[00:00.000 --> 00:05.080]  This is the talk you intended to see, Hack the Law, Rational Reason Approach to Completely Losing Your Mind.
[00:05.560 --> 00:07.820]  So, a little bit about my odd little background.
[00:08.980 --> 00:15.020]  As several other people have said, I got to run my own company partially because DARPA has helped me.
[00:15.600 --> 00:17.780]  I just finished a Cyber Fast Track grant.
[00:17.880 --> 00:20.460]  Those of you who are going to be at B-Sides Las Vegas can hear about that work.
[00:20.620 --> 00:23.800]  And of course, I've got a few interesting things to say to Mitch Altman in the next talk.
[00:24.560 --> 00:30.140]  But more importantly than that, for this talk, I'm a rising 2L, a second year law student at the University of Wisconsin School of Law.
[00:30.700 --> 00:32.260]  My background is all in computer security.
[00:32.420 --> 00:33.720]  I have two degrees from Johns Hopkins.
[00:34.240 --> 00:38.000]  My master is led by the inestible Dr. Griffin, who spoke on Friday.
[00:39.880 --> 00:47.980]  And yes, my company is called Malice Afterthought because it turns out they really will let you register anything as a corporation name, as long as it doesn't sound like a very large company.
[00:48.880 --> 00:49.900]  I don't speak for anybody.
[00:50.100 --> 00:51.480]  I don't speak for the university.
[00:51.720 --> 00:52.240]  Lord knows.
[00:52.240 --> 00:54.120]  I think I'm a bit odd, as I'll tell you about.
[00:54.760 --> 00:59.480]  I don't speak for the very nice civil liberties firm where I'm doing an internship this summer.
[00:59.500 --> 01:01.380]  So just assume nobody authorized me to say anything.
[01:01.520 --> 01:03.000]  I'm just a crazed person with long hair.
[01:03.600 --> 01:08.220]  As a side note, just by the way, I'm happy to take questions at basically any point during the talk.
[01:08.400 --> 01:11.160]  There are about 15 extremely bright lights in my eyes, so just move.
[01:11.280 --> 01:13.060]  And that helps me pick you out in the crowd.
[01:13.120 --> 01:14.240]  But I'm always happy to take questions.
[01:15.860 --> 01:17.040]  So, this is the problem.
[01:17.100 --> 01:19.020]  How many of you know what this guy's name is?
[01:19.360 --> 01:20.320]  Or why he's important?
[01:20.320 --> 01:21.060]  Obama.
[01:22.120 --> 01:23.460]  That's not Obama.
[01:23.800 --> 01:26.820]  You should probably read the news more.
[01:27.060 --> 01:27.740]  A little bit more.
[01:28.300 --> 01:28.840]  Anybody know?
[01:29.920 --> 01:32.700]  I guarantee you've heard of him, but you've probably forgotten his name by now.
[01:32.760 --> 01:34.900]  This is Representative Mel Watt from North Carolina.
[01:35.280 --> 01:48.740]  This is the man who, during the SOPA hearings, said, well, I'm not a nerd, when dismissing all expert testimony on the SOPA, which, as you recall, is one of the things that shut down the entire Internet in protest of what was going to be a complete disaster.
[01:49.740 --> 01:50.960]  These people don't get it.
[01:51.120 --> 01:55.300]  And this would be really cool if Mel Watt of North Carolina was the only person who liked this.
[01:55.380 --> 01:58.080]  But, of course, this was half the Congress saying essentially the same thing.
[01:58.160 --> 01:59.400]  He just had the great sound bite.
[02:00.280 --> 02:01.180]  This is bad.
[02:01.700 --> 02:03.160]  And it gets bigger than this, right?
[02:03.240 --> 02:06.300]  I mean, Ted Stevens, of course, gave us the wonderful series of tubes things.
[02:06.500 --> 02:07.680]  And he's dead.
[02:08.260 --> 02:12.920]  But that didn't stop the decades of terror he inflicted on all the communication systems we have.
[02:12.920 --> 02:16.520]  Remember, Ted Stevens was in charge of the committee that oversees the Internet.
[02:16.960 --> 02:19.020]  This was the guy who creates our policies.
[02:19.440 --> 02:22.040]  And he said, it's not a big truck, it's a series of tubes.
[02:22.200 --> 02:27.600]  Thus, not only generating lots of wonderful memes, but also terrifying everyone who has to actually work on the Internet.
[02:27.740 --> 02:28.840]  Everybody in this whole building.
[02:30.700 --> 02:31.480]  Electronic voting.
[02:31.840 --> 02:35.540]  Another incredible idea if you've learned anything about computer security.
[02:35.540 --> 02:39.180]  If you haven't figured out the electronic voting thing, go find Matt Blaze, who's been running around the conference.
[02:39.820 --> 02:42.160]  From the University of Pennsylvania, who's done great work on it.
[02:42.220 --> 02:46.600]  Or Ravi Rubin, who's unfortunately not at this conference, but is from Hopkins and also did great work on it.
[02:46.860 --> 02:49.660]  This is a terrifying concept, if you know anything about security.
[02:50.000 --> 02:54.120]  That we can't even unelect people who think that the Internet is a series of tubes.
[02:54.820 --> 02:57.000]  Because these things are so easy to pwn.
[02:57.340 --> 03:01.160]  You can see that, weirdly, we're electing Robert Frost for poet laureate.
[03:01.460 --> 03:04.560]  Which would be a trick, as I recall, he's dead.
[03:05.680 --> 03:08.420]  Which, I suppose, you know, that never stopped anybody in Chicago.
[03:12.280 --> 03:17.240]  We have an entire movement in this country of anti-science, what I'm just going to flat describe as nut jobs.
[03:17.540 --> 03:20.180]  Did you know that vaccines can cause shaken baby syndrome?
[03:20.720 --> 03:21.960]  Which is amazing!
[03:22.720 --> 03:24.520]  I mean, this is incredible.
[03:25.040 --> 03:25.900]  This is a thing.
[03:26.420 --> 03:27.140]  And here's the...
[03:27.140 --> 03:27.940]  I mean, you know, there's...
[03:27.940 --> 03:31.840]  Yeah, it's amazing if you get vaccinated against polio, it just makes you want to shake them.
[03:31.840 --> 03:35.220]  Because you're not going to have to grow up with a crippling and debilitating disease.
[03:35.960 --> 03:36.780]  And here's the thing.
[03:36.920 --> 03:37.660]  We're not helping.
[03:38.400 --> 03:42.580]  We sit around in our black t-shirts and black stripy shirts at the moment.
[03:42.740 --> 03:44.860]  And just say, well, they're all a bunch of losers, right?
[03:44.940 --> 03:46.320]  And we spell it in a cool lead way.
[03:46.440 --> 03:47.640]  And it makes us feel good.
[03:47.780 --> 03:49.500]  It's not helping the situation.
[03:49.520 --> 03:51.080]  This gets worse and worse and worse.
[03:51.080 --> 03:52.340]  This is a growing movement.
[03:52.580 --> 03:54.320]  Not a declining movement, right?
[03:54.680 --> 03:59.120]  We should be treating these people like the guys who thought the world was flat in the 19th century.
[03:59.880 --> 04:00.960]  But we don't.
[04:01.060 --> 04:02.740]  This is a bigger and bigger problem.
[04:04.040 --> 04:05.720]  And we hear a lot about these guys.
[04:05.860 --> 04:06.720]  The nine angry dudes.
[04:07.340 --> 04:08.320]  And a couple women.
[04:08.740 --> 04:11.880]  And this isn't the only problem.
[04:12.060 --> 04:16.680]  It'd be really awesome if all you had to worry about as a hacker were these people.
[04:16.680 --> 04:18.900]  Because they get all the insight, right?
[04:19.020 --> 04:20.400]  Hopefully, you know, they do read the newspaper.
[04:20.560 --> 04:21.200]  They don't talk about it.
[04:21.260 --> 04:23.960]  But they do care what the American populace thinks of them.
[04:24.040 --> 04:25.400]  They do try to read the briefs.
[04:25.440 --> 04:27.740]  They do try to come to a reasoned answer.
[04:27.780 --> 04:28.940]  You may or may not agree with it.
[04:29.060 --> 04:38.000]  But even people who I fundamentally disagree with on most topics, like Justice Scalia, who's the one who's sitting there next to Justice Thomas in the front row, second from the left.
[04:38.400 --> 04:42.140]  He's the guy who said things like, that's the living constitution you're talking about.
[04:42.180 --> 04:43.220]  And I'm trying to kill it.
[04:43.920 --> 04:48.600]  Even he cares deeply about this, is a real academic, studies these issues.
[04:49.140 --> 04:52.380]  The problem is these are not the guys who actually decide our fates.
[04:52.620 --> 05:02.420]  All the people who spoke last night, all the people who've been in this building, who've been sent to prison, not a single one of them, man or woman, had their fate decided by these nine people.
[05:02.860 --> 05:07.260]  They're actually decided by the hordes of federal and state trial judges.
[05:07.620 --> 05:10.020]  You don't have a right to appeal your case to this court.
[05:10.020 --> 05:11.840]  You can, and maybe they'll hear you.
[05:11.960 --> 05:15.540]  But there's around 10,000 appeals a year, and they hear about 70 a year.
[05:16.140 --> 05:17.140]  So it doesn't happen.
[05:17.680 --> 05:23.780]  And the problem is that the lower court judges can do kind of whatever they want, because the media isn't necessarily focused on them.
[05:23.880 --> 05:34.240]  So a few of you might have heard a couple months ago, there was a trial court in Colorado that decided that giving your passwords up to your encrypted hard drive didn't violate your right to self-incriminate.
[05:34.400 --> 05:37.100]  Even though the feds had no way of getting anything on that hard drive.
[05:37.260 --> 05:40.460]  They're like, well, giving your password up isn't like incriminating yourself.
[05:40.500 --> 05:43.720]  It's just giving them all the evidence to let them incriminate you.
[05:43.820 --> 05:44.680]  That's totally different.
[05:45.220 --> 05:46.980]  These are the people who decide your fate.
[05:47.180 --> 05:52.100]  These are the people who sent all of our speakers last night to prison for a very long time.
[05:54.680 --> 05:56.440]  There are counterexamples.
[05:56.540 --> 05:59.860]  I don't want to say that every judge is completely off their rocker, right?
[06:00.220 --> 06:19.040]  Some of you may have heard in the last few weeks, Judge Posner, who's ordinarily a circuit judge, the head circuit judge of the Seventh Circuit, which is Chicago and the Midwest, ruled that Apple and Motorola could just both go home and didn't get to have a patent battle against each other that will cost billions of dollars to litigate and take years.
[06:19.500 --> 06:25.220]  Because he just decided, I hate you both, and neither one of you has anything to talk about, and software patents are complete crap.
[06:25.420 --> 06:28.720]  And he just said that because he's Judge Posner and could just get away with that, right?
[06:28.780 --> 06:30.560]  He's like, I've written more books than you've had cases.
[06:30.800 --> 06:31.080]  Go away.
[06:31.820 --> 06:33.340]  This is kind of cool, right?
[06:33.400 --> 06:34.680]  And everybody said, yay, that's awesome.
[06:34.780 --> 06:36.560]  But that's the minority, unfortunately.
[06:36.620 --> 06:43.060]  People who've actually looked at the technical issues, understand the technical issues, and then have influence on the legal community.
[06:44.360 --> 06:50.120]  So there are these counterexamples, but it's just, it's not enough to create a critical mass of people who understand what the heck is going on.
[06:50.360 --> 07:04.800]  And since everything involves the Internet in court cases now, everything from, you know, basic robberies, if you went to the Rambam talk, we saw people confessing to robberies and murder and all sorts of cool things on Twitter, so there's going to be electronic evidence that we're going to have to determine whether it's actually real.
[07:05.040 --> 07:09.200]  So even the simple crimes now involve Internet testimony.
[07:09.240 --> 07:11.960]  And so we need people who can actually understand that kind of thing in the courts.
[07:13.520 --> 07:15.660]  And, yeah, sure, it's not our fault, right?
[07:15.780 --> 07:16.260]  This is the thing.
[07:16.560 --> 07:18.880]  We didn't do this, which is true, right?
[07:19.140 --> 07:22.080]  Nobody in this room caused these people to be all out of their minds.
[07:22.360 --> 07:27.220]  And they don't understand us, and they're just scared because we wear black t-shirts instead of suits.
[07:27.280 --> 07:31.100]  And we're way too cool to talk to them, and the man is keeping us down.
[07:31.440 --> 07:39.960]  And if God wanted us to talk to Congress, they would have given them unfired wall computers so we could plant notes on their desktops, which some of you did and should probably stop because it's scaring them.
[07:41.200 --> 07:43.860]  And the thing is, yeah, sure, this is all true, right?
[07:43.920 --> 07:44.820]  It just doesn't help.
[07:45.040 --> 07:57.920]  We have to react to this with something more than like, I'm too leet to talk to Congress, or I'm too leet to deal with the political process, because if that had worked, we wouldn't have the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, right?
[07:58.060 --> 08:01.980]  We wouldn't have SOPA and PIPA and ACTA and now TPP, which is terrifying.
[08:02.220 --> 08:09.600]  These wouldn't even be concerns if these people could kind of get along without us, the people who create their entire world for them, right?
[08:10.080 --> 08:21.460]  I mean, generally, they seem to think that the Internet is a great tool for profit-making, and they have no idea the legions of cryptographers and Internet engineers who spent decades trying to figure out the way that the Internet could securely carry information,
[08:21.920 --> 08:26.200]  or not so securely carry information if you talk to Moxie Marlinspike, right?
[08:27.520 --> 08:29.840]  And it's bad at every single level, right?
[08:30.180 --> 08:31.300]  These are the big levels.
[08:31.320 --> 08:40.740]  But I mentioned I'm working at a legal internship this summer for a pretty great civil rights firm who I'm not going to mention their name because it'll make them sad, but they have staff attorneys, right?
[08:40.880 --> 08:41.900]  Big deal staff attorneys.
[08:43.200 --> 08:47.820]  And so I mentioned, well, I'm going to be gone on Thursday and Friday because I'm going to go speak at HOPE.
[08:48.120 --> 08:48.900]  Well, what's that?
[08:48.980 --> 08:50.200]  Well, it's Hackers on Planet Earth.
[08:51.200 --> 08:54.600]  And she said, and I quote, you're pro-hacker?
[08:55.580 --> 09:00.380]  In this tone of voice that's usually reserved for the words, you're pro-horse whipping babies?
[09:01.480 --> 09:04.240]  Like, I was, like, just shooting her children, right?
[09:04.640 --> 09:07.000]  Okay, I realize I don't work for the EFF, right?
[09:07.120 --> 09:08.420]  Not every attorney is leet.
[09:08.700 --> 09:14.440]  But honestly, we shouldn't let CNN define what we look like in the political and legal realms anymore.
[09:14.800 --> 09:16.240]  I wish we could.
[09:16.240 --> 09:18.140]  I wish they would be sane, but they don't seem to be.
[09:18.960 --> 09:21.280]  So what do lawyers actually do, right?
[09:22.000 --> 09:23.600]  Because this is the thing, right?
[09:23.920 --> 09:27.960]  Presumably, you saw Hack the Law, you saw this is a law student, he's going to have something to say about lawyers.
[09:27.960 --> 09:29.060]  So what do lawyers do?
[09:29.120 --> 09:31.040]  It's not just three martini lunches.
[09:31.600 --> 09:38.480]  But I do have a friend, a classmate of another rising 2L at Wisconsin, who has just achieved this goal after just one year in law school.
[09:38.580 --> 09:39.760]  So congratulations to Ethan.
[09:40.600 --> 09:44.480]  But the rest of us, yeah, we don't always get to have three martini lunches.
[09:44.520 --> 09:45.780]  There's lots of cool things we can do.
[09:46.260 --> 09:48.320]  And one note before we get on to all of these.
[09:48.480 --> 09:52.740]  Most of these careers I'm going to describe, you can't do by being self-educated.
[09:53.000 --> 09:55.020]  The self-education in the hacker community is wonderful.
[09:55.420 --> 09:57.260]  It is illegal in the legal community.
[09:57.260 --> 09:59.040]  And there's really good reasons for that.
[09:59.220 --> 10:08.560]  The thing is that there are even more people, even lawyers who've gone to accredited universities, somehow, that are selling snake oil than even on the Internet, right?
[10:08.680 --> 10:14.540]  I mean, you know, there's more people selling LegalZoom.com than there are people selling intrusion prevention systems, right?
[10:14.580 --> 10:18.320]  Because they can look forward into the future and kill the hackers before they come to you, apparently.
[10:19.020 --> 10:24.320]  So in order to prevent that from happening in most states, we've said, well, you can't practice law without a license.
[10:24.320 --> 10:26.520]  And in order to get a license, you have to take the bar.
[10:26.600 --> 10:29.280]  In order to take the bar, you have to graduate from an accredited law school.
[10:29.500 --> 10:30.760]  There are almost 200 of them.
[10:30.880 --> 10:32.320]  It's not impossible to do.
[10:33.360 --> 10:35.380]  Well, yeah, but the interning is different.
[10:36.760 --> 10:43.260]  But ultimately, you do have to go to an actual law school in order to work in this field, in order to have the kind of influence I'm going to talk about.
[10:43.380 --> 10:44.400]  So just something to keep in mind.
[10:45.520 --> 10:47.880]  So one thing you can do is criminal law, right?
[10:48.140 --> 10:50.240]  You know, get the wonderful Kevin Free moment.
[10:50.560 --> 10:53.800]  Criminal law is probably what we think of when there's the save the hackers, right?
[10:53.940 --> 10:56.340]  Free Byron, free Kevin, free everybody, right?
[10:56.740 --> 10:59.600]  And you're not wrong when we talk about saving hackers' lives.
[10:59.780 --> 11:02.380]  This is one major thing.
[11:03.240 --> 11:15.660]  It's a damn near life-ending event to have somebody, you know, to be a 15-year-old and have somebody come in and tell you, you know what, we're going to try and send you to prison for 30 years, even though you've lived half of that, because we've determined you're a threat to society.
[11:15.960 --> 11:20.120]  So if you go into criminal law, you can save those little kids' lives, which is kind of wonderful, right?
[11:20.140 --> 11:25.160]  Just both sit them down and tell them, I understand what they're saying, and they're nuts, right?
[11:25.280 --> 11:31.360]  And work with them through a process that can take years to get just through the trial court, set aside the Supreme Court thing.
[11:32.620 --> 11:34.100]  So that is one deal.
[11:35.280 --> 11:39.920]  As a criminal lawyer, you can stop the feds or the state authorities from succeeding, and that's a huge deal.
[11:39.920 --> 11:48.160]  And since there are very few lawyers, even great criminal defense attorneys, who understand at all what the heck the feds are talking about, right?
[11:48.220 --> 12:03.980]  They're lawyers because they can argue to a jury, and they can understand the process and the argumentation involved, not necessarily because they understand what the heck it is they even say you did, or the intricacies of terms of service, or the different layers of the Internet,
[12:04.160 --> 12:05.080]  or all these different things.
[12:05.080 --> 12:11.040]  Having criminal defense lawyers who will defend hackers with a technical background can be very, very helpful.
[12:11.440 --> 12:14.540]  In criminal law also, there's working as an expert witness.
[12:14.840 --> 12:18.500]  Can you put on a suit and say the FBI lies for a living?
[12:18.660 --> 12:19.940]  Then you too can be an expert.
[12:20.160 --> 12:23.060]  The deal is that it works much better if you have a JD.
[12:23.060 --> 12:25.980]  And this is kind of a market forces thing.
[12:26.100 --> 12:35.240]  But if you don't believe me, just Google for JD-MD, as in medical doctor, and look at the legions of people who are hired out who are lawyers and doctors.
[12:35.360 --> 12:38.180]  And they consult as doctors, but in a legal field.
[12:38.300 --> 12:42.560]  And so being able to say, well, I am a lawyer actually, and this is what's wrong.
[12:42.560 --> 12:44.660]  This is where you broke the evidentiary rules.
[12:44.880 --> 12:50.540]  Because there are these incredible rules about what the government can introduce as evidence, and how they have to handle it.
[12:50.900 --> 12:55.580]  And it's not always clear in a digital realm when they break those rules anymore.
[12:55.840 --> 12:58.320]  And so you sometimes come in as an expert witness and say, no, no, no.
[12:58.420 --> 13:02.500]  This rule was broken by this action, which seems unrelated.
[13:02.880 --> 13:06.060]  And so both of those are working as a lawyer in criminal defense.
[13:06.300 --> 13:08.620]  One with a client, one without, but you get the same effect.
[13:10.760 --> 13:15.340]  You can work at civil law, which is not just suing MIT students off the stage at DEFCON.
[13:16.060 --> 13:18.740]  You can also sue Charlie Miller off the stage at DEFCON.
[13:18.940 --> 13:19.840]  Or at Black Hat.
[13:20.060 --> 13:20.920]  Or out of the Apple Store.
[13:21.720 --> 13:23.360]  Or any of the other hordes of people.
[13:23.600 --> 13:25.380]  And really a lot of things, actually.
[13:25.520 --> 13:29.880]  Civil law, for those of you who don't know, is everything you don't see on CSI Miami.
[13:30.920 --> 13:32.680]  It's not criminal law.
[13:32.800 --> 13:34.460]  It's basically the definition of civil law.
[13:35.000 --> 13:38.240]  So it's everything for patent litigation, although we'll talk about in a while.
[13:38.240 --> 13:42.700]  To, you know, companies, you know, sues a person or another company.
[13:42.900 --> 13:43.880]  To all sorts of cool things.
[13:44.960 --> 13:46.860]  Also, things like FOIA requests, right?
[13:46.900 --> 13:50.180]  When the EFF says, well, we had to actually file a suit in order to get these documents.
[13:50.400 --> 13:51.440]  That was civil law.
[13:51.940 --> 14:05.100]  So that's another area where, again, obviously you can see having some technical experience to be able to keep the MIT students on the stage at DEFCON, although they did solve it quite nicely using BitTorrent, would be very helpful, right?
[14:06.140 --> 14:07.980]  There's also legislative work, right?
[14:08.040 --> 14:09.440]  And we have how a bill gets thrown away.
[14:10.140 --> 14:13.380]  And, you know, these kinds of things need hordes of lawyers too, right?
[14:13.560 --> 14:16.560]  Hundreds of lawyers collaborated on SOPA and PIPA.
[14:16.560 --> 14:21.440]  And most of them worked for the entertainment lobbies, which is no surprise to anybody, right?
[14:21.760 --> 14:25.740]  And again, a lot of them didn't even understand the technical ramifications.
[14:26.160 --> 14:31.140]  There were huge problems with the DNS blocking involved in SOPA and PIPA, right?
[14:31.260 --> 14:37.200]  Bruce Schneier and Dan Kaminsky both went to Congress and said, look, you're going to block DNSSEC if you implement this law.
[14:37.200 --> 14:44.880]  You're going to break the security work we've been doing for 20 years that has a good shot of actually fixing some things if you try and implement this law.
[14:45.120 --> 14:56.360]  And so again, we end up needing another army of lawyers with actual technical experience because otherwise we get, well, I'm not a nerd and the lawyers tell me it's all fine because they were all hired by the MPAA.
[14:57.760 --> 14:59.920]  So I guess I don't have to listen to you, right?
[15:00.320 --> 15:06.900]  All of these things need to be done by lawyers in order to have the kind of influence that we seem to need as a community.
[15:07.520 --> 15:08.380]  Sad but true.
[15:09.460 --> 15:13.680]  There's also policy work which, you know, has lots of terrifying commissions and things.
[15:13.940 --> 15:26.120]  And the funny thing is that the vast majority of law in the United States isn't legislative law, like passed by Congress in an open meeting, or judicial law that you can look up in Lexis or if you've heard about in a case in a newspaper.
[15:26.400 --> 15:27.500]  It's administrative law.
[15:27.700 --> 15:31.920]  It's codes and regulations, the vast majority of which you can't even get access to for free anymore.
[15:31.920 --> 15:42.800]  Things like building codes and the FCC codes and rules for what has to go into an airplane and why they have those little locks that lock the handle of the coffee pot in the airplane.
[15:42.980 --> 15:46.800]  All those kinds of things fall into the category of administrative law.
[15:47.220 --> 15:52.280]  And again, this is another situation where we have armies of lawyers who don't understand technical issues.
[15:52.740 --> 15:55.520]  This is things like what happens with the patent examiners, right?
[15:55.560 --> 15:59.060]  The people who determined that software patents were totally fine because it looked novel to them.
[15:59.060 --> 16:06.320]  Because many of them don't have the computer science or otherwise hacker background that says, well, wait a minute, that's math, right?
[16:06.460 --> 16:07.740]  They came from a different field.
[16:07.840 --> 16:09.120]  Some of them might have been biologists.
[16:09.260 --> 16:10.780]  Some of them might have been psychologists.
[16:11.180 --> 16:14.040]  Other things that aren't necessarily the skills we need.
[16:14.200 --> 16:17.680]  And it's not that those other things are skills we don't need.
[16:17.740 --> 16:31.420]  It's that hackers as an entire group in all of our different fields are dramatically underrepresented because we refuse to wear suits or anything other than black t-shirts or just in general because we're too cool to do that and we're out doing other cool things.
[16:32.180 --> 16:34.520]  The problem is that we're losing this war, right?
[16:34.700 --> 16:36.620]  Net neutrality, some of you might have heard about.
[16:36.760 --> 16:38.100]  If you haven't, that's terrifying.
[16:38.320 --> 16:39.220]  Go read about it on Wikipedia.
[16:40.520 --> 16:45.540]  The reason net neutrality is important is because, as we all know, we don't ever get to do anything again, right?
[16:45.540 --> 16:49.760]  We don't get to even stream HOPE live anymore unless net neutrality happens.
[16:50.060 --> 16:55.860]  And the entire network neutrality actual process isn't something Congress is doing.
[16:56.000 --> 16:57.460]  It's something the FCC is doing.
[16:57.620 --> 17:01.480]  It's a rule-making process done by lawyers but not in the legislature.
[17:01.880 --> 17:04.420]  So again, another area where lawyers are needed.
[17:05.120 --> 17:07.400]  And then finally, of course, we have actually running for politics, right?
[17:07.520 --> 17:08.900]  You know, trying to run for elected office.
[17:09.320 --> 17:13.780]  And sure, yeah, you don't technically have to be a lawyer, but there's this kind of theory, right?
[17:13.780 --> 17:16.440]  You might have heard if you live on the Eastern Seaboard, which is that everybody in D.C.
[17:16.460 --> 17:16.940]  is a lawyer.
[17:17.480 --> 17:19.040]  And it's actually kind of terrifying.
[17:20.120 --> 17:25.460]  So this is from Congress merges a lobbying organization, but they let you search on criteria, which is kind of cool.
[17:26.580 --> 17:31.900]  So 206 members of Congress... I actually typed it wrong on the slide, but if you can add up a total...
[17:31.900 --> 17:35.620]  206 members of Congress are lawyers, right?
[17:35.680 --> 17:36.560]  So that's more than a third.
[17:38.200 --> 17:40.660]  And that's because lawyers tend to have the kind of influence.
[17:40.660 --> 17:52.660]  Both there are kind of interesting societal reasons why lawyers tend to become elected officials, which is that if they lose the next election, you can just kind of go back to law in the same way that you can't go back to a Ruby hacking career.
[17:53.480 --> 17:55.820]  But they also just get a lot of stuff done, right?
[17:55.900 --> 17:59.800]  They write a lot of bills because they know the legal term as opposed...
[17:59.800 --> 18:04.040]  You know, which might be have an execution as opposed to kill that guy, like they say in Texas.
[18:05.860 --> 18:08.080]  And these are, again, all of these different...
[18:08.080 --> 18:12.160]  All of these different areas are things that hackers care about and regularly rage against, right?
[18:12.220 --> 18:13.120]  Because they just don't understand.
[18:13.940 --> 18:16.100]  And all these are just some examples, right?
[18:16.160 --> 18:23.080]  As I hope this kind of list shows that you can do a huge number of things that aren't necessarily being an attorney per se, right?
[18:23.120 --> 18:24.640]  They're not... you have a client, right?
[18:24.640 --> 18:27.300]  Or you're representing the state against Joe Schmo hacker.
[18:28.500 --> 18:34.900]  There's lots of things where lawyers have a lot more influence, which becomes immediately clear if you just ask how many of the people in this room are lawyers, right?
[18:34.940 --> 18:35.800]  If you go to Congress.
[18:37.920 --> 18:39.040]  So what are we going to do?
[18:39.300 --> 18:40.280]  We're going to go to law school.
[18:40.940 --> 18:42.240]  That's what you end up having to do.
[18:42.300 --> 18:45.700]  As I said, this isn't an area in which you can legally be self-educated.
[18:46.660 --> 18:48.880]  And law school is kind of odd, right?
[18:49.000 --> 18:56.860]  Because law school, along with just a couple other schools, medical to some extent, veterinary, dentistry, is what we call a professional doctoral program.
[18:56.860 --> 19:03.500]  So those of you... I hope all of you in this room went to see Dr. Griffin's excellent talk on Friday about why you shouldn't write off graduate school.
[19:03.700 --> 19:07.280]  He was talking about academic graduate programs, research graduate programs.
[19:07.800 --> 19:09.120]  These don't involve research.
[19:09.280 --> 19:15.300]  Most law schools, you don't have to write a dissertation, or it certainly doesn't have to be a major achievement, and it doesn't take six years.
[19:16.560 --> 19:27.520]  And it's run by this awesome group called LSAC, which is the Law School Admissions Council, which is a group of law schools that is essentially all of the important law schools who control the entire admissions process.
[19:27.800 --> 19:30.260]  You have to apply through these guys.
[19:30.580 --> 19:38.440]  It's like Common App for those of you who have applied to college in the last couple decades, except that it's actually required rather than simply a suggestion.
[19:38.720 --> 19:40.160]  So you must apply through them.
[19:40.160 --> 19:42.780]  You must pay them a large fee.
[19:42.920 --> 19:46.600]  It's a couple hundred bucks, as I recall, to create your dossier.
[19:46.760 --> 19:56.760]  And then you must also pay them per each additional school that you apply to, just to send the dossier with all the information that you've created and sent to them to the law school.
[19:56.900 --> 19:58.920]  This is in addition to the fees you have to pay to the law school.
[19:59.540 --> 20:01.520]  By any other words, this is a cartel.
[20:01.600 --> 20:05.560]  But I can't legally say that because they're all lawyers, and we're not, right?
[20:06.940 --> 20:13.020]  So, it sounds cartel, it quacks like a cartel, but it's absolutely not a cartel, I promise, hand on heart, right?
[20:14.500 --> 20:16.840]  These guys have also... exactly, wrong slide, yes, thank you.
[20:18.000 --> 20:22.920]  These guys have also created this amazing thing which I want to talk about in some detail, which is the LSAT.
[20:23.360 --> 20:24.720]  So, quick poll.
[20:25.000 --> 20:30.120]  How many of you guys think that standardized tests accurately determine your worth as hackers?
[20:33.060 --> 20:36.140]  Right, but does that actually determine whether you're a good hacker or a bad hacker?
[20:38.700 --> 20:39.900]  Okay, well then, fair enough.
[20:40.040 --> 20:45.700]  Okay, so we've got one guy who thinks that the certified ethical hacker certification is awesome, right?
[20:46.360 --> 20:51.320]  Other than that, I mean, you know, seriously, it's just like the CISSP or CEH or whatever, right?
[20:51.400 --> 20:53.220]  It's not whether it's necessarily good or bad.
[20:54.160 --> 20:55.160]  LSAT's the way it is.
[20:55.280 --> 20:56.360]  You have to take it.
[20:56.460 --> 20:57.300]  There is no alternative.
[20:57.460 --> 20:58.840]  You cannot take the GRE instead.
[20:58.840 --> 21:00.060]  You cannot take anything else.
[21:00.660 --> 21:02.440]  And it's an amazing test.
[21:02.580 --> 21:04.060]  For one thing, it's still on paper.
[21:05.000 --> 21:06.500]  Now, just think about this for a second.
[21:06.700 --> 21:08.520]  We have computers, right?
[21:08.740 --> 21:22.080]  And the SAT is still on paper, but all the other professional schools, the business schools, the general graduate, the GRE, which is the graduate record exam which you take for academic programs, the MCAT, which is this eight-hour long horrifying test you have to take in to get a med school,
[21:22.120 --> 21:27.340]  and, of course, even CISSP now are all on computers, but not the LSAT.
[21:27.340 --> 21:28.360]  Why not?
[21:28.680 --> 21:35.740]  Well, it's because they want to fingerprint you and stick it on your Scantron sheet, which is weird, right?
[21:35.780 --> 21:38.900]  It's only one finger, so you can just cut that one off and not use it anymore, I guess.
[21:39.560 --> 21:40.940]  Don't have to retake it, though.
[21:41.020 --> 21:41.560]  That's important.
[21:42.300 --> 21:44.180]  Because you start running low on fingers quickly.
[21:46.380 --> 21:48.400]  Which is hard to explain, right?
[21:49.480 --> 21:51.160]  So, what is this weird test, right?
[21:51.400 --> 21:54.360]  We've determined we have to take the test in order to have this kind of influence.
[21:54.480 --> 21:56.140]  Remember, we're looking towards the goal, right?
[21:56.260 --> 21:57.340]  This is all the game.
[21:57.820 --> 21:58.360]  We're hackers.
[21:58.520 --> 22:01.240]  We're very good at playing the game to get to the goal, right?
[22:01.340 --> 22:03.640]  How many of you guys went to the social engineering talk last night?
[22:04.460 --> 22:04.540]  Right?
[22:04.960 --> 22:06.280]  Half, two-thirds of the room, okay?
[22:06.640 --> 22:12.760]  Those of you who went there noticed, well, we spent several minutes doing basic business research on what a subway is, right?
[22:12.860 --> 22:14.220]  And where their headquarters is, right?
[22:14.560 --> 22:19.520]  It's all what we have to do in order to get what we want, which is to make subway do weird things, right?
[22:20.640 --> 22:24.300]  So, you have to play this game, even though standardized tests are bad.
[22:24.500 --> 22:25.120]  I totally agree with you.
[22:25.220 --> 22:25.680]  That's all fine.
[22:25.780 --> 22:26.080]  Doesn't matter.
[22:26.700 --> 22:27.360]  What is LSAT?
[22:27.860 --> 22:33.040]  It's about half logic or reading comprehension and half weird little logic games.
[22:33.200 --> 22:36.040]  And it's kind of like logic games as designed by 1984.
[22:36.460 --> 22:40.760]  So, it's logic games where they lie to you, which is not really logic.
[22:42.380 --> 22:43.520]  It takes about four hours.
[22:43.680 --> 22:46.160]  It's about the same length as when you took your SATs, maybe a little longer.
[22:47.360 --> 22:50.340]  And it's basically 50% of your application.
[22:50.540 --> 22:52.120]  Right there is one number.
[22:52.420 --> 22:53.780]  Scored from 120 to 180.
[22:54.120 --> 22:56.840]  And for those of you who did well in math, it's a logarithmic scale.
[22:57.000 --> 22:59.360]  So, basically, you get one kid a year who gets a 180.
[23:00.860 --> 23:04.660]  And a few kids a year who get a 179 and so all the way down, right?
[23:04.980 --> 23:10.000]  If you get anything above a 150, 150 is the exact average score and median score.
[23:10.700 --> 23:13.680]  But, you know, the better you do, obviously, the better you get on it.
[23:16.280 --> 23:20.140]  And I know it's really cool in the hacker community to just cold take the exam, right?
[23:20.400 --> 23:22.840]  Some of you may have done this this morning where you just said, you know what?
[23:22.960 --> 23:24.240]  I want a ham radio license.
[23:24.240 --> 23:38.360]  And I know at DEFCON, when I've given exams at DEFCON, you can sit down, having never done anything, walk in, just be awesome, and walk out with three exams passed, 15 bucks paid, and you can now do anything the FCC can license an amateur to do.
[23:39.320 --> 23:41.040]  Don't do that for this.
[23:41.840 --> 23:43.940]  One thing costs, like, a couple hundred bucks.
[23:44.140 --> 23:48.000]  Another couple hundred bucks paid to the same guys who are totally not a cartel.
[23:49.640 --> 23:51.800]  The other thing is it's only given a couple times a year.
[23:52.340 --> 23:57.300]  And the third thing is when you send your scores to a school, they send all of your scores.
[23:57.300 --> 24:00.900]  Even the score you took drunk while not bothering to study.
[24:01.600 --> 24:03.780]  And again, it's not a test on knowledge, right?
[24:03.800 --> 24:08.600]  It's not like the MCAT, for those of you who've heard of friends who've gone to medical school, or doctors yourselves.
[24:09.080 --> 24:13.300]  It's a test on logic and weirdness, but they write everything in a weird way, right?
[24:13.360 --> 24:14.600]  Again, it's logic games that lie to you.
[24:15.560 --> 24:17.120]  Go to Barnes and Noble, right?
[24:17.600 --> 24:19.560]  Physical books, they do still exist, right?
[24:21.180 --> 24:25.080]  Get a test book, take a couple tests, just so you see what it is.
[24:25.200 --> 24:25.920]  Very important.
[24:26.120 --> 24:27.060]  What do you mean by logic?
[24:27.780 --> 24:30.820]  I mean, they're logic games where some of the things they say are irrelevant.
[24:31.060 --> 24:33.680]  Some of the things they say are directly in contradiction to other things they say.
[24:34.340 --> 24:37.400]  And in the LSAT, the rule is you have to pick the best answer.
[24:38.080 --> 24:39.280]  Not the correct answer.
[24:39.420 --> 24:41.580]  Because there are often all five correct answers.
[24:42.440 --> 24:43.540]  So I mean they lie to you.
[24:43.800 --> 24:45.260]  Or substantively lie to you.
[24:46.000 --> 24:46.400]  Weird.
[24:47.280 --> 24:49.380]  So yeah, get a $30 exam book.
[24:49.560 --> 24:50.120]  It's not a big deal.
[24:50.240 --> 24:53.660]  Something like the CISSP all in one exam book that costs like $400.
[24:54.420 --> 24:56.060]  Get it, run through a couple exams.
[24:56.060 --> 24:57.380]  You'll see it's not impossible.
[24:57.600 --> 24:59.000]  But it is a different style of thinking.
[24:59.440 --> 25:02.080]  And it's not a style of thinking that's like lawyers, just in case you're wondering.
[25:02.520 --> 25:05.680]  It's a style of thinking that's like accountancy, basically.
[25:05.980 --> 25:06.900]  Nothing wrong with accountants.
[25:07.020 --> 25:07.720]  It's just different.
[25:08.200 --> 25:08.880]  And it's weird.
[25:09.040 --> 25:10.540]  And the reason for that we'll talk about in a bit.
[25:10.620 --> 25:14.500]  But it comes down to the fact that most lawyers don't do what you see on CSI Miami.
[25:14.500 --> 25:15.980]  Or on law and order.
[25:16.200 --> 25:16.600]  Or whatever.
[25:16.840 --> 25:16.900]  Right?
[25:16.980 --> 25:17.540]  Even the wire.
[25:19.460 --> 25:23.820]  Most lawyers sit in offices and never leave their house.
[25:25.260 --> 25:26.160]  Or office, rather.
[25:26.540 --> 25:28.260]  And that's not the kind of lawyers you guys want to be.
[25:28.360 --> 25:30.420]  But you have to take this test with all the kind of lawyers.
[25:31.220 --> 25:36.060]  So the other essentially half of your exam is another three letter acronym.
[25:36.420 --> 25:36.520]  Right?
[25:36.840 --> 25:37.840]  We love this one.
[25:37.960 --> 25:38.020]  Right?
[25:38.100 --> 25:39.200]  It's the grade point average.
[25:40.060 --> 25:40.420]  Yay.
[25:41.240 --> 25:42.240]  And let's be clear.
[25:42.320 --> 25:44.480]  Those of you who are all going now, oh crap.
[25:44.700 --> 25:49.360]  I didn't do so well in undergrad because they didn't understand me because I wore black t-shirts and didn't shower very often.
[25:50.040 --> 25:50.580]  It's okay.
[25:50.740 --> 25:52.520]  You don't need to have a four point to go to law school.
[25:52.620 --> 25:53.800]  Even a really great law school.
[25:54.340 --> 25:56.120]  The deal is that you have two numbers.
[25:56.300 --> 25:58.120]  Your LSAT score and your GPA score.
[25:59.000 --> 26:00.880]  And all those of you are going at this point, well wait.
[26:01.040 --> 26:05.480]  Don't you have to write essays and all this personal information and send your resume in just like I did in his undergrad?
[26:05.980 --> 26:06.300]  Yes.
[26:06.520 --> 26:07.060]  Does it matter?
[26:07.340 --> 26:07.660]  No.
[26:09.340 --> 26:10.760]  And this makes me sad.
[26:10.940 --> 26:11.100]  Right?
[26:11.280 --> 26:12.300]  I like writing.
[26:12.480 --> 26:14.420]  I like getting up on stage and making a fool of myself.
[26:14.560 --> 26:17.960]  I would love to be able to go and you say, you should just let me in because I'm hilarious.
[26:18.140 --> 26:18.280]  Right?
[26:18.340 --> 26:19.000]  And I'll make you laugh.
[26:19.680 --> 26:21.180]  And unfortunately you can't.
[26:22.000 --> 26:31.060]  And this is especially depressing if you did hard science or engineering in undergrad, which is a field where your GPAs just tend to be lower than the other schools.
[26:31.260 --> 26:31.360]  Right?
[26:31.460 --> 26:34.320]  So you'll probably have a lower GPA than a history major might have.
[26:34.540 --> 26:38.380]  Not because the one program is harder than the other, but just that's how it seems to work nationally.
[26:39.280 --> 26:44.400]  Other depressing truth I learned while doing this process, if you have a master's degree, they ignore it.
[26:44.460 --> 26:45.200]  It doesn't matter.
[26:45.420 --> 26:48.740]  The fact that you've gone on and done higher research, completely irrelevant to these people.
[26:49.840 --> 26:52.040]  And how much do they care about each other?
[26:52.280 --> 26:54.700]  Well, this is going to be the soul-killing calculator demo.
[26:55.280 --> 27:00.620]  So if you go, which I will do right now, to LawSchoolPredictor.com, which is a real site.
[27:00.680 --> 27:01.580]  And yes, it's using WordPress.
[27:01.900 --> 27:05.320]  And please refrain from ponying it until after I've done the next five seconds.
[27:08.280 --> 27:09.880]  So we're going to punch in an LSAT score.
[27:09.880 --> 27:10.180]  Right?
[27:10.320 --> 27:11.880]  And I'm going to say 165.
[27:12.900 --> 27:12.940]  Right?
[27:13.020 --> 27:13.700]  Which is kind of a...
[27:13.700 --> 27:16.720]  It's a pretty good score, but not an impossible score by any means.
[27:16.840 --> 27:16.920]  Right?
[27:17.240 --> 27:19.820]  We're talking, you know, thousands of people will get this score every year.
[27:20.000 --> 27:21.220]  Because again, the logarithmic scale.
[27:22.000 --> 27:22.700]  And a GPA.
[27:22.940 --> 27:24.260]  And we're going to say, well, I did okay.
[27:24.540 --> 27:24.720]  Right?
[27:24.800 --> 27:26.800]  It's not a great score, but it's an okay score.
[27:26.880 --> 27:28.680]  It's a good score for an engineering or hard science.
[27:28.780 --> 27:29.940]  And see, I got a 3.2.
[27:31.200 --> 27:33.760]  And I'm just going to say, well, I'm not an underrepresented minority.
[27:33.840 --> 27:34.740]  I'm a white male.
[27:34.920 --> 27:37.540]  So that kind of stuck in terms of underrepresented minority.
[27:37.720 --> 27:39.520]  And I'm going to say, agree to terms of use.
[27:39.800 --> 27:40.020]  Right?
[27:40.540 --> 27:45.800]  This will be the last time, by the way, you agree to the terms of use without reading them anymore.
[27:45.960 --> 27:47.120]  You will start reading these things.
[27:47.940 --> 27:49.780]  And we get a big bar full of colors.
[27:50.300 --> 27:51.460]  And this is depressing.
[27:51.780 --> 27:52.940]  Lots of denied up at the top.
[27:53.040 --> 27:54.400]  But this is like Harvard.
[27:54.520 --> 27:55.540]  You don't want to go to Harvard.
[27:55.720 --> 27:55.800]  Right?
[27:55.860 --> 27:58.600]  All the MIT kids are going to make fun of you and you're going to feel unleet.
[27:59.900 --> 28:02.740]  But you go here and there's lots of really great schools here.
[28:02.980 --> 28:04.800]  Like Loyola, Chicago, Case Western Reserve.
[28:04.980 --> 28:05.800]  Lots of cool schools.
[28:06.060 --> 28:12.700]  And I will tell you, depressingly, this was 100% accurate for me and every person I know in law school.
[28:14.100 --> 28:15.060]  That's terrifying.
[28:15.340 --> 28:15.660]  Right?
[28:16.000 --> 28:19.180]  All the yellow bars were places I was waitlisted.
[28:19.340 --> 28:21.600]  All the green bars in both types were places I got in.
[28:21.800 --> 28:24.280]  All the red and orange bars are where I got denied.
[28:25.580 --> 28:26.540]  That's horrifying.
[28:26.660 --> 28:27.820]  What the heck happened?
[28:28.340 --> 28:28.440]  Right?
[28:28.600 --> 28:29.780]  Why is it that simple?
[28:29.880 --> 28:33.340]  You only need two numbers and they can tell you where you can go to law school.
[28:33.720 --> 28:34.740]  Well, I'll tell you why.
[28:34.920 --> 28:36.460]  It's because of U.S.
[28:36.560 --> 28:37.320]  News and World Report.
[28:38.960 --> 28:39.940]  Which you've heard of.
[28:40.080 --> 28:40.340]  Right?
[28:40.540 --> 28:41.540]  They did your colleges.
[28:41.760 --> 28:47.380]  Your parents probably poured over them saying, well, you know, the difference between 53 and 54 is probably totally important.
[28:47.820 --> 28:49.420]  Though it's really not most of the time.
[28:51.440 --> 28:56.380]  All college rankings and all academic graduate school rankings are done in different ways.
[28:57.360 --> 28:59.260]  College things have some student surveys.
[28:59.520 --> 29:05.400]  Academic graduate school rankings tend to be, we ask your professors at every school what professors they know at other schools.
[29:05.540 --> 29:08.480]  And the professors who are known by everybody are at the best school in that field.
[29:08.960 --> 29:11.220]  In law schools, it is just these two numbers.
[29:11.720 --> 29:14.920]  So the law schools, because it's a professional degree.
[29:15.120 --> 29:15.200]  Right?
[29:15.280 --> 29:16.840]  You're looking forward to a job.
[29:17.000 --> 29:17.060]  Right?
[29:17.120 --> 29:20.200]  Or in our case, to changing the world in the way we want it to be changed.
[29:21.320 --> 29:22.980]  They're competing on the numbers.
[29:23.240 --> 29:24.040]  And they're competing on the ranks.
[29:24.200 --> 29:27.000]  And people think it makes a big difference whether you go to number 10 or number 9.
[29:27.180 --> 29:29.600]  And so they fight for the students with the best LSAT and GPA.
[29:30.040 --> 29:31.840]  Because that's all that determines their rankings.
[29:33.360 --> 29:33.720]  Horrifying.
[29:33.960 --> 29:35.880]  Like, really terrifying, actually.
[29:37.840 --> 29:41.700]  As far as I can tell, social engineering, your way to get into law school hasn't worked since about 1980.
[29:41.940 --> 29:42.720]  It did used to work.
[29:43.380 --> 29:44.300]  Hasn't worked since then.
[29:46.100 --> 29:48.340]  I'm incredibly glad I didn't know about this when I applied.
[29:49.540 --> 29:50.600]  So why am I showing you?
[29:50.760 --> 29:51.500]  Because it makes me sad.
[29:52.520 --> 29:55.320]  Because it would have saved me about $1,000 in application fees.
[29:55.440 --> 29:57.020]  To schools that are all bright red.
[29:57.260 --> 29:57.320]  Right?
[29:57.380 --> 29:58.180]  And those weren't my numbers.
[29:58.320 --> 30:00.880]  Now, I won't tell you which schools I got denied from that make me cry at night.
[30:02.340 --> 30:06.940]  But it'll just save you a lot of time if you just apply to schools you can actually reasonably get into.
[30:07.140 --> 30:07.280]  Right?
[30:07.340 --> 30:09.580]  That doesn't mean don't apply to some schools in the orange bars.
[30:09.640 --> 30:10.240]  You might get lucky.
[30:10.520 --> 30:11.660]  Some people do every year.
[30:12.000 --> 30:13.880]  That's why it's weak and sitter instead of just deny.
[30:13.880 --> 30:22.580]  But most people won't get into those because it is just a numbers game for all but like one person on the tail end of a 200 person class.
[30:23.660 --> 30:25.980]  Are the equations for the schools known?
[30:26.880 --> 30:27.820]  That's an interesting question.
[30:27.920 --> 30:29.180]  So are the equations for the schools known?
[30:30.480 --> 30:33.740]  Outside of about the top 30, yes.
[30:33.740 --> 30:35.360]  They publish their ranking.
[30:35.520 --> 30:37.460]  Now they say this is only one factor.
[30:37.800 --> 30:39.520]  And it ends up being kind of a point system.
[30:39.820 --> 30:40.220]  Right?
[30:40.280 --> 30:43.480]  Just like you might have heard about in undergrad or in some Supreme Court cases about this.
[30:43.600 --> 30:49.460]  It ends up you get this number and then we take that number and throw away your resume and then let you in based on the number.
[30:50.020 --> 30:51.320]  For the top schools, no.
[30:51.660 --> 31:00.560]  But what they do is they pay hundreds of law students from across the range every year to apply to all these schools and check as their numbers move every year.
[31:01.240 --> 31:02.660]  They just pay them for the numbers.
[31:02.800 --> 31:02.820]  Right?
[31:02.920 --> 31:07.560]  Because it's not against any rules to tell them where you got in and where you didn't and where you're outside and where your GPA was.
[31:07.840 --> 31:09.960]  So these are hilariously accurate.
[31:10.280 --> 31:12.480]  Like, way beyond standard deviations.
[31:12.600 --> 31:14.060]  They publish all their methods on their website.
[31:14.280 --> 31:15.640]  Again, LawSchoolPredictor.com.
[31:15.720 --> 31:18.120]  Not affiliated but crying at night.
[31:19.600 --> 31:21.260]  So an aside about the admissions process.
[31:22.100 --> 31:23.780]  Most schools don't have an interview.
[31:23.940 --> 31:25.860]  Again, something you might have done from undergrad.
[31:26.040 --> 31:29.500]  You almost definitely did if you went to an academic graduate school.
[31:29.500 --> 31:32.060]  Most schools don't have an interview process.
[31:32.360 --> 31:35.520]  Some allow it, which can be cool if you want to go and visit the law school.
[31:35.720 --> 31:37.040]  You should certainly visit before you go.
[31:37.620 --> 31:38.960]  But you might do it after you're admitted.
[31:39.660 --> 31:45.100]  And a couple schools, Northwestern is certainly one that's very open about this, require an interview.
[31:45.300 --> 31:52.180]  Or make it essentially a require, you must go to Chicago and spend a day downtown and go to the theater and improv or something.
[31:52.520 --> 31:54.340]  And also hang out with them for half an hour.
[31:55.360 --> 31:58.620]  So at this school, which is totally not Northwestern, I had this interesting experience.
[31:58.800 --> 32:01.140]  The interviewer sits down and says, Ah, your name is Brendan O'Connor.
[32:01.400 --> 32:02.040]  Yes, it is.
[32:02.300 --> 32:04.440]  He goes, Oh, well my maiden name is O'Connor.
[32:04.580 --> 32:06.300]  And actually my brother's name is Brendan.
[32:06.940 --> 32:09.120]  And he's actually a security researcher too.
[32:10.680 --> 32:11.320]  Like, seriously.
[32:12.500 --> 32:13.200]  And I'll explain.
[32:13.480 --> 32:14.860]  So there is another Brendan.
[32:15.000 --> 32:17.540]  There are actually two other Brendan O'Connors who were published in the ACM.
[32:18.560 --> 32:20.240]  And I said, Oh, is he the one from Stanford?
[32:20.800 --> 32:21.660]  Yeah, he was.
[32:21.760 --> 32:22.440]  That's where he did his work.
[32:22.820 --> 32:23.300]  Go on.
[32:23.420 --> 32:28.960]  Then I interviewed, which may be the worst question from an interviewee to the interviewer in the history of all interviews everywhere.
[32:29.240 --> 32:31.540]  Which is, is he the one who was killed by the CIA?
[32:32.840 --> 32:34.000]  Which totally makes sense.
[32:35.640 --> 32:37.220]  He stopped publishing in 2006.
[32:37.420 --> 32:38.000]  It was very unclear.
[32:38.260 --> 32:39.420]  I talked to a bunch of people at DEFCON.
[32:39.520 --> 32:40.880]  They all said, Ah, he was killed by the man.
[32:41.280 --> 32:42.080]  Okay, sure, fine.
[32:42.680 --> 32:45.300]  Turns out he just works for a company where they don't let him publish anymore.
[32:45.300 --> 32:48.860]  And so I started getting his press request in about 2007.
[32:50.380 --> 32:52.440]  This weirded out the interviewer.
[32:53.080 --> 32:54.000]  As it turns out.
[32:54.100 --> 32:58.120]  This will not be the last time I've weirded out everybody in the room and they'll take a nice step back from me.
[32:59.180 --> 32:59.860]  But it happens.
[32:59.980 --> 33:01.280]  Anyway, it was funny, actually.
[33:01.440 --> 33:03.740]  She thought it was kind of cool once it explained what the heck I was smoking.
[33:03.980 --> 33:06.080]  She then denied my application and life went on.
[33:07.860 --> 33:08.380]  The same.
[33:08.560 --> 33:10.420]  So, you did all these things.
[33:10.540 --> 33:11.200]  You played this game.
[33:11.320 --> 33:12.900]  You wrote a bunch of essays, which they'll never look at anyway.
[33:13.040 --> 33:15.140]  But do write them because they will deny you if you don't write them.
[33:15.140 --> 33:15.700]  It's a game.
[33:15.860 --> 33:16.700]  You have to play the game.
[33:16.940 --> 33:18.720]  Because again, look towards the goal, right?
[33:18.820 --> 33:19.400]  The game sucks.
[33:19.540 --> 33:21.260]  We're going to look towards the goal of changing the world.
[33:21.320 --> 33:23.760]  And we have to be lawyers to change the world in this particular way.
[33:23.840 --> 33:24.520]  It's the way it works.
[33:24.940 --> 33:25.640]  So you got in.
[33:26.380 --> 33:27.580]  That's Bucky, by the way.
[33:27.680 --> 33:30.900]  For those of you who have grown up in the Midwest know that he's kind of a big deal in Wisconsin.
[33:31.560 --> 33:35.020]  I went to a school that had the worst football team in Division III.
[33:35.540 --> 33:44.500]  So seeing the police escort the football team for my new school in on like the first day, because to keep them away from their hordes of adoring fans was weird for me.
[33:45.040 --> 33:46.900]  Anyway, so he's a badger.
[33:47.360 --> 33:50.140]  And if you can explain that to me, do tell me at some point.
[33:50.240 --> 33:51.380]  But anyway, that's a badger apparently.
[33:51.640 --> 33:53.220]  And he's kind of a big deal in Wisconsin.
[33:53.440 --> 33:54.520]  And that's a hilarious photo.
[33:54.620 --> 33:55.840]  That was law school orientation.
[33:57.260 --> 34:03.400]  For 150 to 200 new students, we had three kegs and two hours to drink them and Bucky to help.
[34:05.060 --> 34:06.240]  Welcome to law school, right?
[34:06.320 --> 34:07.160]  Welcome to Wisconsin.
[34:07.360 --> 34:08.480]  It's a great time.
[34:08.660 --> 34:09.580]  It's very different from undergrad.
[34:10.860 --> 34:12.200]  Also here, you got in.
[34:13.460 --> 34:14.520]  The cost, right?
[34:14.800 --> 34:15.800]  This you may recognize.
[34:15.800 --> 34:17.180]  Those of you who don't know, I'll just tell you.
[34:17.300 --> 34:25.480]  This was the picture sent by Matt Inman from The Ode Meal to Charles Carrion, a lawyer who ridiculously proved he does not understand the Internet.
[34:26.020 --> 34:29.000]  Another lawyer who proved why we need more lawyers who understand the Internet.
[34:29.300 --> 34:30.540]  Otherwise, that happens to you.
[34:31.540 --> 34:31.840]  All right.
[34:31.940 --> 34:33.520]  Law school doesn't have to be super expensive.
[34:33.840 --> 34:37.280]  There's been a lot of articles in the New York Times about how law school is super expensive.
[34:37.780 --> 34:38.480]  Two things.
[34:39.260 --> 34:44.160]  One, if you live in a state, law school, your state has a law school.
[34:44.300 --> 34:44.880]  Just full stop.
[34:45.020 --> 34:46.620]  All states in the union have a law school.
[34:46.700 --> 34:48.000]  At least one, usually a bunch.
[34:49.300 --> 34:50.640]  And some of them are state schools.
[34:50.800 --> 34:54.200]  And you get in-state tuition even for law school in almost all of them.
[34:54.200 --> 34:56.680]  It's usually higher than in-state undergrad tuition.
[34:56.980 --> 35:03.220]  But just to give you an idea from my own experience, if you live as a resident of the state of Wisconsin, it will cost you about $9,000 a year to go to law school.
[35:03.860 --> 35:05.240]  That's incredible, right?
[35:05.680 --> 35:13.600]  To give you a comparison, Yale, the number one of those red bars I had, costs something like $55,000 a year in tuition.
[35:13.820 --> 35:14.920]  And that's not out of band.
[35:15.060 --> 35:16.180]  Wisconsin costs a lot less than that.
[35:16.260 --> 35:17.480]  It's more like $40,000 for out of state.
[35:17.480 --> 35:19.280]  But we're talking a massive difference.
[35:20.420 --> 35:24.580]  If you're not from the state where I grew up, your law school is really good.
[35:24.800 --> 35:28.500]  Most of the state schools are in tier one or tier two, which means they're in the top 100 schools.
[35:28.900 --> 35:30.240]  They're good schools of law.
[35:30.420 --> 35:31.100]  Do consider them.
[35:31.400 --> 35:37.000]  If you have money or if you can get a scholarship because your two numbers were awesome, go to other schools.
[35:37.000 --> 35:39.680]  But it doesn't have to cost a world-ending amount of money.
[35:40.280 --> 35:48.160]  The other thing is that law school almost 100%, the only great law school I can think of off the top of my head that doesn't have a part-time program is Yale.
[35:48.320 --> 35:50.080]  So every other law school will have a part-time program.
[35:50.080 --> 35:51.620]  So you can keep working and go to school at night.
[35:52.300 --> 35:55.400]  And the difference in terms of time it takes isn't a huge amount.
[35:55.540 --> 35:57.240]  If you go to law school full-time, it's three years.
[35:57.520 --> 36:00.940]  If you go to law school part-time, it is by and large four years to complete the degree.
[36:02.920 --> 36:04.740]  Northwestern is a two-year, but I assume it's full-time, right?
[36:04.840 --> 36:06.000]  Like really, really full-time.
[36:06.000 --> 36:07.020]  Cool, so yeah.
[36:07.140 --> 36:10.480]  So you can go to Northwestern, which costs more, but you spend less time.
[36:10.680 --> 36:17.420]  So it doesn't have to end your world in terms of, you know, massive debt, the way that friends of mine who are in medical school are worried about.
[36:17.680 --> 36:17.920]  Yeah?
[36:18.360 --> 36:24.260]  What's the correlation between school you graduate from and your earnings success five years after you graduate?
[36:24.340 --> 36:26.600]  We'll talk about that some a little bit later, if you don't mind waiting.
[36:26.720 --> 36:27.020]  Is that okay?
[36:27.320 --> 36:29.420]  But if I don't hit it to your satisfaction, harass me.
[36:29.720 --> 36:32.720]  Do you realistically get full rides?
[36:34.060 --> 36:34.740]  Some people did.
[36:34.820 --> 36:39.460]  I have a friend who got full rides to Yale, Harvard, and Northwestern, all three.
[36:40.060 --> 36:43.400]  Actually, Northwestern conditional on the fact that she take a year off.
[36:43.660 --> 36:51.300]  They wanted to give her basically $150,000 to take a year off, do stuff, and then come back and study law with them.
[36:52.000 --> 36:53.540]  But she had incredible scores.
[36:53.680 --> 36:56.620]  I won't tell her your scores or who she is, but anyway, yeah, she had incredible scores.
[36:56.740 --> 36:58.520]  You can get full rides based on those two numbers.
[36:59.040 --> 37:04.880]  It's not like academic graduate schools where almost everybody isn't paying any tuition at the doctoral level, though.
[37:05.100 --> 37:06.580]  Most people will pay at least some tuition.
[37:07.280 --> 37:10.060]  So, and again, if you're in your state, you may have scholarships.
[37:10.360 --> 37:14.400]  And if you're paying $50,000 a year, $2,000 or $3,000 a year sounds like nothing.
[37:14.400 --> 37:16.620]  If you're paying $10,000, it sounds like an awful lot.
[37:21.200 --> 37:22.180]  Depends on the state.
[37:22.360 --> 37:23.820]  Residency requirements depend on the state.
[37:24.540 --> 37:29.420]  I know in Wisconsin, you have to be living there for non-academic reasons for a year.
[37:29.960 --> 37:31.960]  I think California has a similar requirement.
[37:32.420 --> 37:33.940]  In Montana, we have no requirement.
[37:34.080 --> 37:36.720]  If you're willing to move to Montana like 10 days before, go for it.
[37:37.800 --> 37:41.980]  And I'll just tell you, those laws tend to be directly correlated with how good your state schools are.
[37:42.540 --> 37:43.480]  That's all there is to it.
[37:45.260 --> 37:48.760]  So, yeah, we will discuss the law school bubble that you were talking about later.
[37:50.080 --> 37:50.880]  So, reading.
[37:51.260 --> 37:53.200]  You're going to do a lot of reading in law school.
[37:53.300 --> 37:54.820]  And it's not just man pages.
[37:55.480 --> 37:57.160]  Which is both cool and not, right?
[37:57.260 --> 38:00.140]  Everybody in this room reads at a ridiculously high rate of speed.
[38:00.140 --> 38:02.160]  Just on average across the community, right?
[38:02.500 --> 38:04.300]  Individual differences don't really matter.
[38:05.120 --> 38:09.480]  My first year of law school has been weird compared to my friends at other law schools.
[38:09.580 --> 38:12.620]  I've had about 30 or 40 pages per class per week.
[38:12.940 --> 38:15.060]  Usually, it's more like 100 pages per class per week.
[38:15.140 --> 38:16.320]  But you're only taking four classes.
[38:17.060 --> 38:19.080]  And it's like pages, like in a book, right?
[38:19.200 --> 38:21.480]  You will tear through this at a hilarious rate.
[38:21.880 --> 38:23.120]  Any of you guys ever played a MUD?
[38:23.300 --> 38:25.740]  Remember text-based games before we had World of Warcraft?
[38:25.900 --> 38:25.980]  Right?
[38:26.080 --> 38:26.180]  Yeah.
[38:26.480 --> 38:28.480]  You guys will be great at this, right?
[38:28.560 --> 38:29.540]  You'll tear through this.
[38:29.720 --> 38:30.740]  And it's actually cool.
[38:30.740 --> 38:33.040]  It's a lot more interesting than 400 pages of man pages.
[38:33.500 --> 38:36.240]  Because there's hilarious stories in all of these things.
[38:36.600 --> 38:38.680]  So some of the courses you're going to have to take...
[38:38.680 --> 38:42.240]  So let's take these examples from the Man Bites Dog School of Journalism, right?
[38:42.460 --> 38:44.500]  If a man bites... if a dog bites a man, it's irrelevant.
[38:44.680 --> 38:46.820]  If a man bites a dog, it's a great story.
[38:47.160 --> 38:49.640]  So these are basically your first-year courses.
[38:50.160 --> 38:53.760]  Your torts, which is what happens when a man bites another man, right?
[38:54.320 --> 38:54.740]  Property.
[38:54.740 --> 38:57.280]  What happens when a man bites you and then takes all your stuff?
[38:58.300 --> 38:58.700]  Contract.
[38:59.320 --> 39:00.480]  Part one, a man.
[39:00.660 --> 39:01.760]  Part two, we'll do stuff.
[39:01.940 --> 39:02.860]  Part three, with another man.
[39:04.100 --> 39:04.960]  Not what you're thinking.
[39:05.540 --> 39:06.280]  Criminal procedure.
[39:06.660 --> 39:08.520]  A man pops a cap in your butt.
[39:09.540 --> 39:10.300]  Civil procedure.
[39:10.760 --> 39:13.540]  A man says bad things about you and you sue him.
[39:14.480 --> 39:14.880]  Wills.
[39:15.000 --> 39:16.440]  A man dies, leaves everything to his dog.
[39:17.080 --> 39:17.480]  Evidence.
[39:17.640 --> 39:20.040]  A man cuts off his finger to keep away from the man.
[39:20.600 --> 39:21.880]  This time, the big man.
[39:22.340 --> 39:22.580]  Yeah.
[39:23.020 --> 39:26.020]  All of these things have happened and all of them will happen again.
[39:26.660 --> 39:27.060]  Seriously.
[39:27.460 --> 39:31.480]  Even in constitutional law, we have examples where a man says, suck it to the president.
[39:32.020 --> 39:33.700]  Which is awesome, right?
[39:33.900 --> 39:36.200]  You know, you get to read all of these incredible stories.
[39:36.380 --> 39:37.560]  And they are hilarious.
[39:38.120 --> 39:39.840]  I'll give you a couple examples, right?
[39:39.960 --> 39:40.720]  Because they're funny.
[39:42.660 --> 39:44.380]  A patriarch of the family dies.
[39:44.540 --> 39:45.060]  Very sad.
[39:45.240 --> 39:45.640]  Expected.
[39:45.820 --> 39:46.800]  Dies surrounded by his family.
[39:47.280 --> 39:49.200]  The funeral home says, okay, we'll take him.
[39:49.280 --> 39:50.200]  We'll prepare him for the wake.
[39:50.580 --> 39:52.440]  We'll send you his personal effects in a couple days.
[39:52.440 --> 39:55.500]  Because we have the other suit you want him to be wearing when he's at the funeral.
[39:55.940 --> 39:56.800]  And they all say, fine.
[39:56.940 --> 39:59.660]  A couple days later, courier shows up at the door.
[39:59.940 --> 40:01.500]  The family is all sitting around having tea.
[40:02.680 --> 40:04.000]  The guy says, okay, here's his effect.
[40:04.120 --> 40:05.080]  They say, thank you very much.
[40:05.160 --> 40:05.840]  The courier leaves.
[40:06.120 --> 40:06.920]  They sit down around.
[40:07.020 --> 40:08.140]  They say, well, we should look at these.
[40:08.280 --> 40:10.680]  And, you know, look at his watch he wore for 30 years.
[40:10.680 --> 40:11.740]  They open up the box.
[40:12.820 --> 40:14.260]  And it's a dismembered leg.
[40:16.460 --> 40:18.840]  It's a dead leg, bloody on the side, on there.
[40:19.840 --> 40:21.980]  And they go, oh my God, they cut off grandpa's leg.
[40:22.080 --> 40:23.780]  It turns out they didn't even cut off grandpa's leg.
[40:23.860 --> 40:26.000]  It was something that had come from a medical school.
[40:26.260 --> 40:32.540]  It was entirely unclear how this had gotten to this family or these 17 different people who had to be fired in order to fix this problem.
[40:33.480 --> 40:36.880]  And seriously, this was day three of torts at 8:30 in the morning.
[40:37.020 --> 40:38.840]  That will wake you up, boys and girls.
[40:39.660 --> 40:41.220]  This happens all the time, right?
[40:41.260 --> 40:45.580]  We have a house that was haunted as a matter of law in property, right?
[40:45.600 --> 40:49.340]  That's a very famous... if you just search for haunted as a matter of law, you can read this case, which is hilarious.
[40:49.740 --> 40:56.420]  We have a case in civil procedure where a lawyer threw a bunch of Barbie dolls at opposing counsel on video.
[40:57.720 --> 40:59.420]  And this is the lawyer, right?
[40:59.420 --> 41:03.600]  This is the guy who's supposed to be there sitting in the suit and being quiet and thoughtful.
[41:04.140 --> 41:05.800]  This stuff happens and it's hilarious.
[41:06.060 --> 41:10.320]  All the same kinds of rape stories you have in any other hacker domain you will have in law school.
[41:10.480 --> 41:11.640]  And so, again, the reading is fun.
[41:11.960 --> 41:14.240]  Which is cool because you're going to have to do a bunch of it, right?
[41:14.300 --> 41:14.840]  As I mentioned.
[41:15.820 --> 41:21.120]  And your expected behavior is to... because of all the reading is to sit and cram in the library 24 hours a day.
[41:21.380 --> 41:22.980]  You will have classmates who do this.
[41:23.220 --> 41:24.020]  Don't do this.
[41:24.080 --> 41:25.120]  It will make you sad.
[41:26.600 --> 41:30.740]  And you don't need to because you read fast and you can get it, right?
[41:30.740 --> 41:32.280]  And you're reading and you take a couple notes.
[41:33.040 --> 41:34.540]  And that's all you're going to do.
[41:36.180 --> 41:41.120]  All those of you who've graduated from an engineering field or a science field or really any field are going, wait, what about homework?
[41:41.800 --> 41:48.080]  You don't have any homework in law school, full stop, for all but one or two classes total during your career.
[41:49.220 --> 41:49.980]  Why is that?
[41:50.140 --> 41:51.320]  Well, it's because we have this.
[41:51.980 --> 41:55.680]  We have high-stakes secure testing, which is awesome.
[41:56.060 --> 41:58.560]  Tests in law school pretty much across the board.
[41:58.560 --> 42:00.900]  Don't hold me to this if there's some law school who does this differently.
[42:01.200 --> 42:04.220]  But for the vast majority of law schools, this is it.
[42:04.280 --> 42:05.620]  This is 100% of your grade.
[42:06.420 --> 42:09.180]  And note that I'm quoting from a fact here in my picture.
[42:09.320 --> 42:10.060]  What is exam four?
[42:10.160 --> 42:24.280]  So exam four is the software that we and like 50 other law schools use to secure our testing environment, which means you run this software and then it locks down your system so you can't have network access to talk with lawyers, I guess, during your test,
[42:24.380 --> 42:24.480]  right?
[42:24.480 --> 42:26.140]  This isn't like an A, B, or C exam.
[42:26.240 --> 42:29.120]  This is a four-hour essay for every course, basically.
[42:29.320 --> 42:30.380]  So I don't know why that would be helpful.
[42:30.720 --> 42:31.900]  But let's assume it is.
[42:32.040 --> 42:33.560]  So it's an armored word processor.
[42:33.960 --> 42:35.280]  And you can see...
[42:36.640 --> 42:38.740]  Yeah, you can see this important line.
[42:39.060 --> 42:41.180]  Nothing else can get in or out.
[42:42.020 --> 42:43.740]  How many of you think that's a great idea?
[42:44.080 --> 42:44.240]  Right?
[42:44.980 --> 42:45.700]  Yeah, that's what I thought.
[42:46.260 --> 42:46.940]  I did.
[42:47.080 --> 42:47.920]  I will just...
[42:47.920 --> 42:49.600]  I'm just going to tell you this so that you don't do this.
[42:49.600 --> 42:58.520]  I did try and sit down with the dean of academics and finally the full dean of law to explain the halting theorem and why this could not possibly work and we can prove it using math.
[42:59.100 --> 42:59.920]  Don't do that.
[43:00.300 --> 43:01.680]  It just weirds them out.
[43:02.960 --> 43:04.120]  It doesn't help.
[43:04.340 --> 43:05.400]  They just say, well, it's secure.
[43:05.900 --> 43:06.500]  It's not.
[43:06.640 --> 43:08.240]  But it says secure in the box, right?
[43:08.420 --> 43:11.200]  This is like the greatest Symantec group ever, right?
[43:11.300 --> 43:12.420]  They just love it, right?
[43:12.520 --> 43:13.640]  And Symantec didn't make this.
[43:13.840 --> 43:14.760]  There's two or three members.
[43:14.880 --> 43:15.920]  You're going to have to do this.
[43:16.020 --> 43:16.620]  It's spyware.
[43:16.940 --> 43:18.440]  As far as I can tell, it does turn off.
[43:18.440 --> 43:19.920]  Yes, it does know if you use VMware.
[43:20.260 --> 43:22.460]  No, it doesn't know if you use IDA Pro.
[43:22.760 --> 43:24.560]  So go forth and be merry, right?
[43:25.420 --> 43:29.140]  So this is 100% of your final grade and it's going to be curved really tightly.
[43:29.540 --> 43:30.160]  How tightly?
[43:30.560 --> 43:41.360]  In a typical class in Wisconsin with 40 kids, the center of the curve, both median and average, has to be between a 2.95 and a 3.05.
[43:42.460 --> 43:45.060]  And there will be probably one A.
[43:46.240 --> 43:49.680]  That means that you're on the dean's list if you get a 3.3 average.
[43:51.040 --> 43:52.740]  It's a really tight curve.
[43:52.840 --> 43:53.660]  And this is generally true.
[43:53.760 --> 43:57.520]  The median is going to move at every different school, but generally you're going to have this really tight curve.
[43:57.960 --> 43:59.960]  And all you have to do is beat everybody else.
[44:01.100 --> 44:02.100]  And that's not hard.
[44:03.080 --> 44:03.700]  It's really not.
[44:03.780 --> 44:04.740]  We'll talk about that in a second.
[44:04.740 --> 44:06.320]  So it's high-stakes testing.
[44:06.460 --> 44:07.420]  It determines your whole thing.
[44:07.520 --> 44:10.580]  But remember, if you pass, you get to graduate, right?
[44:10.940 --> 44:14.780]  So some of you will now be saying, I don't have to go to classes because there's no homework.
[44:14.900 --> 44:15.620]  And that's entirely right.
[44:15.740 --> 44:17.300]  Bill Clinton famously did that at Yale Law.
[44:18.140 --> 44:21.640]  Go to the classes because the professors will tell you more hilarious stories.
[44:21.820 --> 44:24.500]  Most of your professors were insane people.
[44:26.320 --> 44:27.280]  That's why they're in law school.
[44:27.280 --> 44:36.440]  One of my brother's professors at another law school I won't name, told his students about how he had been disbarred twice, which means they unlawyer you.
[44:37.660 --> 44:47.600]  And between the first disbarment and after they reinstate him, and before the second disbarment, he was a major criminal defense attorney, and he decked the prosecutor in front of the jury.
[44:49.120 --> 44:51.280]  And that wasn't why they disbarred him.
[44:53.280 --> 44:54.760]  This is amazing, right?
[44:54.780 --> 44:56.600]  We get incredible stories every single day.
[45:00.760 --> 45:02.260]  You pretty much don't memorize cases.
[45:02.540 --> 45:03.280]  You read the cases.
[45:03.420 --> 45:04.300]  You have to understand the rules.
[45:04.800 --> 45:06.020]  It's all about learning the rules.
[45:09.640 --> 45:10.340]  You've got the book.
[45:10.840 --> 45:13.800]  So the question is, don't you still have to cite these cases, so don't you really need to memorize them?
[45:13.820 --> 45:14.440]  The answer is still no.
[45:14.680 --> 45:18.000]  You almost always have the book if you need to cite directly to a paragraph of the case.
[45:19.240 --> 45:20.480]  If you need to do that.
[45:20.600 --> 45:22.040]  If not, again, it's about the rules.
[45:22.340 --> 45:26.040]  So you can, you know, so like one of my courses this last semester was international on.
[45:26.100 --> 45:26.860]  I didn't have the book.
[45:26.860 --> 45:28.740]  But the rule is pretty simple.
[45:29.240 --> 45:32.620]  International law applies until it's the United States and then it doesn't.
[45:33.100 --> 45:34.280]  So it's a great rule, right?
[45:34.360 --> 45:35.800]  And I can memorize that just fine.
[45:37.100 --> 45:39.900]  I'm going to talk briefly about lawyers and alcohol because it's actually kind of a thing.
[45:40.120 --> 45:41.260]  So hackers drink a lot.
[45:41.380 --> 45:41.940]  I've actually been shot.
[45:42.040 --> 45:42.800]  I've never been to HOPE before.
[45:43.020 --> 45:47.060]  And having been to DEFCON several times, I was like, wow, there aren't people being carried out of talks?
[45:47.200 --> 45:47.660]  How odd.
[45:49.340 --> 45:51.520]  Law schools drink more than coders.
[45:51.720 --> 45:52.100]  It's amazing.
[45:52.780 --> 45:58.620]  20% of law as a profession is a clinically diagnosed alcoholic according to the American Bar Association.
[46:00.020 --> 46:00.820]  It's amazing.
[46:02.460 --> 46:03.900]  So just keep aware of that.
[46:04.260 --> 46:05.100]  It will drive you to drink.
[46:05.240 --> 46:06.780]  And the reason it drives you to drink is really simple.
[46:06.780 --> 46:12.380]  Because in your first year, for me, 830 every morning, we'd learn about kids who were torn apart by elevators.
[46:12.540 --> 46:18.040]  Or kids who were dragging a wire and got electrocuted by an overhead tray, right?
[46:18.220 --> 46:19.680]  Mostly torts drives you to drink.
[46:21.020 --> 46:28.060]  It becomes really easy to sit in a bar and study and just say, he died four days later after they poured bleach on the hospice guy?
[46:28.460 --> 46:29.420]  Yeah, I'll have another.
[46:30.960 --> 46:31.800]  Keep it in mind.
[46:31.800 --> 46:33.120]  I'm not going to tell you not to drink.
[46:33.140 --> 46:33.580]  I drink.
[46:33.720 --> 46:34.100]  It's fine.
[46:35.040 --> 46:37.560]  But just keep it in mind because it is an actual thing.
[46:37.980 --> 46:46.300]  And you see, every day, you'll see newspapers saying another judge or another lawyer was disbarred due to being unable to handle these cases anymore.
[46:46.960 --> 46:50.780]  So it's just something to keep in mind because it does start really early and it was weird to me.
[46:52.620 --> 46:54.000]  So, you're in law school now.
[46:54.220 --> 46:56.600]  You've got the general idea and you're going to look like this to them.
[46:56.840 --> 46:58.020]  Even if you don't, right?
[46:58.100 --> 47:02.940]  If you come in wearing a black t-shirt and black shorts, which I totally do most of the time, you will stand out.
[47:03.460 --> 47:04.020]  Here's why.
[47:05.200 --> 47:06.700]  This is your typical law student, right?
[47:06.780 --> 47:07.960]  Okay, this is a little bit of a straw man.
[47:09.600 --> 47:12.480]  Your typical law student majored in something non-technical, right?
[47:12.740 --> 47:17.900]  Journalism, English and classics, CISSP, things that don't really matter to you, right?
[47:18.460 --> 47:20.140]  This isn't to say those are bad fields.
[47:20.360 --> 47:21.500]  Those are great fields, right?
[47:21.560 --> 47:23.640]  And a lot of them have a lot of application to the law.
[47:23.760 --> 47:25.920]  A lot of our law hasn't changed for 3,000 years.
[47:26.040 --> 47:28.440]  So if you've done a classics major, it can be fascinating to you.
[47:29.160 --> 47:32.180]  But these are the people who then end up not understanding the Internet.
[47:32.780 --> 47:35.520]  A lot of law students have never held a job.
[47:35.760 --> 47:38.780]  They've gone straight from high school into college into law school.
[47:39.220 --> 47:44.240]  Most people in this room probably have held some sort of job or worked for DARPA or done all sorts of cool things.
[47:45.020 --> 47:54.120]  And more importantly, most importantly, they never understand a system so well that they can see both what it is, how it's doing it, and why it's the way it is.
[47:54.660 --> 47:57.300]  And this is important because this is what hackers do, right?
[47:57.360 --> 47:58.400]  This is our bread and butter.
[47:58.580 --> 48:01.360]  We look at a system, we understand why it is and how it's going to do it.
[48:01.360 --> 48:04.440]  This is your biggest strength is understanding the stories behind the cases.
[48:04.760 --> 48:16.480]  Understanding that we have weird case law on the environment in Tennessee that informs contract law because, well, the coal mining companies just paid off the justices and we actually have those historical records now.
[48:17.020 --> 48:26.120]  Seeing how that works, what Wisconsin famously calls law in action, which they swear is not the same thing as, well, sometimes you win and sometimes you throw a Molotov.
[48:27.740 --> 48:28.880]  That happened in Montana.
[48:29.160 --> 48:35.900]  I don't think it's happened in Wisconsin, although we did just have a Supreme Court justice try to choke out another Supreme Court justice twice.
[48:38.060 --> 48:39.340]  I'll let you just Google for that.
[48:39.900 --> 48:47.080]  But ultimately, what is a lawyer looking for is an analogy of law saying, well, this is how it happened before, so this is how it's going to happen again, basically the same, right?
[48:47.500 --> 48:53.240]  We have the same rationale behind restful systems as behind property law, right?
[48:53.240 --> 48:56.160]  The same basic actions will happen in every situation.
[48:56.600 --> 48:58.580]  That's why hackers are going to be good at this.
[48:59.600 --> 49:01.600]  And this is what they think we are, right?
[49:02.500 --> 49:03.780]  And they get scared of us.
[49:04.020 --> 49:05.960]  And this turns them into very small dictators.
[49:07.060 --> 49:12.440]  And you're going to have this situation where they say, well, you should really do Moot Court because otherwise you're not going to find a job.
[49:12.660 --> 49:14.400]  Sorry to come back to the question from before.
[49:15.640 --> 49:17.780]  And you can just ignore them if you want.
[49:18.060 --> 49:22.280]  You don't have to play every single little puppet fiefdoms game.
[49:22.460 --> 49:23.120]  You just don't.
[49:23.760 --> 49:28.140]  But you need to be aware that they're going to exist because it's going to piss you off as a law student.
[49:29.020 --> 49:30.140]  So play the game.
[49:30.480 --> 49:31.820]  Remember again what the goal is.
[49:31.900 --> 49:34.360]  Because our goal is we're trying to change the world in the way that we think.
[49:34.740 --> 49:35.260]  We're trying to...
[49:35.260 --> 49:37.980]  It's not that there are no hackers that are lawyers.
[49:37.980 --> 49:40.020]  Alex Muentz spoke earlier in this conference.
[49:40.180 --> 49:43.960]  He's a very well respected computer security person and also a very important lawyer.
[49:44.500 --> 49:46.020]  There are people who do this, right?
[49:46.100 --> 49:46.960]  And they do it very well.
[49:47.260 --> 49:48.520]  The problem is there aren't enough.
[49:48.840 --> 49:50.300]  And so we end up with laws like SOPA and PIPA.
[49:50.460 --> 49:51.980]  So again, keep your mind on the goal.
[49:52.420 --> 49:53.880]  Which is we're trying to change the world, right?
[49:53.920 --> 49:54.960]  There's no better goal than that.
[49:55.100 --> 49:56.520]  We're trying to remake it in our own image.
[49:57.280 --> 49:58.500]  And of course, I'm not really helping the situation.
[49:58.640 --> 49:59.840]  That is what my desk looks like at home.
[50:01.220 --> 50:03.280]  But don't be afraid of this being odd, right?
[50:03.460 --> 50:07.560]  Because ultimately, like, yeah, there's social pressure to do what they want.
[50:07.560 --> 50:13.640]  Especially there's social pressure from the science fields, or for the science fields, people who did this as their background, to go into patent law.
[50:13.820 --> 50:15.180]  There's nothing wrong with being patent attorneys.
[50:15.620 --> 50:18.580]  But since only we can do it, they say, well, you should totally do that.
[50:19.140 --> 50:23.100]  Don't be afraid to say, well, actually, I find con law interesting or I find criminal law interesting.
[50:23.240 --> 50:27.880]  Because all of these different ways, I hope I showed you this earlier, can have a massive influence on the entire field.
[50:28.080 --> 50:37.180]  So don't be afraid of being odd, which most of you guys were, but it's weird when you come back to school and you're still odd and you've kind of gotten used to working in a cohort of people who are mostly like yourself.
[50:37.180 --> 50:40.080]  This will feel different to you, or at least it sure as heck did to me.
[50:42.000 --> 50:43.500]  And you is who we need, right?
[50:43.500 --> 50:45.220]  I mentioned the bubble in legal education earlier.
[50:45.480 --> 50:49.820]  And some lawyers are having a real hard time getting jobs and therefore having a hard time paying off their loans.
[50:49.940 --> 50:50.720]  And here's the short answer.
[50:50.960 --> 50:57.480]  Those are the students who went straight on, never did anything outside of school, and bring no extra skill sets to the table.
[50:58.040 --> 50:59.060]  You guys are hackers.
[50:59.220 --> 51:00.760]  You can explain what the heck is going on.
[51:00.760 --> 51:03.100]  You can see things before they happen, right?
[51:03.160 --> 51:03.960]  It's like the force.
[51:05.100 --> 51:06.280]  This is who they want.
[51:06.780 --> 51:12.380]  So if you're applying from a 150th ranked school with no experience, you're going to have a hard time finding a job.
[51:12.760 --> 51:24.080]  If you're in tier one or tier two, which is the two groups of 50 at the top, and you come to the table with actual interesting skills and experiences and stories, it hasn't historically proven to be a problem.
[51:24.640 --> 51:25.780]  Does that mean it's going to be trivial?
[51:25.940 --> 51:26.100]  No.
[51:26.100 --> 51:30.380]  But if we only solve trivial problems, we wouldn't have these conferences, right?
[51:30.580 --> 51:36.000]  If we only solve problems that really were kind of just could be done by anybody, who cares, right?
[51:36.020 --> 51:36.860]  No one would ever come to hope.
[51:37.000 --> 51:42.420]  The reason people think hackers are interesting, even though they seem to be terrified of us, is because we can solve these big problems.
[51:42.680 --> 51:44.300]  And we need to solve these problems.
[51:44.920 --> 51:47.460]  And so just a side note, how do you stay you?
[51:47.620 --> 51:49.360]  Well, go to these places.
[51:49.500 --> 51:50.460]  These are awesome, right?
[51:50.980 --> 51:52.300]  Go to your local hackerspace.
[51:52.420 --> 51:57.020]  If you're not a member, when you go to school, go join your local hackerspace, because it'll help you stay sane.
[51:58.320 --> 52:03.760]  Don't be afraid to kind of let your inner nerd out and breathe for a minute after spending all day around your lawyer friends.
[52:05.120 --> 52:13.060]  Shout out to all my friends in Sector 67, who've kept me more or less sane, even though I one time glued both my hands together using a very expensive medical grade polyurethane.
[52:14.300 --> 52:17.540]  And I had to wash my hands in kerosene for 10 minutes.
[52:17.660 --> 52:18.340]  I don't recommend that.
[52:18.460 --> 52:18.800]  It's unpleasant.
[52:18.980 --> 52:20.060]  It doesn't hurt, but it's unpleasant.
[52:21.760 --> 52:23.820]  Law school doesn't mean stopping hacking either.
[52:24.000 --> 52:27.800]  As I mentioned before, this doesn't take a huge amount of time if you can read quickly and remember what you've read.
[52:28.380 --> 52:29.380]  So do other things.
[52:29.540 --> 52:34.720]  I did a DARPA CFT contract, full start to finish, during Spring semester.
[52:35.560 --> 52:36.360]  Just the whole thing.
[52:37.320 --> 52:39.120]  You can do other stuff, promise, right?
[52:39.200 --> 52:41.820]  And you can pay for law school like that, which is kind of cool if you didn't get a scholarship.
[52:43.540 --> 52:47.480]  Don't be afraid to keep doing the stuff you like, just because you're in law school, right?
[52:47.560 --> 52:48.880]  It's not like college.
[52:49.140 --> 52:50.620]  It isn't the only thing you can do.
[52:50.720 --> 52:53.700]  That's why you can do a part-time degree in four years, just an extra year.
[52:56.120 --> 52:57.260]  And then go buy a suit.
[52:57.560 --> 52:58.360]  You do need a suit.
[52:58.680 --> 53:00.200]  I'm running out of time, so I'm just going to tell you.
[53:01.020 --> 53:01.660]  Indochino.com.
[53:02.180 --> 53:03.200]  I'm not being paid for them.
[53:03.360 --> 53:03.880]  Here's the deal.
[53:03.960 --> 53:05.980]  They have YouTube videos of how you can measure yourself.
[53:06.140 --> 53:07.680]  They will send you the right kind of tape measure.
[53:07.680 --> 53:10.960]  You punch in all your numbers, and then they send you suits that just fit you.
[53:11.280 --> 53:12.220]  And I'm me.
[53:12.500 --> 53:13.740]  This is a thing for me.
[53:14.780 --> 53:15.780]  It'll just work, right?
[53:15.820 --> 53:16.500]  It'll be really cool.
[53:16.660 --> 53:17.660]  Just seriously, Indochino.
[53:18.680 --> 53:19.960]  Then you work in legal internships.
[53:20.160 --> 53:21.100]  You work in legal jobs.
[53:21.300 --> 53:23.620]  Your first couple years is a lot like being a junior hacker, right?
[53:23.820 --> 53:25.480]  You do the stuff nobody else wants to do.
[53:25.640 --> 53:26.220]  The research.
[53:26.500 --> 53:27.700]  The stuff you're good at, right?
[53:27.800 --> 53:30.040]  The solving the problem or finding the underlying metaphor.
[53:30.780 --> 53:31.940]  And then you get to get out.
[53:32.400 --> 53:33.480]  And then you're done.
[53:33.800 --> 53:35.180]  And then you get to hack the law.
[53:36.060 --> 53:37.340]  This is the goal we want, right?
[53:37.900 --> 53:39.220]  All of these different areas.
[53:39.440 --> 53:43.240]  Lawyers are making an incredible difference every single day just because they're lawyers.
[53:44.580 --> 53:45.880]  And they're not hackers.
[53:46.540 --> 53:49.440]  And so what we need is more of you guys to take this on.
[53:50.580 --> 53:51.820]  There's lots of cool stories.
[53:51.920 --> 53:55.020]  I'm going to tell you one really short one because otherwise I'm going to be yanked off of here with a cane.
[53:55.580 --> 53:56.280]  US v. Jones.
[53:56.380 --> 53:57.300]  How many of you know what that was?
[53:58.160 --> 53:58.860]  A few of you.
[53:59.460 --> 54:03.660]  And all of you have heard of it because this is the warrantless GPS tracking by the FBI.
[54:03.660 --> 54:04.120]  Okay?
[54:04.460 --> 54:09.420]  So I got to meet the lawyer who argued US v. Jones and won before the Supreme Court just a couple days ago actually.
[54:09.640 --> 54:10.500]  He's a really cool guy.
[54:12.520 --> 54:18.300]  And how he won was he did something pretty hackerish, although he certainly wouldn't describe it that way to the system.
[54:18.560 --> 54:27.160]  He got a lot of really strange people together and made them all write what are called amicus briefs, which is letters to the court essentially saying don't do this dumb thing.
[54:27.340 --> 54:28.040]  Do it the right way.
[54:28.780 --> 54:37.140]  So people on his amicus briefs included the National Rifle Association and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who are not known for collaborating well together.
[54:37.360 --> 54:38.940]  Not that they couldn't, but they just don't, right?
[54:39.260 --> 54:43.640]  And the American Motorists Association, which is like AAA but different.
[54:44.080 --> 54:47.560]  And the Tea Party and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, right?
[54:48.240 --> 54:50.700]  This was weird and they all thought it was odd.
[54:51.300 --> 54:52.900]  And it worked, right?
[54:53.280 --> 54:57.420]  We have a 9-0 decision saying that the FBI can't do this one illegal thing.
[54:57.820 --> 55:00.040]  That battle isn't over and he's the first one to say that.
[55:00.160 --> 55:02.880]  He's working on the next Supreme Court case that's going to be a problem about this.
[55:02.960 --> 55:03.940]  It'll be in about two years.
[55:04.760 --> 55:08.700]  But we have a little bit more privacy, a little bit longer because we thought outside the box.
[55:09.900 --> 55:13.220]  You succeed ultimately in this field by making the rules do what you want.
[55:14.040 --> 55:15.440]  Because there's still going to be rules, right?
[55:15.500 --> 55:16.380]  You don't get to change all the rules.
[55:16.500 --> 55:19.100]  You just get to exploit the rules until they're your rules.
[55:19.480 --> 55:21.040]  That sounds pretty familiar to me, right?
[55:22.360 --> 55:23.520]  This is what we're already doing.
[55:23.580 --> 55:25.160]  And we need all of you to do this.
[55:26.320 --> 55:27.020]  Thanks very much.
[55:40.010 --> 55:44.130]  And I'm pretty sure I've burned all of my time, but I'm wearing black and white and stripey.
[55:44.230 --> 55:45.150]  So come find me.
[55:45.230 --> 55:48.550]  I'm happy to talk to any of you guys who have questions about individual process or whatever.
[55:48.550 --> 55:49.210]  Thank you all.
[55:52.480 --> 55:57.500]  So my friend worked on the Google Oracle case where they did win.
[55:57.760 --> 56:00.340]  And the whole thing about why didn't they...