Richard Thieme celebrates speaking for Def Con for fifteen years by discussing the deepest truths he knows and relating them to Big Picture hacking.
Thieme references the most fervent explorations of his life, from immersion in the works of the Society for Psychical Research while living in England as a young man to conversations with remote viewers in the governmentís Stargate program to thirty years of research in UFO reports (in particular, experiences of ìstrangenessî such as spacetime distortion and telepathic knowledge transfer) to the passionate, obsessive exploits of real hackers and what they discover when boundaries dissolve - all in a context of his own anomalous experiences. He talks about the background for 'Mind Games', his recently published collection of nineteen stories of brave new worlds and alternate realities, which he wrote after a friend at NSA told him, ìThe only way you can tell the truth now is in fiction. He also discusses why another NSA friend warned that he was 'over the line' in the hall of mirrors as a result of his conversations with dark side actors and victims alike. He weaves all this together in the kind of narrative usually reserved for private conversations but which he feels he owes Def Con colleagues and friends after fifteen years of enthusiastic and mutual knowledge-transfer.