When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army

https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/when-counterculture-and-empire-merge

by OgsyedIE • 11 months ago

213 251 11 months ago

jackpoulson.substack.com

sylens2• 11 months ago

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.

ramesh31• 11 months ago

Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference, and arguably hasn't been for a while.

This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all. The broader question is is something like the original spirit of DefCon even still possible? The industry (and the stakes) are so much higher now that it seems impossible.

sylens2• 11 months ago

It is but you have to intentionally keep it small and limit tickets. I think one of the issues that Defcon has is that they just don't cap tickets; historically they could not, because you could only buy a badge with cash so there was no way of predicting how many people would show up.

CalRobert• 11 months ago

Maybe What Hackers Yearn or CCC?

sneak• 11 months ago

This happens to literally every convention ever, not surprising at all.

The CCC would never.

Europe, for all its authoritarianism and infringements of human rights (even in relatively liberal places like Germany) still seems to be trying to not backslide into full-on military-industrial complex like the US is/has.

AndrewKemendo• 11 months ago

CCC might be able to survive because it’s European and multi lingual

ajsnigrutin• 11 months ago

You do 10 things at a small conference, everyone says "we need more of X{0}..X{9}", you have more things next year, more people, everyone wants more of whatever, more people, more problems with more people (security, cost, sponsors,..), more attention of mainstream media, more people next year, more push for politics, more people, more issues with more people, etc., and in the end, you get a boring business conference like many others.

I'm pretty sure that each of the niches could make their own conference now, at some small venue where a 100, 200, 500 people would come... SNES hacking and development? Sure, a small, really nice conference... but then someone would want NES too, and N64, and sega, and PS1, and corporate sponsors, and you end up with E3 instead of 50 retro developers and 150 curious people doing interesting stuff.

ferguess_k3• 11 months ago

Would CCC and Recon be better? TBH I never understand why people (not companies) need to go to Vegas. It's expensive, corrupting and hot during the summers. Montreal is a much affordable place.

sugarpimpdorsey3• 11 months ago

Something something discreet hookers and a company credit card.

ecshafer3• 11 months ago

Vegas (and Orlando) are probably the two cheapest places to travel to in North America. Hotels and flights are both plentiful and cheap. Before Covid you could get like $60 a night hotels on the strip and $150 flights.

__alexander• 11 months ago

CCC would be better but REcon is kind of niche because it’s focus is reverse engineering and not “hacking”in general.

tucnak4• 11 months ago

Defcon is a "joke" compared to CCC.

zevon2• 11 months ago

Congress may be considered "better" in the sense that the MIC would not find a forum there (and would be relentlessly made fun of). More importantly and as to your point about the expensiveness: The Club and all the volunteers put an inordinate amount of work in making Congress as accessible as possible on many levels.

tptacek9• 11 months ago

CCC is just Euro-Defcon. It's fine if you prefer Europe over Vegas (understandable!) or winter to summer, but otherwise: it's the same thing.

lrvick2• 11 months ago

I go to CCC and Defcon every year and they are night and day.

CCC actively discourages companies from advertising unless they are fully open source community driven orgs. Governments are even less welcome.

While even the Privacy Village at Defcon asks you to agree to the terms of service of Discord, Slack, Youtube, and other corpos... CCC self hosts everything including Voip, IRC, Matrix, 3G, 4G, and DECT, all linked together in various ways.

While Defcon has strictly controlled talks approved by sponsors and appointees of the Defcon corporation that themselves work for mostly proprietary corporations, CCC is an entirely volunteer driven organization from top to bottom and you can give a talk anywhere you want about anything 24 hours a day as long as someone else has not already reserved that spot.

While Defcon has villages reserved and approved by committee and corporate sponsors, at CCC any community can apply for table or an area and almost all are granted as space relative to the size of the community. You can do basically anything you want with your space. You can also access the event and your space 24/7 so the hacking and party never fully stops.

I go to Defcon because it is the corporate paid excuse a handful of actually capable hackers I like to hang out with have to hang out. And maybe two or three talks worth seeing.

I go to CCC because it is the nearest place I can go experience thousands of actual hackers that believe in making the world better through open source, right to repair, music, art, and maximizing sharing and collaboration. Almost every person I talk to is an instant friend. People who largely agree technical talents are meant for more than raising shareholder value.

I love CCC and I keep going in hopes I can bring some of that back with me to silicon valley.

If anyone goes to CCC be sure to visit the Church of Cryptography which I am usually around.

tedivm2• 11 months ago

Once they scared off the people running the Sky Talks, which were always awesome, and messed with groups like the lockpicking folks ability to fundraise, I think the idea of it being a hacker con really died and it turned into just another corporate convention.

px432• 11 months ago

Skytalks happened this year and was better attended than ever. Getting a seat was extremely competitive, people lined up for several hours for a single talk token. I would have loved to go to some, but unfortunately there was a ton of other stuff I wanted to see so I didn't have time to stand in line.

They were a side conference to a side conference, but the structure let them run things the way they wanted, which is important.

jayess• 11 months ago

That Skytalks still requires masking is absurd. I saw the organizers at DEFCON walking around with no masks. The last skytalks at DEFCON a couple of years ago was pretty bad anyways, really disappointing.

ghostpepper4• 11 months ago

what happened with the lock pick village?

nebula88042• 11 months ago

Scared them off? Is there any documentation of that? My understanding is that the split was amicable. SkyTalks has immunocompromised people on staff and they chose to voluntarily leave defcon because they wanted to continue masking mandates while Defcon did not. Bsides welcomed them with support in their conference(helping with Token Drops and scheduling) and Skytalks occupies a space that is physically separated from Bsides(as in a different hotel on its top floor).

SkyTalks are as awesome as they always were, I'd argue its even better since now you dont have to sacrifice other things at defcon to see skytalks. You can now have dedicated time for skytalks.

colechristensen2• 11 months ago

I went, while I enjoyed myself this year I feel it's gotten too big and too disorganized. Also I went to a couple of talks that would seemingly have been bread and butter talks for defcon that were very sparsely attended and I just wondered where everybody was.

This might just be FOMO with the organizers. It's probably time for DefCon to drop in person registrations, get smaller, and return to a hotel. Villages and village talks need to be better curated and basically the focus needs to be tightened up.

busterarm7• 11 months ago

DEFCON talks are for watching on Youtube when they get uploaded weeks/months from now. It's always been about contests/challenges and partying. It's a con of cons.

px432• 11 months ago

This was my 23rd DEFCON, and was just as counterculture as it was decades ago if you know where to go, and don't get distracted by the big pretty signs. DEFCON has always been about feds, policymakers, corpos, kids, and straight up black hat criminals partying together and shaping the future of infosec.

The author of the article decided to wander down the Military Industrial Complex track, and seems to be complaining that it had too much Army stuff. I didn't see any of that this year, because that's not what interests me. I met up with a large number of cipherpunks and activists that I don't get to see very often, and had some extremly productive conversations regarding various projects we're working on for the next year.

busterarm7• 11 months ago

As a longtime attendee myself, this is absolutely true.

Also, DEFCON and DT specifically have not shifted anywhere. A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general. They are also not "counterculture" as these are mainstream/televised points of view.

I had to stop dealing with certain parts/people of DEFCON and infosec in general because of this intense noise. That's not pegging myself as being on the right, it's just that my DEFCON experience has always been about expanding my worldview and fun... this very loud and influential group isn't about either of those things.

tucnak4• 11 months ago

Kool-Aid man lives in the world of corporate logos...

Palomides3• 11 months ago

"it's counterculture if you ignore all the military/mass surveillance stuff" doesn't strike me as a strong defense

iwontberude2• 11 months ago

Feds and criminals coming together is the point for many clandestine operations

lucasRW• 11 months ago

Yeah... shots of water is as "counter-culture" as it gets...

jvanderbot2• 11 months ago

I'd love to go to defcon, but I fear it'll end up like every other conference I go to: wandering around, watching a few talks, ending up at a few semi-boring cocktail hours, etc. Maybe I'm that anti-cool enough to get auto-filtered?

I joined a local discord / defcon chapter, and it was mostly reminiscing about the good old days and most people saying they weren't going this year.

dogleash• 11 months ago

Defcon went fed when Jeff Moss went fed. But the crowd size has done way more to change the vibe. The 30% crowd post-covid year was a short return to old defcon.

tptacek9• 11 months ago

This implies that you believed Moss was somehow a black hat before he got involved with Homeland Security Advisory Council, which is pretty funny. People just make these things up and state them confidently.

anonfordays2• 11 months ago

Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference

Being in tech and partnering with the US Army on 2025 is counterculture.

GuinansEyebrows2• 11 months ago

this is an extremely creative use of the word "counterculture"

giantg26• 11 months ago

"still issues with things like sound equipment"

For the $500 entry fee you would think they could provide earphones and someone would hack together an app that would let you listen through those earphones based on some sort of proximity detection. No doubt the first year someone would find a vulnerability in it and would need parallel deployment to the existing infrastructure, but still.

tekla3• 11 months ago

Cool, whats your handle so I can suggest your name to organizers to set it up for them

spydum• 11 months ago

Would be a great idea, except they couldn't even operate WiFi with any stability (to which I heard was a LVCC problem, but I don't know that for sure).

tptacek9• 11 months ago

I was at Defcon in the 1990s and it was never a counterculture conference. It has always been Nerd Spring Break Daytona Beach.

prettyblocks• 11 months ago

Felt like counter culture to me when I went to my first one (DC11). I remember punk kids selling manuals and lineman sets they stole out of the back of telco trucks outside the entrance of Alexis Park.

lmeyerov• 11 months ago

if you s/counterculture/maker/g , so less about anti and more about doing, i'm with the others -- it's just bigger, with some individual subcommunities having ossified while new topics have opened their own new shiny & vibrant communities

ex: ai village was a new weird thing just a small number years ago, but now that ai is the #1 topic at blackhat (commercial side), it even has its own big event that overshadows blackhat proper . imo that's a success story for defcon fostering doers.

brunoqc• 11 months ago

Doesn't everything counterculture ends up absorbed by the capitalism system eventually? I think I learned that from Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, or maybe from a youtube video about it.

abullinan• 11 months ago

> 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.

That is me! :) I do not know where the counterculture hangs out at DC, because I have never been a cool kid, just a brainy weird kid among the brainy weird kids, even as an adult! But there are often quite a few insightful papers at DEF CON. I didn’t go this year, I think my managers are on to me. :)

cess114• 11 months ago

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.

cushychicken• 11 months ago

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.

stickfigure2• 11 months ago

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.

mathandstuff• 11 months ago

The issue isn't software developers working with the military. It is a matter of offensive U.S. military operations and the associated self-serving geopolitics being treated as countercultural.

sebstefan4• 11 months ago

Western strain of extreme pacifism that encourages smart hackers to eschew military applications entirely

Not what people are saying. There would be little noise if there were talks at defcon about Ukrainian cyberwarfare or hacking Russian military infrastructure.

This is about the united states military industrial complex. Can you even point out a military that did more harm to the world at large in the last 50 years? How many dead? How many human right violations?

The head of the NSA as well, post-snowden? Come on.

ecshafer3• 11 months ago

Who do you think are the ones actually supporting Ukrainian cybersecurity and hacking Russian military? Ill give you a hint they are the ones sitting in office parks in maryland writing software for the NSA and DOD.

psunavy032• 11 months ago

The only reason there still is a Ukraine is the US so-called "military industrial complex." And guess who the ooga-booga scary NSA is probably giving intelligence products to, or at least probably was until January?

chupasaurus2• 11 months ago

Guess who cooperates with any security conferences in Russia that aren't abysmal and how many smart hackers attend those.

The world hasn't changed.

asoneth• 11 months ago

Western strain of extreme pacifism

While there certainly are some Western hackers who eschew all military applications because of their extreme pacifism, the examples in the article (e.g. pro-Palestinian activists) are not necessarily pacifist. I'd describe them more as out of alignment with their country's current governments, or perhaps actively aligned against them.

And given recent (and not-so-recent) behavior of the US government, I don't think it's irrational for hacker in the US to conclude that their own government presents a greater threat to their freedom than Putin or Xi. (I don't necessarily agree, I just don't think it's an irrational conclusion.)

tete2• 11 months ago

Ah yeah that "extreme pacifism" that has grotesque ideas like people shouldn't murder other people just because their governments think so.

How dare them being opposed to that poor military sector, that nobody ever speaks up for. Completely forgotten by politics and media, nobody ever takes their side and see how in reality they make the world a much better place.

After hundreds of thousands of deaths and daily news about one war crime chasing another by all sides, daily uncovered cruel lies, essentially all wars being illegal and not defensive according to UN laws. Laws that the very countries that now break them established. Only not being sanctioned because of vetoes by these countries.

And all of them being lobbied against by some nerds meeting in their spare time to follow their interests. Those horrible, horrible extreme pacifists!

scarecrowbob• 11 months ago

I think a lot of folks just aren't stoked on making things that could be used against them. And a lot of us are smart enough to see how that could happen.

shazbotter3• 11 months ago

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.

theginger• 11 months ago

The x files def con was always a defense conference

OrvalWintermute• 11 months ago

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.

brohee• 11 months ago

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...

tptacek9• 11 months ago

Hammond is very well loved by the kind of people who think that Stratfor was a shadowy mercenary private CIA, and not a glorified Substack.

qwertytyyuu• 11 months ago

Whelp might as well just only go to black hat now

DaSHacka• 11 months ago

If you have $3000 for a ticket, sure.

Though I must say, it's stange to go to the certified fed conference because the "non-fed" option is "too pro-fed" now.

mi100hael• 11 months ago

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."

ganoushoreilly• 11 months ago

I think many would be surprised how many people 20+ years ago were feds.. or became feds

dogman144• 11 months ago

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!

tucnak4• 11 months ago

Spooks have been doing keynotes for a few years now. The so-called hackers are on toes, because deep down they wish to be daddy'd up to get to do some silly, secret-type shit. Contrary to the past, when spooks despised computer people (that's how cypherpunk came about.) On the other hand, Clearances are not what they used to be, too; every fart having to do with computers, analysis, collection is classed TS by default.

carom• 11 months ago

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.

motohagiography• 11 months ago

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

rsync• 11 months ago

"... the hacker subculture was intelligence influenced all the way down ..."

Oh stop.

There was zero intelligence at any of the five CuervoCons ...

taviso• 11 months ago

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.

tsujamin• 11 months ago

A Pwnie for "unilaterally shutting down a counterterrorism operation”

leoh• 11 months ago

I think this award was satire, not to defend defcon, but yeah

wkat424215• 11 months ago

Ok that's weird indeed. Here at European hacker events this action would be applauded. Getting permission from spy agencies before fixing something would be a surefire way to get lamest vendor, lol.

Most there don't trust government. And besides security holes can be used by all sides so it's imperative to fix them asap.

When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army

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