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Speaker Bios
We have a great variety of speakers at this year's convention. These are
their biographies. If you're interested in having a printed copy, we
also have a PDF version available.
Acidus has lectured for the past two years at the PhreakNic and Interz0ne conferences in the Southeast, and has been published numerous times in 2600. Topics have ranged from circumventing lockdown software, building a magstripe authenticating Coke machine, hacking the PC heart of ATMs, XM Radio infrastructure concerns, and various hardware projects. He is currently doing grant research on embedded systems at a well known engineering university.
Catalin Acio was raised in Galati, Romania, the fifth biggest city of the country (population 400,000). In 1995 he graduated magna cum laude from CFR High School with a major in computer programming. He attended Dunarea de Jos University, one of Romania's top educational institutions, and studied electromechanical and computer science until he left the country in 1999. He has worked as a database programmer and network admin for two small Romanian software development companies.
Atom Smasher is a self-taught hacker with over 20 years of experience. He is the author of several open source applications, and regularly writes and teaches classes about computer security for activists. Atom earns an honest living designing custom solutions for web-based applications. His unique approach enables him to accomplish tasks often deemed "impossible" by others.
b9punk is a designer and pretentious artist at large (http://www.jennifergergen.com) who managed to get mixed up in a few bad crowds, including pirate radio, the coordination of the Hacker Halfway House, and "fascism for the fashion." She is a veteran of KBFR pirate radio. During her tenure, in addition to hosting a show, she was instrumental in growing the stations' participants and music archive. Most notably, she survived a visit from the FCC. She loves the FCC. She is also largely responsible for the "propaganda" look and theme of this grand event. She's not sorry, and she'll do it again.
Mike Bananno is a member of The Yes Men (http://www.theyesmen.org), a group that has impersonated World Trade Organization officials at international trade conferences the world over. At times they have given keynote addresses as the WTO to international trade attorneys, textile representatives, accountants, university students, and the entire audience of CNBC Marketwrap just to name a few.
barbwire has been working in the IT industry in Australia for the past ten years. With roles ranging from infrastructure design and support to application development, he has a broad scope of knowledge. He has been specializing in Internet technologies over the last five years with a strong focus in knowledge management and security.
David "bernz" Bernick has been active in Boston's 2600 scene for many years. Currently Bernz is the Senior Engineer at Legal Computer Solutions, a company that provides a secure document repository center for large (1,000,000 pieces of evidence) legal cases (criminal and civil). Part of the work also includes sometimes cracking documents, passwords, and zip files for which there are no keys or decrypted copies, hence the software you'll see presented at the conference. Long ago in his youth, bernz wrote an article for 2600 Magazine on the topic of social engineering. Bernz grew up near the sea and currently lives beneath it.
Bernie S. has been hacking computers, phones, radios, and the authorities for over 25 years - sometimes pushing the envelope too far. In 1995 he was imprisoned for one and a half years by the Secret Service for possessing hardware and software they said had the potential for abuse. Later the U.S. government admitted "there were no victims in the offense" and that they were more concerned about his exposing their covert activities. Bernie continues to investigate and report on communications technologies and government activities.
Jello Biafra has now been to three of the five HOPE conferences. He is the former lead singer for the Dead Kennedys, a spoken word activist who campaigns for free speech and against corporate dictatorships, and a media hacker who knows exactly how the industry works and how it can be manipulated Despite his admitted lack of technical prowess, Jello manages to see the big picture and how it relates to the hacker culture.
Big-E, a Miami native, has been in the scene since late 1998, having discovered the wide world of hacking and phreaking at age 11. Today he is still in the scene, frequenting the Phone Losers of America forums and reading all the others. His main interests include reclaiming the word "hacker" from mainstream media and social engineering. You can hear Big-E on Hax0r Radio.
Binary is a network engineer from Boston with over 12 years experience with data communication. He is currently dividing his time between laboring for a large telecommunications equipment manufacturer which develops circuit-to-packet convergence technologies and being a divergent trance DJ on weekends. He is a founding member of a Boston-based workspace of technophiles.
Matt Blaze has been involved in all sorts of stuff, from evaluating Carnivore and Key Escrow for the government to writing the crypto file system to writing dozens of papers on crypto. He was the codesigner of swIPe, a predecessor of the now standard IPSEC protocol for protecting Internet traffic. In 1994, he discovered a serious flaw in the U.S. government's "Clipper" encryption system, which had been proposed as a mechanism for the public to encrypt their data in a way that would still allow law enforcement to have access to it.
Stephen Cass was born and raised in Dublin, but now hails from Brooklyn. He cut his programming teeth on a TI 99-4/A and a totally pimped out BBC Model B+, but is currently smitten by his G4 PowerBook. He covers computers and space (among other things) for IEEE Spectrum, the flagship publication of the nice people who brought you 802.11, 1394, 1003, 754, and 802.3. (A very small prize will be awarded to the first HOPE attendee to correctly tell him what those standards actually refer to.)
Mike Castleman regularly appears on the Off The Hook radio show and participates in other 2600 related program activities. Beyond that, he is very secretive (despite not having any secrets worth keeping), and you'll have to ask him if you want to know more.
Richard Cheshire is known to the hacker and phone phreak community as "The Cheshire Catalyst." He was the last editor of the legendary TAP Newsletter which was published from 1971 to 1984. At that time he hacked his way into the world Telex network but had rested on his laurels since Telex was replaced by fax and e-mail. He came out of retirement, however, to get his own area code in 1998 (http://CheshireCatalyst.Com/321/).
Jim "Cipz" received an Associate's Degree in nanofabrication from PSU in 2000 (first graduating class in the United States for that degree). Since then he has earned various degrees and continued learning electronics, optoelectronics, computer networking, and computer security. He picked up skills in microradio, hacking, lockpicking, and other activities along the way.
Count Zero has been a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow since 1992. In 1993 he cofounded the innovative hacker group "The L0pht" in Boston, which has served as a model for successful hacker collaborative spaces. Today he is working to further develop collaborative real world hacker communities and has been working at "Hasty Pastry," a new hacker space in Cambridge.
In the mid 1990s, Dharma Dailey learned about an LPFM pirate radio station that broadcast out of a housing project in Illinois. As a teen mom who grew up in low income housing projects, she immediately recognized the potential of LPFM and wondered why something that was so good for community building was illegal for those who could use it most. She's been researching LPFM ever since.
Christopher Davis graduated from Stony Brook University in 2000 with a degree in music performance. Davis is currently working in the field of computers. He has also written political and electronic music theory in his spare time. In 1999 he won an award for Outstanding Project in Music at the Celebration of Undergraduate Achievement at Stony Brook and now goes by the performance artist name of xpo8odx.
Serving as @stake's Lead Software Architect, DilDog came to @stake as a founder from L0pht Heavy Industries, a renowned security think-tank. While at @stake and L0pht, he developed the best selling Windows password auditing tool LC3, and the AntiSniff product. He is also responsible for numerous security advisories in many applications, operating systems, and environments. He is a recognized authority in the areas of Windows product vulnerability assessment, application optimization, and program analysis. His current responsibilities include design and development of the SmartRisk Analyzer (SRA).
An original member of the now famous Homebrew Computer Club where he designed his own computers and helped create the "blue box" tone generator, John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) has over 30 years of programming and security expertise. One of the first security pioneers, John developed his interest while learning how to penetrate phone networks. He became the 13th employee of Apple Computers, designing telephone interface boards and developing both hardware and software for the Apple II. A cofounder of ShopIP, John now performs security audits and is an architect of the CrunchBox firewall/IPS system. He also does database, Python, and secure GUI programming for SpamCruncher and CrunchBox.
Dragorn is the author of Kismet, a wireless sniffer and IDS tool. He's a fan of improving security in general, and wireless security particularly.
Jon Erickson has been involved in computer security for over a decade. He has spoken at computer security conferences around the world and is the author of the book Hacking: The Art of Exploitation. He has contributed to various magazines and currently works as a vulnerability researcher for an enterprise vulnerability management company in northern California.
Rob T. Firefly is an amateur hacker, prankster, and comedian from Long Island. Formerly known as Rufus T. Firefly, he has been active in the scene for over a decade. Rob went on to become a staff member and occasional editor of the PLA's spinoff zine, United Phone Losers. Rob's personal site can be found at http://rtf.phonelosers.org.
Before becoming a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow, Freqout was a founding member of "New Hack City." NHC had three incarnations, the first in Boston, and two in San Francisco. Freqout built his first hacker space just after going to the first HOPE conference and is now a member of the "Hasty Pastry."
Emmanuel Goldstein is the editor and cofounder of 2600, as well as the chief organizer of the HOPE conferences. He also is a radio host for WBAI's Off The Hook and WUSB's Off The Wall and directed/produced the documentary on the Kevin Mitnick story entitled Freedom Downtime. Emmanuel to this day enjoys playing with phones, operators, and customer service representatives worldwide. His passions include urban exploration, mind exploration, and space exploration.
Rop Gonggrijp was editor and publisher of the Dutch hacker magazine Hack-Tic from 1989 to 1993. He also cofounded XS4ALL (one of the first European ISPs) and cofounded ITSX (a computer security consultancy). Along with partner Barry Wels, Rop initiated work on the CryptoPhone in 2001.
Gonzo is a veteran of the Underground and is the editor-in-chief of the e-zine Reprimand. It can be found at http://reprimandmag.com.
Virgil Griffith spends most of his time as a student in brain and computer sciences at the University of Alabama. He is an avid fan of AI and biologically inspired techniques in computer security (Internet immune system withstanding). He was one of the plaintiffs in the Blackboard college ID card system lawsuit last year. After researching the system, Blackboard filed a restraining order preventing the details from being revealed at a conference in Atlanta.
Eric Grimm and his law firm CyberBrief, PLC, specialize in the resolution of technology related legal disputes. Back in 2001 he represented 2600 when Ford decided to sue for redirecting fuckgeneralmotors.com to their site. His victory in that case probably saved others from the horrors of a lawsuit, at least for now.
Born in Germany, Frederic Guimont moved to Canada at an early age where he developed an interest in comic books and computer programming. After having fully explored his parents' Commodore 64c, he focused on developing his drawing skills and went on to study art in college near Quebec City. He has worked on a comic book series entitled Candyappleblack and is currently adapting George Orwell's 1984 as an independent comic book project (http://www.1984comic.com).
Gweeds is a hacker activist and wants to be your friend. Contributor to the rise and fall of New Hack City 415, he currently spends his time cooking for poor people and writing software for anarchist foaf networks.
Seth Hardy is involved in both research and implementation in the field of cryptology, both as part of a university research group and independently. Although he enjoys programming, his primary interest is the mathematics side of cryptography. For this reason, he's been involved in a number of projects which involve translating mathematical concepts and algorithms into working implementations in code. Seth has presented his work at a number of conferences, usually with his good friend Jose.
John Henry is a founding member of the Institute for Applied Autonomy (http://www.appliedautonomy.com) and was a young lad at the first HOPE conference. The IAA was founded in 1998 as a technological research and development organization dedicated to individual and collective self determination. IAA projects to date have included robots that write graffiti in high profile locations, a cute robot that distributes subversive literature, a vehicle that prints six foot tall letters on the ground while driving, and a website which generates maps that avoid surveillance cameras in cities.
Sharon Hom is Executive Director of Human Rights In China and Professor of Law Emerita at the City University of New York School of Law. She has over 14 years of experience in USA-China legal exchanges and training programs. Sharon was a Fulbright Scholar in the People's Republic of China and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. She also participated as an independent expert in the WSIS International Symposium on the Information Society and Human Dignity. As a delegate of the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, Sharon also presented at several parallel NGO events at the WSIS, and participated in the EU-China Human Rights Seminar in Venice, Italy. She served on the USA-China Committee on Legal Education Exchange with China, and sits on the boards of Human Rights Watch/Asia, and on the Committees on Asian Affairs and International Human Rights of the Bar Association of the City of New York.
IrishMASMS is an old school hardware and network guy. He has degrees in Management of Information Systems, computer programming, networking technology, microcomputer programming, and aviation/aerospace management. Certainly not a bit-head by any means, but he will write some code if forced. After exploring the wonders of the early years with TRS-80s, Mac Plus, and even some Unisys mainframes and a clustered DEC VAX, he is currently frustrated as a miracle worker for a government library with no IT budget, and looking for a better opportunity in the information/network security realm. During off time and when not working any consultant jobs on the side, he helps with the local Linux Users' Group and other local IT organizations. He also enjoys a few LAN parties, his NES, and his cat. No one can confirm or deny that he is a founding member of the 241_Crew, a locally based group of misfits who explore technology and the local music and epicurean scene.
Judas Iscariot hails from Delaware and is a moderator on the Phone Losers of America forums as well as a prestigious Telecom-munist member. Judas started back in the BBS days reading up on text files and he still holds them close to his heart. After being persecuted as a teenager for being a "black-hat" hacker he decided to research and learn telephony. His first encounter with the PLA was back in the mid 1990s when he started red boxing after reading a PLA text file. His current interests are Voice over IP (VoIP) technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Telecom-munists.
Javaman is a Philadelphian who attempts balance living in academia, the security community, and the real world. He can usually be found in his office trying to stay on top of current research, the local diner drinking too much coffee, or the Philadelphia Walnut Factory wasting time on IRC. He also likes long walks on the beach and engaging in romantic candlelight dinners with various monomaniacal despots extracted from the course of history, brought to life by neurotransmitter imbalances.
Brad Johnson is a science and technology writer as well as an activist. He coauthored, as Adam Brate, Making the Cisco Connection, a business history of the datacom giant, and Technomanifestos, a history of the information revolution from Alan Turing and J.C.R. Licklider to Abbie Hoffman and Richard Stallman. In recent months he has volunteered for the Howard Dean and John Kerry campaigns in addition to the Democratic National Convention.
Jason Kroll arrived at the present through a C64-Amiga-Mac-Linux trajectory. He even spent his dotcom year as the technical editor of Linux Journal. The crash sent him back to complete his B.A. in economics at the University of Washington and he is now finishing his M.S. in computer science at Tufts. His research interests are mostly machine learning and game theory, but he finds it hard to focus on research with the world in its current state.
Lazlow produces a daily radio program called Technofile which is heard every day on 80 radio stations nationwide as well as on XM Satellite Radio. This 60 second news feature frequently covers hacker issues and items overlooked by the mainstream press. Lazlow is a contributing writer to Playboy and has been published in several magazines. He is most famous for cowriting and producing audio for Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto Vice City. His production company and recording studios are in Long Beach, New York.
John Leita aka Archivist graduated with a bachelors in engineering from SUNY Stony Brook. He has done some work for Brookhaven National Labs as well as other engineering companies. He has been an avid urban explorer for many years and is currently editor and webmaster for Long Island Oddities, a magazine and website devoted to odd finds, urban exploring, and forgotten history. Much like many urban explorers, he also shares a strong love of computers and hacking.
Laura Cummings-Leita aka ShadowCat graduated with a bachelors in English from SUNY Stony Brook. Since then she has held various jobs from computer instructor for the blind to English teacher. She is now coeditor and webmaster of Long Island Oddities, a magazine and website dedicated to the strange and unusual on Long Island. She has been an avid urban explorer for many years.
Leo aka I-baLL originally hails from Moscow. He is a phreaker whose introduction to the scene occurred a decade ago when he began frequenting various bulletin boards in the New York City area. He is a jack-of-all-trades who knows something about everything but not enough to get a job. Currently Leo edits, writes, and updates (sporadically) the Reprimand e-zine (http://www.reprimandmag.com), hangs out at Cal's forums (http://cal.phonelosers.org), and is generally seen hanging around the New York City 2600 meeting with his two liter bottle of soda.
Peter Leung joined CryptoMail.org in 2000 as the webmaster and the project manager. His main task in the organization is to direct, manage, and organize the software release process. Peter collaborates with other members to document the e-mail system and informs everyone about the organization's activities. Peter holds a BS in mechanical engineering, a BS in mathematics, and an MBA from SFSU.
D. Kall Loper is coauthor of Digital Crime Digital Terrorism and Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of North Texas. He has thought far too much about hacker culture and would be happy to hear your thoughts on it. Before turning a hacking hobby into a life's work, he worked for the Michigan Department of Corrections teaching inmates how to write lawsuits and administrating employment and life skills training for female prisoners. He currently teaches and trains in the areas of digital forensics and computer crime investigation because they are fun and easy.
Mike Lynn has been involved in wireless security research from the early days of 802.11. His accomplishments in the field include authoring the first publicly available 802.11 intrusion detection system, writing device drivers for almost all types of 802.11 cards, and developing the Airjack toolkit for 802.11 security research. Mike is the primary inventor for a variety of patents in the area of wireless security and cocreator of the first commercial 802.11 intrusion detection system. Mike is currently a member of Internet Security Systems' X-Force Security research and development team.
Todd MacDermid is a serial open source security software author and speaker, and a member of Syn Ack Labs (http://www.synacklabs.net). Current research areas include covert channels, interface design, and other privacy protecting topics. Past work includes kernel module rootkit detection and source routing.
Mangala is a native New Yorker who has been working with information technologies since 1984 and is presently working part time as a C++ software developer and a Unix system administrator. The other part of his time is spent as a geophysics student at a university in Germany. He is a member of the German Chaos Computer Club and also part of other hacker groups such as 't-Klaphek, based in Utrecht. In addition, he's helped to organize the Orange County (California) 2600 meetings.
Josh Marcus is a community activist and programmer living in Philadelphia. He has been a developer on the open source projects that underlie the Philadelphia Independent Media Center, including the Slashcode-based open publishing system and the studio-transmitter link software that powers WPEB 88.1 FM. He is also a contributor to various open source projects, and the Director of Technology of Datarealm Internet Services, a Philadelphia based webhosting company.
Nathan Martin is a new media artist, collective experimenter, technologist, designer, writer, and programmer currently living in Pittsburgh as a Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's Studio for Creative Inquiry. Nathan is a founding member of the media arts collective Carbon Defense League (CDL) and the hactivist.com network. Nathan is currently working on the CDL project MapHub and is writing a book called Parasites, Splinters, and Thieves.
Dan Matthews has been in the semiconductor sales and manufacturing industry for over 20 years. He is an engineer and an engineering manager over field engineers for the past 14 years, having been a director of engineering for a major microcontroller (embedded CPU) manufacturer for the past eight years. He spent much of his time traveling the world training in seminars about embedded design using microcontrollers and has been exposed to thousands of embedded systems.
Nick Mathewson is one of the main designers of the Type III anonymous remailer protocol, the one that has been selected to replace the type II protocol currently used by the Mixmaster software. He is the lead developer on the Mixminion remailer software and a core developer on the Tor anonymizing proxy.
During the first HOPE conference in 1994, Kevin Mitnick was a fugitive. In 1997 during Beyond HOPE, he was in prison. Although released in 2000, he was denied permission to come to H2K to see the prerelease of Freedom Downtime. And in 2002, Kevin missed H2K2 because he was still on supervised release, which tends to keep one away from hacker events. But now it's 2004 and there are no legal barriers to keep Kevin away from The Fifth HOPE, where he'll be delivering the Friday keynote address. Since his legal troubles ended (not exactly helped by the mass media's portrayal of him as the "world's most dangerous hacker"), Kevin has been extremely productive, working as a radio talk show host, testifying in front of Congress, working on two books, and doing security consulting. While he's in great demand as a speaker worldwide, this is the conference he's waited the longest for.
Monk is a corporate burnout. He started Boulder Free Radio in his basement in 2000 and has been on the air pretty much 24/7 (with occasional breaks due to FCC busts) since then. Monk has developed a group of 40 plus DJs rocking the Boulder Airwaves with great live music, local on-air band jams, and some of the best music west of the Mississippi. The group's tech team has developed an Internet studio transmitter link system that's successfully thwarted the FCC for over two years.
Dan Morgan published the leading satellite TV hacking newsletter, Satellite Watch News. He also produced the DB1 radio show and a series of related videotapes. In 1997 DirecTV filed a cease and desist order to stop publication of the newsletter. When Dan refused on First Amendment grounds, DirecTV (owned by General Motors) sued him for a million dollars. Unable to afford effective counsel, Dan lost the case and nearly everything he owned. Dan Morgan now operates a small network consulting firm in Michigan.
James Mulvenon is a political scientist at the RAND Corporation in Washington, DC and Deputy Director of RAND's Center for Asia-Pacific Policy. A specialist on the Chinese military, his current research focuses on Chinese C4ISR, defense research/development/acquisition organizations and policy, strategic weapons doctrines (computer network attack and nuclear warfare), patriotic hackers, and the military and civilian implications of the information revolution in China. James' most recent book, entitled Soldiers of Fortune, examines the Chinese military's multi-billion dollar business empire. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Murd0c is an Allentown, Pennsylvania based phone phreak with a real interest in Direct Access Test Units (DATUs), vintage telecom, and now VoIP protocol. His real love is that of comedy. Murd0c has been following and interacting with the Phone Losers of America since 1998. His prank calls and other shenanigans are often heard on the PLA's website.
Viki Navratilova has spent seven years in the security community and in the meantime has gotten a C.S. degree, lots of useless knowledge, and some free t-shirts. After working for a year or two at a Leading National University, she has learned the fine art of not caring about security. Oh, and she's published a bunch of stuff on Linux and security in book, magazine, newspaper, and online formats.
Dr. Greg Newby is an information scientist with an interest in hacker ethics and education for hackers. He has taught college courses ranging from Unix security to systems administration, and has also published papers and led workshops. He has helped organize the last few HOPE conferences and still believes in the promise of information technology for a free and empowered society.
Annalee Newitz is a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She conducts research, talks to the media, propagandizes, and writes policy recommendations and white papers. Although she is a digital rights generalist, her special areas of interest are expanding the public domain, free speech, and network regulation. Previously, she was Culture Editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian and was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship in 2002. She writes a syndicated column called "Techsploitation" (http://www.techsploitation.com) and is published regularly in national magazines and newspapers. In her off hours, she edits an indie magazine called Other. She has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.
Sam Nitzberg is a computer security analyst who has presented and published on subjects relating to information security, information warfare, and technology and society. His papers and presentations have been conducted in both national and international venues, and he has attended or participated in each of the HOPE conferences since their inception. His website is http://www.iamsam.com.
Tyler Nordgren is a media artist who uses the application of the malfunction (or glitch) in technology as a theatrical tool and performance tactic. His work forms a discourse that is constitutive of an obsession with the intersection of human and machine and an ironic, but critical, analysis of the mass media and corporate control. One of his projects, Re-Code.com gained the attention of the mainstream media in such places as USA Today, CNN, and BBC World.
Nothingface is formally educated in electrical and computer engineering and informally (i.e., not) educated in automotive maintenance and repair. He has been known to earn his keep doing software design, hardware design, and security consulting. Nothingface is currently employed designing hardware and software for two-way radio communication networks.
As a security engineer and researcher, Laurent Oudot has been a security expert for the past seven years, working for the French equivalent of the U.S. Department of Energy. He is also an instructor in French high schools on computer security. He cofounded the French Honeynet Project which is part of the Honeynet Alliance. He has also written many security articles in places like securityfocus.com. He has been a presenter at numerous international computer security and academic conferences as well. His research focuses on defensive technologies like honeypots, intrusion prevention, intrusion detection, firewalls, sandboxes, mandatory access control, etc. In his spare time, he is a member of a weird security team called Rstack (http://www.rstack.org/oudot/).
Phar has been working in the electronic security and telecom fields for most of his life. He is a resident of the Hacker Halfway House and enjoys long walks on the beach and pina coladas.
Weld Pond was one of the L0pht members who testified before the U.S. Senate under his pseudonym (and he wasn't even in the witness protection program). He was on the original L0phtCrack team and also wrote Netcat for Windows. Now he specializes in software security and automated vulnerability discovery tools.
Porkchop has been involved with 2600 since 1997 helping with the HOPE conferences, the Off The Hook radio show and the documentary Freedom Downtime. He earns his bread at a liberal arts college in New York toying with grid computing infrastructure and writing software for collaboration between research scientists in the field of bioinformatics.
Steven Rambam is a licensed private investigator and the owner and CEO of Pallorium, Inc., an investigative agency with offices and affiliates throughout the world. During the past 23 years, he has conducted and coordinated investigations in more than 50 countries and in nearly every U.S. state and Canadian province. For the past 13 years, he has also been the owner and director of PallTech, an online service which provides database and investigative support services to investigative agencies, special investigative units (SIUs), and law enforcement. PallTech offers interactive and non-interactive access to nearly 600 data sources, including five major proprietary databases such as Skiptrace America and BusinessFinder America. The Skiptrace America database, which currently contains more than 5.3 billion unique records, is believed to be the largest individual reference database in the United States, excluding those databases maintained by the three U.S. credit bureaus. More than a decade ago Rambam forced the tightening of airport security in Texas airports by publicly exposing those airports' security flaws. In 1997 he exposed the presence in Canada of 162 Nazi war criminals and also conducted investigations which resulted in the prosecution and conviction of war criminals on murder charges. He is also the inspiration for "Rambam the detective" in Kinky Friedman's series of murder mysteries.
Rev. Sergey, having emigrated from Russia, is a member of the Barbelith Underground, founding member of the Weird Science Club, and is an ordained minister with the Universal Light Church.
Oxblood Ruffin is the Founder and Executive Director of Hacktivismo, an international coalition of hackers and human rights activists that develops circumvention technologies and consults with NGOs. He is also a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow t-file and security group. Oxblood is a coauthor of the Hacktivismo Enhanced Source Software License Agreement (HESSLA). The license enables both Hacktivismo and its end users to go to court if a third party (read Government) attempts to use the software in a malicious manner or to introduce harmful changes into the software in such a way that it violates the licensee's human rights. Oxblood participated in the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva and recently delivered a paper on hacktivism at the Yale Law School Conference on Cybercrime. He is based in Munich where he works as a strategist for a cryptography firm.
Hannah Sassaman is an organizer with the Prometheus Radio Project. She has spearheaded national campaigns against the Clear Channel coalition and partnered with local, national, and international individuals and organizations to bring people out in force to the FCC hearings on "localism and diversity" in Texas and South Dakota. She also develops a variety of web tools to bring people's voices to power structures in the U.S. government.
Len Sassaman is a communication security consultant specializing in Internet privacy and anonymity technologies. Len has been a strong defender of personal rights through technology. As a volunteer, he has lent his expertise to human rights organizations, victim support groups, and civil liberties organizations. He is a frequent contributor to online discussions of electronic privacy issues and has contributed to the development of free software privacy utilities. Len is an anonymous remailer operator and is currently project manager for Mixmaster, the most advanced remailer software available. Previously, he was a software engineer for PGP Security, the provider of the world's best known personal cryptography software.
Bruce Schneier is both a founder and the chief technical officer
of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. which provides managed security
monitoring services to organizations worldwide. Bruce is the author of
six books, including Secrets & Lies: Digital Security in a Networked
World and Applied Cryptography, now in its second edition and
the seminal work in its field which has sold over 150,000 copies and
been translated into five languages. He writes the free e-mail
newsletter Crypto-Gram, which has over 70,000 readers. Bruce has
presented papers at many international conferences and he is a frequent
writer, contributing editor, and lecturer on the topics of cryptography,
computer security, and privacy. He also designed the popular Blowfish
encryption algorithm. His Twofish was a finalist for the new federal
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Bruce served on the board of
directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research and
is an Advisory Board member for the Electronic Privacy Information
Center. He holds an MS degree in computer science from American
University and a BS degree in physics from the University of Rochester.
Jason Scott is curator of textfiles.com, a website that collects files and other artifacts from the "BBS Era" of the late 1970s to mid 1990s. Over the last six years, his mission has expanded into many different historical projects, including a massive BBS documentary currently being edited for release later in 2004. He is, at this point, beyond saving.
Wendy Seltzer is a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and free speech issues. As a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Wendy founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats. Prior to joining EFF, Wendy taught Internet Law as an adjunct professor at St. John's University School of Law and practiced intellectual property and technology litigation with Kramer, Levin, Naftalis, and Frankel in New York. Wendy speaks frequently on copyright, trademark, open source, and the public interest online. She has an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally takes a break from legal code to program (Perl).
ShapeShifter is most well known as one of three alleged "ringleaders" of the 2000 RNC protests in Philadelphia, where he was charged with "Possession of an Instrument of Crime" (a cell phone) and held on half a million dollars bail. The charges against him were dismissed when prosecutors failed to prove that cell phones are dangerous and that he conspired to break the law. In addition to being a menace to society, ShapeShifter is currently studying electrical engineering and has recently spawned "the BUG," a.k.a. Zoe Olivia. ShapeShifter is also the layout artist for 2600.
Michael Sims has been an editor at Slashdot.org since 1999 and is a student of technology, privacy, and free software. His interests include censorship issues, digital rights management, and electronic communications. He lives in New York City.
Sl1pm0de began his interest in technology with a pinball machine that his family had since his birth. The fascination of the lights, sounds, and the game gave him an understanding of some of the wonderful things technology could create. Like most typical old school geeks, sl1pm0de graduated to a Commodore 64 and later to an Apple IIE. Since then he has dabbled in many aspects of technology including electronics, ham radio, graphics, multimedia, systems administration, networking, and computer security. He has been involved in the 2600 meetings in Arizona since 1995 and has been an avid reader of the current state of technology and the politics surrounding the technical world. He has also done a hacker radio show called In The Now hosted at http://slipnet.org since 2001.
StankDawg is a senior programmer/analyst who has worked for Fortune 500 companies and large universities. He has been published in 2600 Magazine on several occasions, as well as other hacking zines and numerous websites. He is founder of "The Digital DawgPound" (the DDP) which is a group of white-hat/gray-hat hackers who produce their own magazine, radio show, TV show, and other projects at http://www.binrev.com/.
Robert Steele is the author of On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World and The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political. He is the founder and CEO of OSS.Net, a global intelligence partnership and network that excels at both teaching and performing legal ethical intelligence collection, processing, and analysis. In the course of a 25 year national security career, Robert has served as a Marine Corps infantry officer and service level plans officer; fulfilled clandestine, covert action, and technical collection duties; been responsible for programming funds for overhead reconnaissance capabilities; contributed to strategic signals intelligence operations; managed an offensive counterintelligence program; initiated an advanced information technology project; and been the senior civilian responsible for founding a new national intelligence production facility. He was one of the first clandestine officers assigned the terrorist target on a full time basis in the 1980s and the first person, also in the 1980s, to devise advanced information technology applications relevant to clandestine operations.
Joshua Teitelbaum developed the CryptoMail e-mail system and founded CryptoMail.org in 2000. He is the primary developer and technical lead of the e-mail system. Besides information security, Joshua holds an active interest in building scalable trading systems for broker/dealers and portfolio managers.
The Prophet aka TProphet has been a 2600 writer since the early 1990s, primarily on telecommunications and related subjects. When he is not traveling abroad, he lives in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
Marc Tobias is an investigative attorney from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He has a bachelor's degree with a major in law enforcement and a Juris Doctor from Creighton Law School in Omaha. He was admitted to the Nebraska and South Dakota bars as well as federal courts. He has specialized in technical fraud investigations for 30 years, is a polygraph examiner, has written five police textbooks (including the treatise on locks and safes entitled Locks, Safes, and Security). Marc has worked around the world in investigations involving security issues and the bypass of high security locks.
Pete Tridish is one of the founders of pirate station Radio Mutiny, 91.3 FM in Philadelphia, and its legal successor RadioVolta.org. He is also a founder of the Prometheus Radio Project, an organization that organizes for low power radio and provides free assistance to LPFM applicants. He actively participated in the FCC rulemaking and the grassroots organizing campaign that led up to the adoption of LPFM. He tours the country regularly to help start community radio stations and fight for democratization of media, speaking at colleges, coffee shops, living rooms, garages, and even the CATO Institute.
Nart Villeneuve is Director of Technical Research at the Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. He is currently documenting Internet content filtering and surveillance practices worldwide with the OpenNet Initiative (ONI). Nart designed the software and methods used by the ONI to enumerate Internet filtering and is currently investigating Internet filtering in more than 15 countries worldwide. In addition, he has been documenting and evaluating existing circumvention technologies as well as developing them. His research interests include hacktivism, cyberterrorism, and Internet security. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto's Peace and Conflict Studies program.
Kathy Wang broke into programming with BASIC on the Apple IIgs. She has a bachelor's and master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan, where she specialized in VLSI chip design and semiconductor device physics and fabrication. She worked at Digital as part of the Next Generation Alpha Chip Design Team, and got to spend an entire wonderful summer blowing up Alpha chips. She has published a paper on some of the work she did there at an IEEE conference. Kathy has instructed courses ranging from "Semiconductor Device Physics" to "Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing." Since Digital got broken up by Compaq and Intel, Kathy has focused on the software side of things. She has worked at Counterpane Internet Security and currently works as a Senior Infosec engineer at the MITRE Corporation. Kathy is also a founder of Syn Ack Labs, a computer security research group focused on cryptography, steganography, and low-level packet hijinks.
Peter Wayner is the author of 13 books including Translucent Databases, an exploration of how databases can do useful work while protecting privacy, and Policing Online Games, a book exploring how P2P networks can enforce rules and prevent cheating. He's also a frequent contributor to publications like The New York Times, Wired, and BYTE.
Barry "The Key" Wels has many passions. Lockpicking, safecracking, voice encryption, radio monitoring, and bug sweeping (TSCM) are a few of them. He spends most of his time on the Cryptophone project (http://www.cryptophone.de/) and on Toool, the Dutch lockpick sportgroup he is chairman of (http://www.toool.nl/).
Steve Wozniak has a long history in Silicon Valley and is respected worldwide as a visionary and philanthropist. He built the first Apple prototype himself and later started Apple Computers. He was also a major force behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Steve personifies what a true hacker is and his becoming incredibly successful has done nothing to negate that. (And yes, he did build Blue Boxes and take a keen interest in phone phreaking back in the 1970s after reading that infamous article in Esquire.) Steve currently runs Wheels of Zeus (wOz) and is on the board of directors of Jacent and Danger, Inc.
Bill Xia is president of Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., which helps Chinese web users get around the firewalls the authorities have erected to control access to information on the web. Since he left China in the 1990s, he has devoted his time to researching Internet censorship in China and developing information technology that can penetrate such efforts in totalitarian regimes. Xia is also involved with http://www.freenet-china.org and is the founder of DynaWeb.
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