What's With the Tinfoil Hats?
Michael Hart -- Tradeshow Week, 8/7/2006
Talk about a forehead-slapping caution to show managers and meeting planners: If you want a smoothly run conference component, try to make sure none of your panelists have outstanding arrest warrants.
Steven Rambam is apparently quite well known in the social circles of, well, computer hackers. The panel he was planning to lead on the second day of the Hackers on Planet Earth conference (and yes, they use the acronym HOPE) June 21–23 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York was entitled "Privacy Is Dead ... Get Over It."
Rambam is a licensed private investigator and founded Pallorium which, according to its Web site, is the largest privately held online private investigation service in the United States.
His presentation — in preparation for which, Rambam had taken an attendee volunteer's name and e-mail address and was prepared to discuss the 500 pages worth of personal data he had managed to gather on him, his background and that of his friends and family — drew quite a crowd. So there was no mistaking what witnesses saw. Just as Rambam was beginning his talk, four men in blue coats approached him, handcuffed him and led him away.
This was a meeting of computer hackers, so what transpired created quite the furor. Conspiracy theories began to be laid out almost instantly on Internet Web sites. Within hours, attendees were wearing "Free Steve" T-shirts, a reference to the "Free Kevin" T-shirts many in the hacker culture wore for years as tribute to Kevin Mitnick, who was released from prison in 2002 after serving five years for crimes connected to his own hacking activities.
In this case, however, fact was not stranger than fiction. Rambam was arrested by FBI officials because he had been accused of impersonating an FBI agent in an attempt to intimidate a potential witness who was scheduled to testify against one of his clients in a money laundering case. The fine art of computer hacking was not involved.
That, however, did not stop the innuendos.
One advocate wrote on a computer security blog, "This was an intentional slap in the face by the FBI: the fact they waited to arrest him at the conference, instead of serving the warrant at, say, his hotel that morning, after his speech, or at any number of other times."
In response, somebody else wrote, "Take off the tinfoil hats. They arrested him because they knew where and when he was going to be in a public place."
Despite several attempts by Tradeshow Week, HOPE organizers could not be reached for comment. Otherwise, we would have asked them about Mitnick, too. He was also scheduled to speak at HOPE, in a session entitled "Hackers in Prison." Only he didn't show. Attendees were told he was hospitalized in Colombia, for reasons that couldn't be divulged.
One last thing: Rambam made his first court appearance June 25 on charges of witness tampering and obstruction of justice. He was released on his own recognizance.
The truth is out there.
