DEF CON Advises Feds Not To Attend Conference 250
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."
Uncomfortable Relationship (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Uncomfortable Relationship (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretending that they care about the community is a little hard for me to do.
Fixed that for you.
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FTFY
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Teaching the Feds about the difference in hacking and cracking, blackhat, greyhat and whitehat, seems to me not to be such a bad idea.
Problem with the Feds are they are puppets, and will do anything they're told to do to pocket their salaries.
Too often in such situations, knowledge of right and wrong goes out the window.
The problem with public knowledge and hardened security is that it's against grand interestrates for the 0.01%.
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You can't teach a pig to bark. Well, maybe a really exceptional pig.
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I think DEF CON should invite some Chinese government types to give talks about jobs in chinia... not because I want them to get any help from DEF CON but because I want to see the eye's and ear's of the FEDs to bleed when they realize what they they have done. They have pissed off the lurking stench in the darkness. That which lives in darkness craves hot-pockets.... O and sell scary magical computer knowledge to the enemy. Their magic can make doors lock and computers explode with the force of a brick of
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Re:Uncomfortable Relationship (Score:5, Insightful)
No, its people like us they recruit. Of those 5,000, I can guaruntee that at least 4,000 were the type that would attend DEFCON, BEFORE, they starting working for the feds. Their good people are us. All institutions and movements survive by recruiting. The Feds have good people because people like us decide to work for them. They really need to remember that.
No, WE really need to remember that. Then remember how we get treated by society, the press, the legal system, etc...
Then think how well they get treated.
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as with most sub-cultures, counter-cultures, its not that they misunderstand you, its they PURPOSEFULLY misrepresent you to the public. They just play stupid to get you do to all the work of informing them on how your sub culture works, which they use to exploit it.
If they can't exploit it, they just arrest everyone. If they do a good job of pre-trial slander, all they really have to do is prove you belong to a group of undesirables, and they really don
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Problem with the software and hardware engineers are they are puppets, and will do anything they're told to do to pocket their salaries.
Too often in such situations, knowledge of right and wrong goes out the window.
fixed that for you.
(yes, we are to blame for doing ANY damned thing as long as The Man pays our salaries. but I've already ranted about this before...)
yes, blame the feds for being amoral. but blame us, too, for we usually will whore ourselves out to a company as long as we get healthcare, week
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Not news. Anyone is perfectly willing to demonize and sacrifice anyone in society if it serves any need they perceive.
Fixed that for you.
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Anyone is perfectly willing to demonize and sacrifice anyone in society if it serves any need they perceive.
You've just described a predator. No, we're not all predators, and in fact most of us advance civilization as the best form of defence from predatory conduct, preferring a "live and let live" course.
However, it's good to know where you stand. Now we can watch out for you.
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The press would rather talk to a bunch of pedophiles with blood on their dicks from freshly deflouring 8 year olds than give a shred of good press to the most noble and ethical of hackers
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There are rules on attendance (for example, no undercover reporters; media folks have special badges that immediately and visibly identify them, and the last one to be caught trying to pass got thoroughly humiliated and then kicked out and banned). They don't collect logs of who attends (you can't pay by credit card, because that leaves an auditable trail, for example) but they do exert some control over admission.
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Wrong.
You can have public access but still limit that access in any way you want (unless you are some sort of entity which is required to conform to equal opportunity laws.) Next time you go get your pork skins at walmart, take a look by the door, and you'll see a sign that says something like "no firearms allowed on premises". They can do that. If you're caught violating that private policy, yo
Re: Uncomfortable Relationship (Score:5, Interesting)
"You can, of course, be arrested for anything at any time. However, you will not be convicted of"
Thats why being arrested in and of itself is being used as a form of punishment these days. If arrested you're held for the full period allowed by law (72 hours I believe in most areas, there are of course always attempts to extend this limit) and in most cases never charged. You have your fingerprints, image and now even your DNA taken as evidence to be used against you in the future. If you want proof you don't have to look far, during the OWS protests thousands were arrested, I doubt 15% of them were charged. In NYC even those cases where they did try to charge the protestors the cases were thrown out left and right, due to lack of any evidence, evidence (video) proving the charges were bogus, case after case where the arresting officer "couldn't"/wouldn't come to court and even a case where the police write up of the "criminal activity" wasn't a crime(the officer claimed that by dressing up like a pixie she was "impeding traffic").
Wrong way to go about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong way to go about it? (Score:5, Insightful)
This time they should know are not welcome and more importantly why.
Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You didn't read the agreement?!? It can't read!
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Not only does that law not exist in America, that law would be unconstitutional in America. 1st Amendment, y'know.
4th Amendment (Score:2)
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You are right of course. There is however practical justice, legal justice, and moral justice. They don't all demand the same outcome for the situation you describe.
Personally I still feel that anyone working at NSA is a collaborator is tearing down our Constitutional freedoms. Until they leave their employment there they absolutely deserve to be shunned by the rest of society. Note I don't say attacked or harassed.
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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 towa
Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Funny)
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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
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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 li
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I suspect the person you replied to was just joking, but it says something about Slashdot that you just can't be sure anymore.
How could anyone read the summary with its "time-honored 'Spot-the-Fed' tradition" and then NOT conclude I was joking?
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It might be because we're humorless drones...or because the joke fell flat. I saw the connection, I didn't find the humor. You could have gone with "I think (well actually your first mistake. Think implies a guess which means you have doubts thus you should not have raised the point) I spot a Fed...No, wait...to reasonable, I'll keep looking".
Now that would be a tip of the hat to the original summary line, but be respectful of the poster's view and a level of "funny" for /.
You took the lazy, grade school
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Democracy will be broken the day the vote is removed.
What good is a vote between two predetermined choices? You don't just need a vote, you need a functioning electoral system that's actually responsive to the will of the people. What we have instead is much more akin to the magicians choice [mallusionist.com] than a carefully designed instrument that measures the will of the people. Until we have preference voting, publicly funded campaigns, and a media that doesn't black out third party candidates, we really don't have
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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.
Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Insightful)
So your argument is they are just following orders? That's pretty funny.
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Re:And what will happen if they do (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Wow, mark this day on the calendar, folks. It's the day you saw a Slashdotter in support of the Nuremberg defense. Is this, like, the anti-Godwin?
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"Hey, look man, I don't gas the Jews, I just pull the Zyklon B canisters off the truck, hook them up to this valve in the 'showers' and press the 'gas the Jews' button. Gotta pay the landlord, ya know?"
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Right! I mean why did everyone in Russia hate the secret police? What's wrong with secretly spying on all your neighbors? Dose that make them bad guys?
Yes.
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Why not?
Because we are not them.
Re:Wrong way to go about it? (Score:5, Interesting)
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But how do you make sure that guy is indeed an undercover federal agent? You can be 99% sure, but, baring gross incompetence, you can't prove it.
Re:Wrong way to go about it? (Score:5, Funny)
Obvious joke: gross incompetence and Federal agents, those things don't overlap often.
Re:Wrong way to go about it? (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, you only need to be 51% sure. ;)
Re:Wrong way to go about it? (Score:5, Funny)
Engage in massive, illegal surveillance then hold a secret court to decide their "guilty".
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Followed by a drone strike at his family barbecue.
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No. We are better than the NSA (low standard to rise to, but still). I know that was a joke but.. it's possible that non-feds might be caught up in this and it would really suck to be kicked out of defcon on the slightest suspicion. There needs to be some kind of test - something a fed would never do but a regular attendee would be glad to.. there are options.
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It is a private convention and they are free to prohibit anyone they like.
They may be able to get their secret court to issue a warrant to have officers present, or to eavesdrop on the convention.
They just have to have one person suspected of a crime -- or persuade a judge of reasonable suspicion that illegal activities may be planned at this convention.
You can ban people by name, but there's no legal mechanism that allows you to select "No law enforcement activity on the premises"
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Terribly amusing in the fact that the federal agents would probably be the one making arrests and escorting the security out of the building.
... thereby settling the difficult question "how to prove a fed"...
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How do you know that security aren't also the feds? :p
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[ackbar]
IT'S A TRAP
Defcon is a freakshow (Score:3, Interesting)
Defcon hasn't been about Defcon for a long time now. Since, what, Defcon 5 or 6? Ever since they moved out to that dumb Alexis hotel.
The REAL conference is Blackhat Briefings, which goes on during the week and is attended by serious people. Then, on the weekend, we bring the freaks out for your amusement and cap off Blackhat with Defcon. It's all about $$$$$ for Darktangent.
Re:Defcon is a freakshow (Score:4, Funny)
hah I remember being at defcon in 2002 and some crew from Japan public radio or something started interviewing me, went something like this:
interviewer: Why did you come to DefCon?
me: I'm totally here to hang with my friends and party.
interviewer: You didn't come here to share information?
me: d00d, we do that every day, it's called the In-ter-net.
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Hi, I'm Sea Bass, Looking for a date @ DEF-CON (Score:3, Funny)
I'll be the one dressed as a lumberjack, covered in salt.
Can they extend to non-invitation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the Feds you should worry about (Score:5, Insightful)
The Feds who show up and identify themselves as Feds aren't the Feds you need to worry about anyway.
Re:Not the Feds you should worry about (Score:5, Funny)
The Feds who show up and identify themselves as Feds aren't the Feds you need to worry about anyway.
While saying that those weren't the feds we need to worry about... Did you wave a hand?
NO NO NO (Score:2)
it would go "These are not the drones^HFeds you are looking for"
When you dance with the Devil, (Score:4, Interesting)
When you dance with the Devil, the Devil doesn't change - you do.
Look up Smedley Butler. He joined for patriotism, he was decorated for bravery and then he was used to murder civilians for agribusiness. Here we are a century later and the game is the same. Young men join for patriotism and end up murdering civilians for the profits of the 1%
Recycling an outworn meme (Score:3)
In USA, Fed hacks YOU!
In an alternate universe the Def Con membership includes somebody by the name of Snowden... is he considered a Fed or not-Fed?
Re:Recycling an outworn meme (Score:5, Funny)
Feds probably go there to recruit, too... (Score:2)
Although (as seen here on /.) that's not been going too well for them lately, at least publicly.
But time, and the "law" is on their side.
And of course, they don't even have to physically go there to find out what's going on.
Showcase something smart, but borderline legal, and maybe you'll get a call after the conf. "inviting" you to join the team.
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Heck, last year the NSA had a fscking recruiting booth there (and an enigma machine, which was frankly cool)!
DoD has been recruiting there for years. Fortunately being non-US, the conversations are shorter for me.
Min
Spot the Government Contractor (Score:4, Informative)
Would it be any more difficult to spot one of the vast numerous contractors that work at the behest of the feds?
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Brazilian? (Score:2)
Spot the fed may just turn into hack-the-fed
I hope you are not suggesting DEFCON might go Brazilian on them?
Who knows? An Orwellian surveillance state is a lot more serious than soccer.
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I hope you are not suggesting DEFCON might go Brazilian on them?
We can haggle over a working definition of privacy, but unauthorized waxing in *that region* is way, way over the line.
Insufficiently paranoid, actually (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [imageshack.us]
(SFW aside from PG13 language).
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You know, most of the feds that go to Defcon are simply security researchers and hackers, just like half the other people there, who happen to work for a different organization.
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If you think the Feds you knew were there were the only Feds there, you're an idiot.
DEF CON: It's Feds all the way down.
semantics (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Does anyone believe that being once removed by virtue of a private company makes you any less part of the police state?
Sadly most either think so, or don't - but don't care.
while we are at it (Score:2)
Pot calling kettle black. Moss works for DHS (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it seem strange that someone working for the Federal Government (DHS) is asking other Federal Employees to stay away?
What about the hacker ethic? (Score:2)
Openness to all & the free exchange of ideas and information with curious people doesn't seem compatible with the exclusion of any one group.
Re:MIBs (Score:5, Funny)
You can't use that to recognize the feds. All hackers wear black. And sunglasses the whole day long.
However, feds burn. And why do feds burn? ... Because they're made of wood. ... Because it floats. ... A duck!
How to know if one's made of wood?
And what also floats?
So, if the guy weights like a duck, he's a fed!
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You can't use that to recognize the feds. All hackers wear black. And sunglasses the whole day long.
The resolution to this is; hack everyone. If they were a fed, you'll be able to figure that out by the contents of their e-mail account and their My Documents folder.
If they didn't turn out to be a fed, you just scribble a quick apology and leave it as a note on their desktop; after you phinish bragging.
Re:MIBs (Score:4, Funny)
The resolution to this is; hack everyone. If they were a fed, you'll be able to figure that out by the contents of their e-mail account and their My Documents folder.
If they even *have* a My Documents folder on a laptop at Defcon, you're most of the way to proving they're a fed...
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Re:MIBs (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Feds at DefCon and Black Hat mostly just wear jeans and t-shirts like everyone else. It's a little easier at Black Hat because many of them won't put their company name on their badge. DefCon doesn't have identification on badges.
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So before you joined the agency, did you see yourself more as a Dale Cooper or as a Fox Mulder?
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"hack the fed" (whatever that means)?
Yeah, that seem like a real challenge .. ;) huhum :)
sure, but bring your own axe.
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Lengthy approval processes, limits on number of Federal attendees at conferences, and restrictions on weekend travel will keep the Feds away from this conference.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!!!!!!1!
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I think he's generally right but certainly not in the case of THIS conference.
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My Slashdot friend PopeRatzo directed my attention to the following article, which provides a good overview for those unfamiliar with the Obama administration's "Insider Threat Program;" if any doubts remained regarding "the most transparent administration in US history," prepare to be even more disgusted:
Obama’s crackdown views leaks as aiding enemies of U.S. [2013-06-20] [mcclatchydc.com]
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DefCon is cash only, no registration, no identifying information.
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Ok, so insert a few random leaked documents into every presentation. By the end of the week, anyone with a security clearance will have so much paperwork to do explaining why they had unauthorized access to every one of hundreds of pieces of classified information, they won't get around to doing any real work until the week before DefCon 2014.
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tons of porn on every screen, people drinking all day long, and ill mannered conversation
I fail to see what Fed's even gain from attending.
Might want to connect the dots. You've never worked at a federal agency have you?