Last HOPE conference (Hackers on Planet Earth) Part 5

Last HOPE conference (Hackers on Planet Earth) in NYC 2008

Part 5 (Saturday)

I arrived an hour before my talk because I wanted to see John Threat’s Hackateer premier which was right before my presentation. Meeting one of the MOD guys was like meeting a character out of an action/adventure movie—I’d read so much about them, but instead of their capers being fictional, this was the real thing. I was also hoping to meet Mark Abene, aka Phiber Optik, but it was nice to see him onscreen. I remember reading about these guys when I was messing around with my brother’s BBS in the 1980s and wondering if they would ever log onto ours (they didn’t—as far as I know). But I studied these guys’ legal cases in law school in Ron Weiker’s awesome cyber law class at Franklin Pierce Law Center so it was interesting to actually meet them.

My presentation started at 8 PM with me fumbling to find a power cord to plug in my computer because the year-old battery has only 10 min. of life in it. It was a good thing that I couldn’t see past the second row because of the blinding lights because seeing the filled room would have probably been shocking. And coming after John Threat was a difficult act to follow. Somehow, I pulled 6 months of academic research together into a 50 minute presentation titled, “RFID and REAL ID Act: Privacy and Legal Implications.”

Afterwards, I was happily received off stage by a large group of people with questions. Interestingly enough, I met a guy from Latvia and one from Portland, Maine. Oddly enough, I also met a scary guy who insisted that the government put an RFID chip in his head while he was sleeping, wanted me to help him remove it, and then wanted me to help chip some racial/religious group “for God” so they could be tracked. Great…just my luck to have a really scary guy ruin my post-presentation high. I reported him to conference security. Their response: “We’re not going to let some psycho guy scare off one of the few female presenters we have, by God!” They offered to toss him out if I saw him again which, thankfully, I didn’t.