Maria Diaz lady business. pop culture. whatever.

24 Hour Defcon Party People

When we last left our sordid Vegas tale, I had an insane day which resulted me in me not actually arriving in Vegas until 11pm, knowing I would have to leave 24 hours later. Other, more rational people, would have turned around and returned home, but by the middle of the afternoon, and with the gate agents working hard at getting rid of the enormous standby list that had accumulated after they cancelled the second flight of the day, I decided to continue and put myself on list after list, along with all the other freeloaders. I finally made it on the 9:30 flight, which didn't leave until a whole hour later because the pilots were flying in another plane and were late. I held my breath until the plane door was closed and they had no choice but to fly us all to Las Vegas. And fly us they did, eventually I found myself at the MGM Grand, reunited with my ladiez and in search of Red Bull on a drip.

Eventually, through some Facebook connections, we found ourselves at something called the "ninja party" (held in honor of Defcon, a hacker's conference) in the garden of the truly amazing Artisan Hotel, which our host kept calling "The Artesian" and which our cab driver ended up almost not being able to find and turning her meter off when we drove too far and found ourselves by the Spearmint Rhino. In the "catacombs" of the ninja party, I made a friend. A friend who nervously gave me story ideas once he found out I was a writer but would later make me swear that I would keep his identity a secret.

I had no idea that previous writers covering Defcon had attempted to infiltrate and were then literally chased out of the con. But, having read 2600 in my teens and dabbled in some hacker-esque communities in the late 90s on IRC, I knew the drill and if there's one group of people you don't want to piss off, it's anyone in the hacker community. I've been dabbling on the faux geek side of the Internet for a long time now, but I ain't no fool.

I'm not working this, I explained. If I were working, I would have at least gone to a talk or two and not just crashed a party. He seemed genuinely interested in me getting my story, any story, though. When I came back from the ladies room, he asked me "Did you see anything in there? Was there anything interesting?" and I had to say no. Just a bunch of gothed out women, a sea of black t-shirts, a pissed off looking night auditor and an unplugged ATM. He let me know when security celebrity Dan Kaminsky had shown up and gave me all the dirt on how he had recently been hacked because of his ridiculously easy to figure out passwords. Later on, as we sat at the Riviera bar at 3 in the morning, I asked him to point out anyone else particularly high up or interesting. "Just a bunch of nobodies." When his more well-connected friend showed up to take us to the Double Down Salloon, he said "Talk to him. He knows everyone."

I mention all of these things because he was the perfect tour guide into this world, and what's funny about this person being so hell-bent on me getting an article out of the evening we spent and of me keeping him anonymous is that now I can't find him anywhere. And that is such a strange feeling from the usual aftermath of the usual conferences I go to, where I am able to piece together someone's entire life with a simple Google search. Here, with my anonymous source, it's as if I invented him and he has melted into the ether. Was I there? Was he there? I have the foursquare check in to prove that I was indeed at a bar at 5 am on Sunday August 2. I have the Riviera matches I stole. I can remember his website address ending with a .net. But I can't find him anywhere, or any of the other people that were around us, the other friends I made, the guy who made fun of my pink iPhone cover, the other guy who was from New Jersey.

I've long been obsessed with the idea that nothing is anonymous and that nothing is private and that everything is being tracked somewhere. It's strange and uncomfortable to not have a social media reminder of someone else's existence. This is what life has become.

I'll end with this, on an unrelated note: I loved my slice of defcon (and will probably go for real next year), feeling truly out of my league, and reminding us that Internet culture has not been completely taken over by marketers and cheerleaders, there is still room for fake names, and green text on black backgrounds.