bomb instead of explosives in the
City of London ?
Dr Mark Ludwig gave his wry International Virus Writing Competion
award to one of the proponents of the media hype surrounding the fact
of the announcement of a Virus Writing Conference. His Virus CD-ROM
containing hundreds of live computer viruses and source code seemed to
sell out quickly. He now looks at computer viruses in terms of
evoloution and has done experiments with Genetic Algorithm programming
to allow virus code to mutate and recombine in order to evade the
attentions of anti-virus scanning software. Since he has also
published protected mode boot sector infectors, all the snobs who
think that just because they are running Linux, Windows NT, or OS/2
that they are safe from mere MSDOS viruses, had better think again.
Annaliza (an honourary member of the UK contingent, since she attends
the 2600 meetings in London when she is over here) gave a talk about
her video "Unauthorised Access" and Christian from the Chaos Computer
Club in Germany gave an account of things over there. He also showed
the cool video phone technology he is working on using my portable.
TDK ran through what was happening in the UK (you should know all
about that already)
One of the most interesting ideas I picked up from DEFCON was from
Stephen Dunifer of Berkley Free Radio. He is involved in Free Radio
(i.e. "pirate" broadcasting ) using CAD/CAM designed, stable frequency
micro-power transmitters. As these do not drift as much as commercial
stations do, there tend to be fewer complaints, and the stations can
stay on air longer before the authorities have to be seen to act to
shut them down. He and his collegues have been involved in providing
such cheap transmitters to the Chiapas indians during and after their
recent revolt against the Mexican government. the plans for these,
including PCB graphics and component lists are available by ftp from
crl.com, directory ftp/users/ro/frbspd
What caught my attention was his description of a recent rave in the
Bay area, where due to restrictions on amplified music, the DJs
broadcast on FM via a micro-power transmitter and got the audience to
bring along their boom-boxes. The concept of an audience of ravers all
wearing Sony Walkmans seemed quite bizzare and Californian, but it
made me think of what might be possible/necessary after the UK
Criminal Justice Bill gets passed.
There were a couple of interesting talks by private detective /
telephone bugging types. I watched a couple of them demonstrate how to
pick a lock (somehow one of the hotel's noticeboards with those
movable letters behind a locked glass fronted door got re-arranged).
With the right tools and a bit of practice it seems quite easy. There
is a shop opposite the hotel which sells bugging / anti bugging
equipment, which these professionals were naturally contemptuous of.
It seems to be a major pastime in the USA, and of course DEFCON aided
things by publishing the frequencies used by the local police and
hotel security staff. Can Princess Diana be seriously contemplating
exile in the USA ? Somehow I think that the "Squidgy" tapes incident
would be childs' play in the USA.
There was an interesting talk on anonymous remailers, and the
possabilities of extending the concept of remailer chaining and
encryption. The old military/ diplomatic signals security trick of
continuously sending a stream of messages between re-mailers, even
when they are have no "real" messages to send was discussed, since it
was claimed that anon.penet.fi had been the target of successful
traffic analysis.
Whilst the convention was in progress, the big event was of course the
opening of Planet Hollywood, the film star owned burger restaurant in
Caesar's Palace shopping mall. I did mosey along, and the crowds were
even bigger than when the one in London opened, all hoping for a
glance of Arnie or Bruce. I did not see them, but I did see at least 6
"Hollywood Blonde" women, tall and beautiful, each with a wizened
monkey at least twice their age and about half their height as an
escort, heading for the opening festivities.
I resisted the temptation to go go haring off into the desert in
search of something interesting in Area 54 and Groom Lake
("Dreamland") where the US stealth planes and it is rumoured captured
UFOs lurk.
By the end of the conference, the DEFCON tshirts were no longer
causing many double takes "are DEFCON a rock band ?" and I had
"nearly" won a jackpot from a slot machine . It was time to head off
to San Francisco and then home.
All in all I enjoyed DEFCON ][ and look forward to the similar event
which TDK may be organising in London this April. Watch this space,
and send offers of help, money, etc. care of the editors of PHUK
magazine.
- Otaku
+++
EOF
