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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.
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.
He is clearly well fed, but considering going hungary, or maybe Venezuela.
I think I've Spotted a Fed. Do I win something?
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.
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
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.
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