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DEF CON Advises Feds Not To Attend Conference
tsu doh nimh writes "One of the more time-honored traditions at DEF CON — the massive hacker convention held each year in Las Vegas — is 'Spot-the-Fed,' a playful and mostly harmless contest to out undercover government agents that attend the show each year. But that game might be a bit tougher when the conference rolls around again next month: In an apparent reaction to recent revelations about far-reaching U.S. government surveillance programs, DEF CON organizers are asking feds to just stay away: 'I think it would be best for everyone involved if the feds call a "time-out" and not attend DEF CON this year,' conference organizer Jeff Moss wrote in a short post at Defcon.org. Krebsonsecurity writes that after many years of mutual distrust, the hacker community and the feds buried a lot of their differences in the wake of 911, with the director of NSA even delivering the keynote at last year's conference. But this year? Spot the fed may just turn into hack-the-fed."
I have never really been comfortable with having the Feds in there in the first place. Anyone in government can potentially serve in a prosecutorial role, and the government has demonstrated over the years they are perfectly willing to demonize hackers if it serves a need. Thinking about Mitnick, Gonzales, and a bunch of other guys who got railroaded here, along with 2600 meetings where we would get interrogated just for showing up to have coffee.
It's a little like inviting the fox into the henhouse to have these guys around. Pretending that they care about the hacker community is a little hard for me to do.
I imagine after being asked NOT to attend, they will be FAR more interested in attending.
I am guessing they are generally physically fit with short cut hair.
Just because you "know" you'll get beaten when walking around in a Ku Klux robe in Queens, New York at night (which is perfectly legal afaict), this doesn't mean beating you up is allowed, and that it isn't a crime that should be prosecuted.
Please... would DEFCON organizers be so kind to ask the spooks to stay out not only of the conference but out of the entire citizens life? Thanks.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
The Feds who show up and identify themselves as Feds aren't the Feds you need to worry about anyway.
Are they? Do you actually have any inside knowledge of the NSA and what they do, beyond what you read int eh papers and hear on /. ? Like any fed agency it's largely ordinary civil service just doing a day to day job to feed their family. Most of them are ordinary people no more deserving of your hate (and yes, it is bigoted hate, oriented around their job instead of race or creed) than anyone else. Most of them are probably doing harmless innocuous work, or actually tracing workable intelligence leads towards the bad guys. the few actually involved in "the bad stuff" we all hate are probably the same ordinary civil service workers who just "doing their job" and give no more thought to the moral rightness of what theyre doing than a Chevy worker does as he tightens the same nut 50k times a day as the line moves past.
Your unreasonably unlimited hate and vitriol only helps fuel the problem.
Beleive it or not the intelligence community does serve a useful purpose, and the scandal is only one facet of them.
Better to narrow your focus only towards the ones actually responsible, the ones in charge, politician and appointee alike, who decided they needed to violate our rights to "keep us safe". Hating them all is unreasonable and no different than any other unreasonable guilt-by-association based hatred through history.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
If you think the Feds you knew were there were the only Feds there, you're an idiot.
Personally, were I an FBI wonk, I'd have long-ago made penetrating DEFCON a priority on so many levels and so long ago that I'd have deep-penetration spooks in the leadership today, guiding policy. That's practically Machiavelli 101.
Hell, I'd have even doubled-up, and sent honeypot Feds to BE hacked/cracked/busted, so the Defcon kids would feel like they were winning, ala:
http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/8581/4puc.jpg
(SFW aside from PG13 language).
-Styopa
Does "Fed" include all the people in that room who are contractors for various federal agencies?
Does anyone believe that being once removed by virtue of a private company makes you any less part of the police state?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, you lose. What you spotted was a reasonable person with a brain.
Sometimes, in rare moments, these ordinary people do extra ordinary things (Mr. Snowden) to help shine a light on a corrupt system; corrupt from the top down, not so much the bottom up. Most times they come to work like most people, processing paper work, managing information, and trying to make it to the end of the day so they can enjoy life. As the GP said, save the vitriol for those that make policy or even better, if you don't like the current batch of policy makers, work to get rid of them in the next round of elections.
If that was your attempt at humor...try again.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
I agree with this to an extent, but "just following orders" generally doesn't cut it. Of course this case is more nuanced than genocide, but the principal is the same.
No of course not. That's the problem.
You could use the exact same defense for the Stasi. East Germans had no nice and official documentation about what they did, unless they worked for them. Were they therefore not entitled to have an opinion about it?
Are they? Do you actually have any inside knowledge of the NSA and what they do?
I'm not convinced. I've not seen conclusive evidence. Oh sure, I'm sure they stop a terrorist now and then, but the question is whether the threat they themselves pose to liberty is worse than the threats they deal with.
History suggests it is: people have vastly overestimated external threats compared to the threat from people nominally tasked with defending them.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Many of these large acts of evil can't happen without a lot of support from average people. So long as the average people in the NSA just doing their jobs help organizations like the NSA to remain staffed an operational they are complicit in the dirty dealings of the organization.
The leaders do share a huge share of the ethical burden but definitely not all of it. They could not do what they do without so many people willing to help them and so many people that consider something to be just a job and don't look at the ethical issues at all.
I wish we knew a lot more about these organizations. They should receive positive feedback when they operate the right way and negative when they act the wrong way. Right now they only get negative and I doubt the organization is universally bad but without both reinforcements and greater public awareness along with people unwilling to do these immoral acts it is very hard to get change.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
We've heard that "Just following orders" defense somewhere before... You might want to Google that and see how those trials turned out. The fact that they are mindless drones in a machine that is performing reprehensible acts, but hold no hate for their victims themselves, does not make them innocent. After Snowden, anyone willing working for the NSA and not looking for work elsewhere is approving of and endorsing their crimes.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
So your argument is they are just following orders? That's pretty funny.
Like any fed agency it's largely ordinary civil service just doing a day to day job to feed their family. Most of them are ordinary people no more deserving of your hate (and yes, it is bigoted hate, oriented around their job instead of race or creed) than anyone else.
Would you make the same arguments about e.g. Al Qaeda's accountant? Or the contractors on the Death Star?
Most of them are probably doing harmless innocuous work
If you sweep the floors for the enemy, you're still working for the enemy.
Beleive it or not the intelligence community does serve a useful purpose
Only useful to those interested in projecting American hegemony across the planet for all of eternity.
the same ordinary civil service workers who just "doing their job" and give no more thought to the moral rightness of what theyre doing than a Chevy worker does as he tightens the same nut 50k times a day as the line moves past.
And that's the problem. They're morally negligent, that's no better than being morally wrong. Remember, the only thing required for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. These people aren't just doing nothing, they're providing support.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Yeah, this.
I'm sure that throughout the decades there were perfectly normal and nice people that participated in the KKK. I imagine in some regions it was more of a BBQ-club than a hate-mongering organization. That people joined simply due to the social stigma of not joining, they liked their neighbors, and oh yeah, ra ra white power.
But that doesn't matter, because the leadership of that organization is bat-shit anti-social insane. And by being in that group the members gave legitimacy to those leaders and provided them power. A nutter with just his cats to talk isn't a political threat. It's not a voting bloc. It's not an establishment that people in power care about. The nutter can still be dangerous all by himself, but not the sort of social force that the KKK represented. The leaders of the KKK aren't a big threat if they don't have anyone to lead.
I don't particularly blame people working in federal positions for the atrocities of the federal government across the board. The postal worker in town didn't torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The US general in Iraq didn't illegally spy on US citizens. But they do share some of the blame just for being in the same group. The same way that I share some of the blame by being a US citizen. (Because we run this town, right? Right!?)
But I 100% completely blame the NSA workers associated with this spying project for being complacent about it's violation of the US constitution. I've worked places where the broad governing rules were paid lip service, and everyone generally agreed that we should be following them, but specifically disagreed about how we were blatantly violating them because of excuse excuse excuse, it's-special-in-this-case. If the hammer came down, EVERYONE in that company deserved to be hit. I know, I know, you wants to keep your job, you don't want to rock the boat, and you think you're doing some good in the world. So pass the buck. Send an email. Ask the boss in a very traceable and and blunt way. Do that and now it's HIS problem. Give him some time to decide if he wants to double-down on doing something illegal or if he wants to fix it. If he doesn't fix it, GO OVER HIS HEAD. Because it's good for the company/government/society to fix these problems. In the long run.
And if you can't trust the official channels, fuck it, blow that whistle.
Most times they come to work like most people, processing paper work, managing information, and trying to make it to the end of the day so they can enjoy life.
And why does that excuse them from assisting evil? These people have a moral responsibility to evaluate the system that they are working in.
As the GP said, save the vitriol for those that make policy
Policy doesn't do anything if there aren't people to carry out that policy. Those who choose to help carry out bad policy are bad people.
if you don't like the current batch of policy makers, work to get rid of them in the next round of elections.
Was that *your* attempt at humor? We tried getting rid of the neocons in 2008, look at what that got us. Democracy is well and truly broken in the US. You're not going to do anything from the top down. Only when the people rise up will real change happen.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!