Coding for Liberty: On the Ground at Rand Paul’s Presidential Hackathon

Virtually everyone at #HackForRand brings up privacy rights and the National Security Agency within ten seconds of explaining why they’re here, and the goal of the hackathon -- a 24-hour marathon competition of programming judged by a three-person panel -- is to work on building an app that advances “liberty and privacy.” The “liberty and privacy” directive comes from Ron Schnell, the CTO of Sen Rand Paul’s (R-TX) Presidential campaign, whose job it is to build a tech-soaked Republican political machine that even Silicon Valley can get behind. "I know all of you care about privacy, and that’s why the theme of this hackathon is privacy and liberty,” Schnell, also a competition judge, told the couple-dozen attendees as the event kicked off. “We know the Valley cares a lot about privacy, we don’t want to see the government building backdoors into our systems."

The first-place team would be whisked away to an undisclosed location (later on, someone told me Monterey) to meet the Senator in person, and both first- and second-place winners would receive copies of the Constitution signed by Sen Paul himself. The grand prize went to Team Checkmate, a trio of French aerospace software engineers who had driven up from Orange County (CA) the day before. Schnell said their secure payments system, a nifty tool that uses biometric authentication (ie a fingerprint) instead of a password, couldn’t be used on the Paul campaign because of regulations. Still, he and the other two judges were impressed with the “innovative” hack.