More Tales From the Crypt…Analyst

good morning it's 11 o'clock I'm gonna probably stray away from the mic but I just wanted to use it to get your attention thank you for coming this morning thanks to besides Rochester for letting me be here my name is Jeff man I am currently an information security consultant advisor but I do a few other things can you guys hear me if I walk away just raise your hand in the back I started about 37 years raise your hand if you were born 1986 or later I've been doing this as long as you've been alive and that makes me feel old just real quickly I work for a company called online business useless knowledge that I

tell stories and this is what this talk is about mostly I have to start first by apologizing and this is actually going to be a two-fold apology this is a story about the past the story about how I got started in hacking the penetration testing

is it was really hard to find screenshots and try to give you visuals of what we did back then and then I heard Jason Scott talk this morning how many people were at the keynote and I suspect that I should probably redo this presentation after I spend too many hours getting distracted by all the games that are out for me I'm going to intersperse throughout this talk some dates and it's mostly to keep you guys hopping active there's also a little bit of trivia for example does anybody know the significance of this stage shout it out anybody wanna take a guess oh don't raise your hand you gotta shout it out no it's the day Skynet became

self-aware all right so the majority of this talk is going to be about the latter part of my time at NSA I gave a talk a few years ago called Tales from the Crypt analyst which I have stickers for now if anybody's into stickers see me afterwards but just you know to recap if you haven't heard my other talk which is Tales from the Crypt this is more Tales from the Crypt I started out as a cryptologist at NSA I was working at the time was called the InfoSec side of the house and I'd say at the time had offense and defense and I've started out on the defensive side protecting communications of our of our

customers which was probably primarily the military I did that for a while I spent some time over operations actually as as I said my first talk Tales from the Crypt is mostly about what I did the first couple years at NSA I have a lot to talk about so I'm just going to very briefly recap that just as a wets your appetite you can find this talk out on YouTube probably my favorite version is besides DC I want to say 2016 but you know Tales from the Crypt Geoff man you should find it I dealt with one-time pads primarily paint on manual crypto systems back when I started at NSA in 1986 and very early on in my career I

had a customer come to me and say you know we're working with these people that are in the field and we communicate with one-time pads now the guys in the field they've quite literally would have a one-time pad that was printed very small like maybe on an inch and a half pad of paper that they could hide in the heel of their shoe make it easily concealable but the guys that they were talking to back in controlled spaces and offices what were called handlers or caseworkers they have larger versions of the one-time pad they also had this thing sitting on their desks and was kind of new it was a personal computer an IBM PC and they came to us

and said is there any way we could do this encryption decryption thing on the computer because it's just sitting there and it takes its hours and hours to to do this process and I thought well yeah why not I mean it's just a simple algorithm we do it in our head that ought to be able to be computer program so what ended up happening is I launched into what was an engineering organization at NSA that built boxes and I say build boxes radios little things where you know plaintext messages went in and ciphering code came out and it was an organization that built hardware and firmware and the idea of doing something in software had never been

done before at the time so there was rules to follow I was in an engineering organization that built hardware and I took all the hardware specs and rewrote them to try to make them as closely as possible applicable to software I had to put it through an approval process so at a young age in my mid-20s I'm standing in front of a bunch of middle aged men in suits that were all engineers and physicists really smart guys and I was pitching something that had never been done before and I actually got them to agree to let let us do it they also said don't ever do this again but to my knowledge this was the

first software base crypto system that NSA ever produced it was simply taking a one-time pad putting it on a floppy disk that could be put into a PC so that the encryption decryption could happen in an automated fashion this was like a word processing program and I drew it I read through a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon you know pixel at a time it's kind of like using paint anyway that's the first thing I did this was a ward for doing this that was the first part of my career and I realized at the time that was probably one of the coolest things I've ever done in my career which a lot of but that was kind

of cool my second career is I became an intern and I went over to the operations side of the house I was there during the first skirmish in the desert which was called Desert shield/desert storm which is back in the early 90s so I got the I got the special award for that everybody that participated in it got this certificate and I think I got a cash award too but I I had started off site of Fort Meade and I had to drive down and work it for at me has anybody ever been to Fort Meade if you ever get a chance to go to Maryland go to Fort Meade if for no other reason they have a

Cryptologic Museum there now a lot of the stuff that I used to work in the museum the mainframe that I used to work on is in the museum it's a Cray computer again it makes me feel old to think that the stuff that I worked on was in a museum but I earned certification as a crypt analyst that's this is pretty much the only certification I hold I don't know if it's really valid 26 years later but I am NOT a cissp I'm an old salt that has been doing this for a long time anyway that's the past that's the first you know fast-forward the first couple of years of my NSA career my last tour

is an intern I went back to the Opera to the InfoSec side of the house the defensive side of the house and I went to work for an organization called the field evaluation this organization came about because some smart person at NSA figured out the way that we do what we do in the operations side in terms of intercepting communications and messages from our adversaries and breaking some of these codes and ciphers and encrypted systems is very often we discover that the people that are using these systems don't use them properly they and see if this sounds familiar to any of you guys we commonly break systems because systems are not changed from their default settings these systems are

sometimes broken because things like a one-time pad which is key that it's supposed to be used one time and then destroy it which if you do it that way and you aren't able to steal that gate is cryptographically insolvable there's a perfect security for communication but some people some of our adversaries in the interest of saving paper I guess neighbors the green movement even back then they might use a page a one-time pad key for a week or a month and send multiple messages as soon as you do that you make it vulnerable to compromised invulnerable from a cryptographic perspective to solve it default settings reusing key things like that and somebody decided well gee we produced

the the best crypto in the world where NSA we produced these little black boxes and these perfect systems how do we know that our people are using it in the field correctly so fielded systems evaluations came about and my project was

yeah it took it took the phone call an analog signal and it converted it to digits send it convert it back into an analog and the person would sound like Donald Duck when you listen to it but this was secure communication so I had to do an evaluation of that but then this happened another seminal date in the history of our civilization anybody give up sing called the NSA mosaic browser anybody would remember mosaic this is what it looked like it wasn't the first browser but it was the first commercially available free browser changed the world why we're sitting here today because the internet became publicly available this happened is basically what happened I was

certified at the Avenue notice it was in 1993 the mosaic browser came out in 1993 so this fielded systems evaluation had it had a branch within it that was focused on networking systems and so a bunch of us guys that were kind of curious about networks and computers and maybe we'd seen movies like this and we were kind of interested we got to work on starting to look into hacking and how do you break computers back then at the very beginning you know we weren't the first but this was going on in in the world and the book on the left was really our Bible because UNIX security was internet security internet security the book on the right a very popular

book in the time written by two guys named Cheswick and Belvin the story about how they they they caught people breaking into their systems and they wrote a book about about it but again in those days in the early days it was internet security there was a bunch of us that were interested in it so we started doing it the government is the government likes to do if you've ever worked for the government any branch any kind of bureaucracy like the government no I'm just pausing a minute at least they're not admitting to work for the government so in large organizations one of the things that happens very often as you reorganize yeah coconuts to make it

look like you're making progress and so senior management at NSA decided hey this internet security things becoming big we're the experts on communications so we need to do something so they reorganize so they pulled a bunch of disparate groups together and and form this organization called the systems and network attacks in it if you google that I think eventually the snack is we called it put together things similar to staves or configuration standards there's some recommended recommendations type documents on how to build things back then maybe in the mid-2000s Google it you might find something but basically the organization would sleep together but the idea was to become a center of excellence you know we're NSA we're the brightest

smartest whatever you want to thank mythical people in the world and we should be able to pull together and become experts and all this so we assembled a team as I said there was a several of us that were kind of interested in doing this and we got swept into this thing called the snack the guy that was running it at the time the deputy director he had this vision he's like all we need is a bunch of those you know smart cakra types get them together the world basically so this small group of us in trying to figure out how to do this thing and do it in such a way that we could you know not just do it for the

fun and not even do it for the profit but to do it as part of a mission and I say and especially the defensive side we took a road trip we went to San Antonio Texas we went to something that at the time was called the Air Force information warfare Center why Air Force does the Air Force at the time I don't know if it's still true today they basically owned the network they were responsible for the network for the government for the for the military anyway for the DoD so they were the IT of the military if you will and they set up them not only the first Network Operations Center they set up the first

Security Operations Center and that was all part of that week and we heard about it and we wanted to learn so we figured we'd go to the best we met a couple guys down there we called them the captains doesn't really matter who they are the guy on the left he actually died a year ago the guy on the right I actually putting together this top tracked him down and we used to we would get all the luminaries and big-name figures back in the day to come talk to us so we could learn those guys they very quickly got snatched up they formed a group they left the military the wheel grip anybody ever hear the wheel group it only lasted

for like maybe a year they were one of the first commercial internet security cybersecurity companies out there and they got acquired by Cisco and Cisco has been acquiring companies to this day security company sorry I didn't get the chance to see that so you can't see it's a San Antonio we're at Kelly Air Force Base they have an air museum so we got to see planes I was the u-2 spy plane which had only been recently Declassified so we got to see it it was kind of cool anybody know what that plane in Desert shield/desert storm kind of won the war for those are actually some of the people that I used to work with and I

put it very small so that they none of them look like that anymore the Alamo one of the best things about the San Antonio if you've ever been there as you go to the Riverwalk and you get introduced to the 46 ounce margarita we we we went out there and we each have one it was a one drink evening and quite literally some of the guys were lying on the floor I was driving a minivan and it was interesting even and we bought one of those glasses and we took it back because what we learned that athlete primarily was the organization over the physical structure where they called Finch Finch way of our office we learned

about the round table put everybody's desk in the corner and put a round table in the middle so everybody's doing their research but that they have a question if they want to collaborate we would call round table and everybody would spin their chairs come into the middle and we talk things out so we had one of those glasses that we called the orb we drank a lot of mountain dew I don't exist back then and we filled the orb with super balls the little mini ones and every once in a while just blow off steam we'd get into Super Bowl battles and throw them at each other and it was fun times like I said we needed our own

space so the office that we that we created again the culture so we nicknamed our space and we called it the pit we thought we were being cool it was actually a spin-off of the old TV show mash where the doctors in mash they lived in there their tent and they called their tent the swamp that's what the pit man exists this is an aerial shot of buildings that are just out just west of BWI Airport or what do they call these I forget Thurgood Marshall Airport the pit was actually in this building in that corner and the reason I bring this up is a couple years ago this book came out called dark territory anybody I've

ever heared this book read this book in this book in the fourth chapter which is entitled eligible receiver there is this paragraph the NSA had a similar group called the red team it was part of the information assurance Directorate formerly called the information security group it was information during its most sensitive drills the red team which was so anyway we're famous because we were the guys that were in an office we called it the pit somehow it exists it exists in folklore to the point where so I'm one of the original founding members of the pit but what were we doing we were trying to learn how to become pen testers we're red teams we didn't call

ourselves red teams at the time but we're like you know let's break into networks and let's break into computers so we can tell people how to fix it what a great idea we ran into a little bit of difficulty because again we worked for a large government bureaucracy we worked for an organization that was into hardware so we ran into political difficulties we ran into rules and when your hacker you don't want to follow rules the highlights we didn't have sands back then we didn't have any any any sources to go through so we had to come up with our methodologies you know interestingly enough the methodologies that we came up with there's kind of a

right way to go about doing this they more or less exist on we're today again we weren't necessarily the first in the world to be doing this but we were figuring it out as we went along working it in and say back in the day we called it recon we'd go out and sort of figure out what our target was and learn as much as we could about them these days we kind of call it those cents so the names have changed but the things that we do were sort of we figured out yeah this is the way you do it what we didn't have and this is what was interesting when I was putting

together this talk because I was trying to remember what were the tools that we had back then and I distinguished in the private sector so things that you guys take for granted today the tools that you're using all the time the things that you're learning about conferences like b-sides we didn't have all that imagine a world without Google does anybody remember a world without Google do you remember when you used to have a conversation with people you know like you're out there the restaurant we didn't have that back then so let me share a little bit about the tradecraft that we had back then I think this is interesting from an historical context and I also want sympathy from you guys

for how hard we had it back then because we had to hack you know ten miles every day uphill in the snow type of thing but I need to give them a disclaimer and that is in terms of a target system had to be classified at the level of the classification of the target system so if we were looking at a top secret network at the top top secret system anything that we did had to be level labeled top secret not doesn't matter what it was it had to be labeled top secret because of what we were targeting so my disclaimer is that I'm not telling you about what we used back then I'm telling you about what was available to

be with me okay we had sniffers back then I might know anybody still use network sniffers I mean it's all software now back then it was hardware it was on it was a machine that you'd plug in to old networks with cables that you've never heard of and protocols that you've never heard of and they were 30 or 40 50 pounds so they'd be on a cart and we'd have to wheel them to the computer room and things like that so yeah we had snippers we had a vulnerability scanning tool one of the first ones came out was called Satan Barry used Satan remember Satan a few people that are older I'm also interview the guys back in

December that wrote Satan meets a venema and Dan farmer I have a few family moments because most of the people that I look up to or literally no longer with us so they're hard to track down or they've moved on to other things if you get a chance to go out and watch this episode it was it was pretty cool to hear them talk and like I said was one of my few fanboy moments Oh another date anybody anybody ever hear a bug trap bug trap was a mailing list people that would write about bugs vulnerabilities that they found who was one of the early forms of vulnerability disclosure people would write about all sorts of different

things so one of our sources of we're looking at a target they're running such and such a system let's go look at bug track this is an example somebody writing about a vulnerability it would come in an email and digests eventually people you know like our friend this morning Jason figured out how to archive them to make them searchable but this was a very key resource for us back in the early days one of the other resources was something called computer emergency response teams if they saw stuff out in the wild they would write about it they would report on hacker activity or it looks like people are exploiting this or that vulnerability and they'd write about it

does anybody actually reading this small print while I'm looking at it and get what it is this is asserted vizor in the was issued on July 4th 1996 about a movie that came back out out back then Independence Day where they wrote a certain advisory about how the alien operating system was vulnerable to attack so we had a sense of humor even back then other examples of open source collection that we had back then we had epic use we had basically in the early days of the internet it was mostly colleges and universities and research agencies that have large mainframes with large databases and there was these rudimentary search tools that were connected to various combinations of

these databases now so Archie and I ever used Archie a few people good DNS information used to be pretty much out openly available if you didn't know how to configure your router and nobody did back then so you would get domain information out who is internet before Google there was Alta Vista anybody remember Alta Vista this was one of the first kickass search engines out there we used to swear by it mosaic was replaced by Netscape and he Netscape fans out there isn't this a fun stroll down memory lane and don't you understand now I hate Jason because I'm like he's probably got all this stuff in so much more cool graphic so I got to go back and redo

this whole talk Yahoo used to be Yahoo before it became Yahoo it used to be a decent search engine when it first came out one of the things that you did one of the features of Yahoo is you could click on a link it was like a random it would just take you someplace because in the early days people were just starting to put up websites about anything and and they wanted everybody to connect so you could just click on this sort of roulette let's play internet roulette and see where it takes you not suitable for work let me tell you the way we would acquire targets back in the day before there was forgotten about this

but we used to use something called stroke pop quiz inmate well first they may remember stroke anybody remember using spirit so this is a question for three or four people I realized this when I was putting this talk together why I knew this person's named it but the author of stroke is none other than Julian Assange and when I when I was because I was going and looking at what are the tools when did they first come out and I'm like oh yeah Julian Assange because when you used to launch it it was command-line it would pop up a little window or I guess it would scroll down it was this Astro version whatever written by Julian Assange I was like

that's why I did the guy's name anyway that's my my brain you know mental brain old-age moment

back in the day we didn't have Network masking everything was a registered IP address ipv4 so we would look at targets and see what kind of address space they own and there was places where you could look up Class A's B's and C's all shot down to the individual IP address all internet reachable so we would go out and look at the databases to find out find our targets and that's lookup most of what we did back then was the UNIX utility we have things from mapping networks because it was important to find out what was on the network another date any one little thing called crack came out 1991 invent / crack is not that kind of password cracker that's

right back in the day again this was mostly UNIX systems passwords were kept in a file called password in the directory

you used to be able to pretty much world readable you could steal it you could run crash and start guessing passwords of course passwords are not an issue anymore that we've solved that problem one of the big techniques for breaking into systems back then was something called set UID which is on a UNIX system when a program runs it's gonna run at the permission level of who owns the file which very often was route and one of the common techniques for breaking into UNIX systems it was to try to figure out a program that you could get it to crash or halt execution and it would dump you out into a shell of the ownership of what it was running under

which was very often the route don't want to bore you with the details common method of if you could just crash an application you were automatically in you would get the root shell so that's just an overview of some of the things that we were dealing with back back in the day I mentioned that we we had issues with bureaucracy we had issues with the sensitivity of what we were doing NSA what do you believe it or not takes takes the wall very seriously and NSA operated under this thing called the Charter and the Charter is still classified so I can't show it to you but what the Charter essentially says and this is all before 9/11 and and the

Patriot Act so just bear with me because the world has changed but the way we were operating at the time was NSA does not do what NSA does to u.s. citizens and we took that very seriously and because we were doing this thing ethical hacking breaking into the good guys that technically violated NSA's charter so initially we were told don't do that but then they said and the day is man and lawyers they're like well there's a way to do it but we need to figure out a way to do it and do it efficiently Oh another date anyone a lot of things happened in 1991 a previous speaker had his PGP key up there this is what PGP

came out pretty good privacy anybody use PGP GPG new PG variations of it another fanboy moment I got to meet Phil Zimmerman the guy who wrote PGP last of all and I had to tell him a story and if you can indulge me I'll tell you the story really quickly there was a time when NSA looked at PGP let me back up PGP initially was got Phil Zimmermann in trouble because crypto material back in the day was considered material which was a fancy word for munitions arm and stuff like that and so it couldn't be exported and of course PGP could be everywhere the internet was everywhere so he was getting in trouble for that at

NSA we were in the habit of producing all the crypto and all the crypto equipment for all our customers which was the military we had our customer come to us one day and say why are we spending millions of dollars on this clunky device that you guys are building when we could use this PGP thing and encrypt our email for free so an edict went out from senior management everybody stopped what they're doing everybody's got to work with trying to find an attack on PGP and there's a couple guys that put their heads together and came up with an attack on PGP and they were paraded around they were treated like rock stars they were

given all sorts of trades within the hallowed halls of NSA weird they got all sorts of cash awards they they were wined and dined you know they we were all geeks and nerds and was a very conservative organization so I think they had a luncheon but that was the equivalent of being paraded some months later they eventually started doing a brown bag lunch series for you know those peons that you know we just worked with so I went to this brown bag lunch one day and the guys given the talk about what they did and what they did was they took a document and they found some unused bytes in this document and they inserted some code into this

document that if they sent this to somebody by email and got them to click on the attachment and open it it would execute this code again it's any of this sound familiar this code that they ex executed would copy the PGP key rings into a file and so what are we talking about it's a phishing attack and it's you know malware you will it's a trojan if you will but I'm listening to the guy talking like wait a minute that's not an attack against PGP at all that's you just stole the keys which is legitimate that's what you do a lot of times with cryptography but the question I asked him then was wouldn't that work against

our stuff anyway that's an example of the politics Venice at the time and the governor needless to say my knowledge the who knows there's a lot of smart people there so I told you again top secret the stuff that I'm sharing with you is top secret but I am going to reveal to you one of our primary attack tools remember this is top secret so just keep it within this rim

let that sink in a minute the pink man we had the lawyers look at the pink command they said well what is it what is it and what does it do we have to explain it a somewhat technical level how ICMP works and what ping actually does and in case you don't know ping is just simply a packet that goes out and says anybody alive are you there and if you're alive as a system you come back and say yeah I'm here I'm alive what the lawyers decided was because we were targeting a system and we were launching something that would elicit a response it fit the definition that they had at the time of an active attack and so

therefore the ping command is a top-secret cyber weapon so that wasn't working for us so the target system we had to go through all sorts of levels of management to get permission everybody had to approve event and you know we were like four or five levels deep and management and that go up the chain it would take weeks to get permission to run a ping command that wasn't working for us so we had to talk to the lawyers we tried to figure out a way to make this all work and the original concept was basically the lawyer said why don't you just show us all your techniques ahead of time and we'll sort of evaluate

it and pre-approve them so when you get a job you just you know tell us we're gonna do attack XY and Z and technique z RW and do the little list and all that and of course we try to explain to them what that's exactly work that way cuz you don't really know what you're gonna use until you see what you got that's the whole point of reconnaissance you know what what what is the system listening to in terms of services what are you up against we don't know until we get there you have to kind of start probing and doing stuff to figure out the tailor what's your attack sir so what we ended

up deciding to do and for some reason I volunteered to do it but I think because I have a brother that's a lawyer I felt like I could talk to lawyers and nobody else in the group wanted to really talk to lawyers I decided to take it on a weekly project that by meeting with the lawyers and just going over tools and techniques it was a lot of fun because we abused him on a very regular basis because he had no idea so we were going right under his nose mostly me putting backdoors into his system if anybody knows well I'm not gonna go into detail but anyway we met weekly and I called it full time where I

meet with the lawyers and talk to them about all the different tools and techniques I'm checking time because okay I gotta fly sorry for talking fast word got out very quickly we were doing this for internal networks and this is actually a report that came out two years after I left and I say but it's actually I don't remember how it came about but at some point it came about that some unclassified networks came to us and said we want you to do a security assessment of vulnerability assessment of our internet presence namely the Department of Justice came to us and they said we want you to look at our internet presence well it's an

unclassified system NSA doesn't look at unclassified systems at the time that was the responsibility of NIST standards technology but it was well known at the time that NIST has new capability so when this would get these responses they would routinely come back to NSA anyway because the NSA had the capability and the dance began so I took on this you know how do we figure out how to make this all work the first thing I would saw was well it sort of has to be a favor from one cabinet level position to another so we had to figure out you know get the secretary of Turney general to write a message to basically the Secretary of Defense but it was

actually sent to the person that was responsible for the Internet at that point C 3 Iowa's command control and communications and intelligence this is signed by Janet Reno she was the Attorney General at the time our director responded and said yeah we can do it this is a month long process

this letter had been signed it had not been sent yet when this happened anybody remember this this was like the first half of a government website a website was defaced I got a call on a Monday morning from my contact at the Department of Justice saying help we've been hacked do something hung up with them this is a longer story I'm just giving you the highlights call the lawyers and said this is what happened we're so close we've got everything signed sealed we just haven't delivered it yet what do I need to do to get a forensics team down there and he gave me some criteria we met the criteria in my opinion I took a team down we were doing

forensics we didn't know what forensics was really at the time there was no guides about forensics we were there for about two and a half days when I got a phone call from somebody back at the pit saying shits hit the fan you guys got a drop what you're doing and come back now so somewhere along the line we stepped on somebody's toes and somebody got very upset that we were NSA working on a big huge mess and you know a positive outcome was later on I became a contributing author editor for one of the first things in handling documents that came out because yeah we didn't know what to do at the time and what

they had done at the time back in those days when you had a web server you were running it on your own server in your own network in your own and when they got hacked what the IT people did at the time of the DOJ was pull the plug and wipe the thing and rebuild it all evidence gone so we didn't really get too far from forensics but we learned lessons about what not to do in terms of if you ever want to do any kind of forensics again a longer story but the result was we got in so much trouble I was put on double-secret probation they tried to fire me I had to

go through Internal Security Investigations and everybody I was interviewed everybody that interviewed me when I told them the story they said that's it you just tried to help them like yeah I just tried to help so the upshot was we all left most of us left to this day six people there's only one other person that's out in the private sector where the Pitts rangoli the founder and CEO of tenable network security he was an original member of the pit two other members of the pit are still at NSA and two more out in the private sector but they they choose to remain anonymous so the upshot of all this is you know the majority of us left

but shortly thereafter this chapter for eligible receiver eligible receiver about almost a year after I left NSA and it was the first joint everybody's getting hacked by NSA the entire military it was originally planned to I think to be like a two-week exercise and they halted they'd want they over ran everything interestingly enough there was it wasn't last fall was the fall of 2017 they held a symposium at the University of Maryland University College I believe where they pulled together a bunch of the masterminds of eligible receiver and they did a whole panel discussion they at the time on their website had a video that had actually been produced by NSA shortly after eligible receiver that

talked about the whole thing like a 25 minute video and they redacted it down to like nine minutes it was up on the web I watched it but I didn't think to grab it but I think Ron has it he told me one of these days don't get a hold of it but I think that website is still good you can at least go and I think here the panel discussion that they had talking about eligible receiver you know surprise surprise the government was vulnerable to attack and some guys that were not members of the pit you know were able to kind of run roughshod over pretty much all of the DoD networks very quickly into the point where okay we got

to call the exercise because people are starting to load guns another day's time the first 1997 this is actually when nmap came out which I I thought was fascinating because I was like you know I've been using em map for so long

called stroke and that's so much better anyway members of the paper we still get together every once in a while we try to meet like once or twice a year the guys who still work at NSA they like to bring us gifts you can get these gifts at the gift shop of the National Cryptologic Museum not to give it another plug but you can get the special bat pin that puts out the NSA seal which is what's shining on the coffee mug there so apologize for going fast of so much more stories to tell is just trying to kind of give you the highlights if you want to you know learn more about stories if

you want to keep listening to me as I said I am a one of the co-hosts on security weekly because of my fame of being an NSA pen tester I got to be part of a card game that's actually a fundraiser for a group called hack for kids of teaching the next generation about hacking it's a game called Freaker life Freaker dot life i encourage you to get cars i got a few copies of the decks here i can show them to you so i'm one of the face cards what they call in hack wound isms and a bunch of us got together last year at Def Con taking recently a book came out called

tribe of hackers some people do I'd be happy to autograph it for you you read my chapter it's a fascinating book I'm not even all the way through yet I just got new glasses with the new reading bifocal thing and I can actually see the print now because it was killing me before I give talks and workshops on effective communication that I call the heart of the Jedi mind-trick conference Jedi Master and I am officially considered a combine because I'm a member of the Cabal of the coup buttons which was people to get together with that guy Jean Stafford he wrote that book that I showed you earlier the Bible on practical internet and UNIX

security this is a shot I was indoctrinated or led into this group of the commotions two years ago at RSA and in a strange twist of fate the guy had my arm around in the red sweater that's actually the lawyer I used to work

about out of time questions comments if not now I'm around all day look for me and I'll find a place to put out stickers any quick questions that's enough oh wait why did I need Snowden was going to come up my my short answer is traitor I'm happy to go into a longer answer but you have to buy me a drink but most of the people that I know that I worked with and I still keep in touch with a lot of people that are former or current NSA people if you knew what they knew and I don't know all of it but I suspect that the damage that he did or whatever his intentions were are for me

put him in the category of traitor I will say what he was seeing that he had beefs about or what he was concerned about I think are legitimate I just think he went about it the wrong way and the reason I give this talk on the whole thing about the DOJ when I've given that talk I call it I was the first snowed because the first time I ever heard of something called the church proceedings anybody know what the church proceedings are I'm about to tell you well couple in the back the church proceedings came out came out as a result of Watergate strange how history repeats itself there was this investigation that went on for months and months produced a big

lengthy report sound familiar and the the report essentially said as a result of investigating Watergate there's these organizations like the FBI of the CIA and the NSA they have a whole lot of power but not any real real regulatory oversight there's nobody putting any limits on it so as the result of the church proceedings was this NSA charter that said NSA can only do what NSA does to non-us says they can't do what NSA does the u.s. citizens the first time I ever heard of the church proceedings was when I was getting in trouble getting my ass reamed by this lawyer back in 1996 the second time I heard about the church proceedings was when Snowden did his

thing and I was hearing reporting on it and somebody brought up Bill it's the church proceeding so longer answer than I wanted to give any other questions yes this is my spirit they look sweet and cuddly it's the rage that goes on inside another question question is what I recommend the NSA is a place to work today sure sends what you want to get out of it but if you're looking for decent employment there certainly changing their mission they're changing their orientation the world has changed but they're still hiring and plus you can say someday 20 30 years any other questions

oh hell no I mean we had a we had a motto when I was back into when they formed the snack there was some committee that went off for several weeks slogans smacking they came by parts of Florida was we immediately trashed it and the guy but the slogan that I came up for

[Applause]