usual as far as Paul could tell—lots of scheduling issues and fund rais-
ing talk, but mostly details about meetings, pending legislation, and
more meetings. Then he sent his e-mail along, posing as Clover.
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Referral
Danny,
Busy beyond belief right this moment, but I should be able
Rick Dakan
47
to help. Let’s talk on Monday or Tuesday when things have
settled down a bit.
Ken
A few minutes later, Danny replied that Monday would be fine, and
Paul diverted it to his own machine. Hopefully Danny would put any
thoughts about the target out of his mind until they needed him again.
In the meantime, Paul could take over his e-mail duties just fine.
“Everything’s rocking along,” Paul announced to the room. Chloe,
Sacco, and Sandee all looked up at him. “Sacco?”
“All set with the earmark to insert,” Sacco said, his voice a little
louder than necessary as usual. “It looks good. Hell, it might even be
decent legislation, but hopefully actually doing some good won’t raise
any alarms with these fucks.”
“I think we’ll be fine,” said Paul. “Give it an hour or so and then
we’ll shoot the procurement language on over to him. Should give
him a couple hours to shoehorn it in but not enough time to dig too
deep.”
Sacco checked something on his laptop, which also had all the data
from the Congressman’s phone. “Yeah, the Congressman’s calendar
confirms that the conference committee’s meeting through the night
so they can get everything wrapped up over the weekend and signed
and passed on Monday morning for the big press event.”
They’d had their pick of bills they could have inserted the earmark
into—a dedicated budget item that provided funding for a specific
program. In this case it was being inserted into a large infrastructure
bill that had been lingering around for several months but had recently
been fast tracked after an overpass in Georgia had collapsed two weeks
earlier. Sacco, who watched all the Congressional machinations for the
Crew, decided this was better than the federal land use bill they’d
originally planned on using, since the sudden fast tracking would mean
all kinds of congress critters would be inserting earmarks into it and
there’d be more chaff disguising their activities.
Paul turned his attention to Sandee. “How’s Mr. Data doing?”
“He’s plugging away, says everything’s running the way he thought
it would. Should have something soon,” he said. Sandee had a direct
link over an encrypted IRC channel with the Crew’s data analyst. As
soon as he was done he could throw up some names for them and they
could formulate their earmark request perfectly. He’d been a real find,
although they still felt the need to keep him in the dark about most of
48
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
the details of the con. But that was partly his own choice—he knew
enough to know he didn’t want to know anything else.
Paul sat back on the couch and reached over to give Chloe’s leg a
squeeze. She smiled at him. “Do you think we should check on Bee
and c1sman?” he asked.
“Let them have their fun. We don’t need them on this right now, and
they’re in their element.”
“Do you think Bee will ever get a clue about his crush on her?”
“Maybe,” she said. “But this is a hacker con, and Bee’s a single
woman with an incredible mind for gadgets and hardware hacking
who’s outnumbered 5 to 1 by horny, mostly single geeks. Poor c1sman’s
gonna have a lot of competition down there. I’d be surprised if he
summoned up the courage to make a move. I hope he does, but I’ll be
really surprised.”
“I hope he does too,” said Paul. And not just because he’d like to see
Bee finally with someone. C1sman was in a weird place mentally, and
Paul wasn’t at all sure he was adjusting to the hardcore criminal hack-
ing life very well. Paul had suffered similar doubts when he started of
course, but he had a lot less choice and Chloe was dragging him along
into it. C1sman’s motivations weren’t nearly as clear-cut and he had a
lot more options, even if he didn’t see them yet. Bee would bind him to
the Crew, which would be great. They could use him.
Downstairs it was almost time for the keynote. He figured Bruce
Potter, one of Shmoocon’s founders, would be taking the stage to intro-
duce the speaker, an academic-based hacker who’d led a project expos-
ing some nasty vulnerabilities in electronic voting machines. Paul sort
of wished he could be there, but he knew the video would be online
in a month or less. Shmoocon was an interesting kind of hacker con-
vention, mid-sized and extremely popular. The attendees and speakers
constituted what Paul had come to think of as the upper middle class
of the hacking community. Most of them were security or network
professionals of some sort, some of whom no doubt got into a lot of
mischief in their younger years but who had grown into well paying
jobs and familial responsibilities. There was an undercurrent of youth
as well—college students or twenty-somethings who were still search-
ing for their place in the world. The vendors and sponsors tended to
be security companies and publishers, all legit, all trying to make a
buck. Despite the con’s home in Washington DC, the talks mostly
steered clear of politics except in either the most general or specific
of cases. Privacy rights and personal freedom were always big topics
of concern, but issues like social justice or political activism on non-
Rick Dakan
49
technology issues seldom got much attention. And of course, like any
con, the social aspect was just as much a draw as the talks, if not more
so. The large hotel bar and lounge area would be full in the evenings,
and Saturday night Shmoocon rented out an entire nightclub over in
Dupont Circle to accommodate attendees. Paul and Chloe would be
skipping those events of course, but Bee and c1sman might be able to
take advantage.
The idea of running a complicated con from a hacker convention had
been a calculated risk. Paul had gone back and forth on the idea, as had
Chloe. At one time or another both of them had argued vociferously
for both points of view. As it turned out, the first time they both agreed
happened when they were both on the “pro” side of the argument, so
they’d gone with the plan. Using Shmoocon as cover gave them a lot of
advantages. They were able to get c1sman well positioned to let them
piggyback on the convention’s bandwidth, and once they’d decided on
using the con, he’d submitted his plans for running a TOR server at
the convention, one modified with new improvements of c1sman’s own
devising. The TOR worked in concert with other computers to help
make the user’s internet activity anonymous. Users logged into TOR
would have their activities routed through layers of anonymous servers
before proceeding on to wherever they were headed on the internet.
This process masked the user’s IP Address, making it very difficult to
trace back the packet to its original point. The newer, more robust TOR
server c1sman and his hacker friends had set up worked in conjunction
with computers all over the country and in Germany. The whole point
of the display at the convention was to stress test the arrangement, so
they were encouraging as many con attendees as possible to hop on and
give the setup a try. Hopefully all that activity and bandwidth would
provide more than enough cover for the rather risky attacks the Crew
was launching this weekend.
And if things went wrong, Shmoocon also offered perfect camou-
flage. There were over 1300 attendees at the event, any of whom was
theoretically a suspect if law enforcement somehow got involved. Paul
thought the odds of that happening during the actual weekend of the
convention were pretty slim. Their plan should cover their tracks very
well. But the almost inevitable investigation after the fact was another
matter. Smart people would start digging around, trying to figure out
just what the hell had happened. If they figured it out and managed
to trace it back to Shmoocon, that still left them with over a thousand
suspects. Beyond the fact that a sizable fraction of the attendees regis-
tered under pseudonyms, the real culprits, aside from Bee and c1sman,
50
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
weren’t even actually attending the convention. Paul, Chloe, Sacco, and
Sandee were in the hotel under fake identities and often looked the part
of hackers, but they weren’t doing any socializing or interacting with
the rest of the convention. Even the most diligent investigator would
have a hard time finding any trace of them.
Paul watched and read strangers’ e-mails for the next hour and a half.
It was both boring and thrilling. Again and again temptation pulled
at him to change a word or two just because he could, but of course he
didn’t. It was a real high, and he wondered how people who worked at
places like the NSA dealt with the temptations to pry into everything.
Maybe they didn’t, or maybe they just got used to it. Maybe both. All
Paul knew was that he loved the power that having Sacco, c1sman, and
Mr. Data in the Crew gave him.
“Oooh!” said Sandee. “Good news everybody. We’ve got some names
from Mr. Data. He seems very excited. Either that or he accidentally
hit Caps Lock.” Sandee worked the keyboard for a few seconds and
then pulled a small USB drive from the side of his laptop and brought
it across the room to Paul. He plugged it into his own machine and
copied the list of names to his desktop.
“Here we go,” said Paul. “Time to give the target his marching
orders.” Then he started to write legislation.
Oliver loved his job. Well, Oliver HAD loved his job. Now he was
looking for a new one, but there were plenty of offers on the table,
and there was some level of potential for love in all of them. But he
needed to clear his head, take a break, and put things in perspective
before he made any big decisions. Plus his current, previously lovable
job, wasn’t aware that the feelings weren’t mutual anymore and so still
had no qualms about paying his way to a hacker convention all the way
out in San Diego just because he said he needed to go. He didn’t even
feel guilty about it. There was still some slight chance he’d stay with
the company, although with his friends jumping ship and the new gov-
ernment mandated changes in testing procedure going into effect next
month, it didn’t seem very likely. Still, there was a chance, and if he did
stay, the stuff he learned at Toor Con could theoretically come in handy
at work. Or at his next place of employment for that matter.
Ollie stretched out on his king sized bed 22 floors above downtown
San Diego. He’d just been staring out the window down onto the field
where the Padres play. Great seats if there’d been a home game that
weekend. Even so, it was cool. Outside, the September evening was
crisp and clear and breezy, a far cry from the heat that still suffused
St. Louis. It was good to be away, on his own. He’d even turned his
cell phone’s ringer off so he’d only have to answer calls if he wanted. A
nap would be nice, then maybe a free beer or two up at the Marriott’s
hospitality suite. Then he could head over to the convention center and
see what was going on.
52
Geek Mafia: Black Hat Blues
He woke up around 7:00 PM, trudged into the shower and threw
on a t-shirt from last year’s Toor Con that featured an ASCII design,
just like every other year. He liked the old school sensibilities Toor
Con tried to espouse. Even though he wasn’t yet thirty, he still felt
more of a connection to the original hackers than to the modern scene.
Of course the flip side was that it was the modern scene that afforded
him plenty of lucrative and exciting work as a full time penetration
tester, so he wasn’t going to complain too much. He just sort of wished
people didn’t take everything quite so seriously these days. It seemed
like being a hacker must have been more fun back in the 80’s and
early 90’s.
Ollie had been to the San Diego Convention center twice before.
Once for a Toor Con, and once for San Diego ComicCon. The differ-
ences and similarities between the two amused him as he crossed the
train tracks and made his way inside the sole open doorway. During
ComicCon, the place was FLOODED with people. Flooded. It took
up what seemed like 10 city blocks—the entire main floor of the hall
plus more in the annex across the street—and by mid-day the place was
packed solid with fans. Toor Con occupied just three small ballrooms
on the second floor that could hold a couple hundred people each. He
walked down the wide, white, hallway that seemed to him like some-
thing out of Logan’s Run or some other 70’s sci-fi version of the future.