13 Years of Dragon Con and the EFF Green Room

The Green Room Sanctuary

• The true highlight of being an annual guest speaker was the legendary Dragon Con Green Room—a private sanctuary where invited guests relaxed without handlers alongside icons of pop culture, science, and computing:
  • Swapping stories with Richard Hatch (Captain Apollo from the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica and Tom Zarek in the 2004 reimagined series).
  • Chatting with Micky Dolenz of The Monkees and his daughter Ami Dolenz.
  • Spending hours discussing cryptography, secret ciphers, and UFO phenomena with Elonka Dunin (the world's foremost authority on the unsolved CIA Kryptos sculpture).
  • Sharing the stage on digital civil liberties panels alongside security technologist Bruce Schneier.

The Speaking Progression: Hacking 101 to 301

• On the technical track, we developed a classic weekend progression:
  • Hacking 101: Friday evening, packed to the rafters with standing room only.
  • Hacking 201: Saturday evening, diving deep into technical tools, architectures, and exploits.
  • Hacking 301: Sunday morning, quiet and hushed—reserved for the dedicated few who survived Saturday night at Dragon Con and showed up for the hardcore masterclass.

"Just Another Convicted Perl Hacker"

• Dragon Con was also where I frequently delivered my signature keynote talk: "Just Another Convicted Perl Hacker"—recounting the cautionary story of my 1990s trial (State of Oregon v. Randal Schwartz), educating a decade of systems administrators and security auditors on administrative authorization, ethics, and digital civil rights.