Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while. It's a place for security professionals to go to hang out in Vegas for a few days on their company's dime, or to extend their stay after Black Hat.

The conference has gotten too big for its own good. It now inhabits the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is less convenient than when it was in one of the hotels (or multiple hotels clustered together). The one positive of the LVCC is that it has a ton of room but there are still issues with things like sound equipment that plague the villages and their talks/workshops.

When I went to Defcon a few years back, one of the speakers started his talk by saying:

"When I first started coming to Defcon, it was full of hackers and we played spot-the-fed. Now you're all feds and we play spot-the-hacker."

In 2022, Google TAG were awarded a "lamest vendor" award at defcon for fixing a Chrome vulnerability they discovered was being exploited in the wild... without asking for permission from the NSA first. That was the turning point for me.

It's not exactly new. Mudge is the current CIO of DARPA, and other people around the L0pht went on similar trajectories. Feds openly participating in DEFCON is itself a rather old flashpoint.

Way back in the times of hippies and yippies many were subsequently recruited by the empire. While he was troubled in other ways Abbie Hoffmann was, as far as I know, a notable exception.

The top two winning teams of that xTech AI pitch competition were not even AI solutions. It just seemed like a vehicle for the Army to now be able to award those companies non competitive contracts.

Not a new topic - few years ago, the Jen Easterly-era CISA made a hard recruiting pitch at defcon. Patriotism and service-messaging one might recognize from their own time in the military.

What was surprising was the intense applause from a hacker con to this pitch.

Given what was to come, also notably absent discussion from the audience or speaker about how working for CISA did or did not mean working for DHS. Assurances of firm segmentation on this aspect from speakers after the formal talk ended were similarly a bit weak.

Not that anything was inherently bad about her recruiting pitch, but for a hackercon, it was a bit close to the flagpole. And notably that CISA crew is “no longer at CISA” and under prosecution, or intense social pressure, or otherwise.

Feels worth evaluating!

Is it really surprising that DEF CON went where the money was?

Most cybersecurity work in the US, by volume, rolls up to one of about five organizations - all of whom are US government entities.

Most cybersecurity work has nothing to do with keeping Russian bot farms out of outdated WordPress installs.

Hammond didn't protest during a talk but clearly after its end if https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1mlaw4s/jeremy_hamm... is to be believed. And removed by venue guards not DefCon goons.

And he seems really well loved, as evidenced by https://www.reddit.com/r/Defcon/comments/1mlaw4s/comment/n7p...

There are two key truths:

Hackerdom has always had a relationship with Defense, Intelligence & LE.

Most hackers are deeply benevolent and care greatly about the world, and insecurity at large, mostly fostered by Business.

Building relationships with defense & intel are often the best avenues towards moving towards a more secure future, working within the system for positive change. Our way of life, and our freedoms are not secure with imminent threats on the horizon.

Please, disabuse yourself of the notion that Mainland China is not weaponizing their hackerdom against us simultaneously.

at some point someone is going to discover the history that the hacker subculture was intelligence influenced all the way down. it has never not been within a degree of separation at every angle from the IC.

it's fine, hackers were probably one of the few constructive successes to come out of it ever. Personally, I suspect the hacker project was on the scale of what the US did during the cold war with abstract expressionist art[1] and literary magazines[2].

As a funnel for getting great, principled talent into the IC, we should be happy and grateful there were people to balance what was coming out of the colleges.

Just because the classified world values hacker skills doesn't mean people shouldn't. I'd say the opposite. There is absolutely a secret world that is accessible on a need to know basis, and it hides everywhere in plain sight for those with the skills to see it. All you have to do is be the among the very best at what you do, in whatever field you are in, and you will encounter it. Saying the Army undermines the subculture that was defcon misses the point. The message of hacking was, develop elite skills and others will find you. not only has this not changed, it is more true than ever.

[1]https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/did-you-know/la-cia-y-e... [2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p037t501

The x files def con was always a defense conference

I can't help but think that Putin and Xi must feel very happy about the Western strain of extreme pacifism that encourages smart hackers to eschew military applications entirely. European hackers in particular can just look east to get a glimpse of the future.

The world has changed.

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Whelp might as well just only go to black hat now

Damn, DEF CON used to be a real one. It's a damn shame to see this happen to a group of hackers.

I'm sure other venues and community events will take up the mantle given time, but it's still a bummer to see an event that used to be so fiercely independent out here cheering on the feds.