[HN Gopher] When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army
___________________________________________________________________
When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army
Author : OgsyedIE
Score : 133 points
Date : 2025-08-13 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jackpoulson.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jackpoulson.substack.com)
| sylens wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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.
| sylens wrote:
| 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| I don't think it's really a matter of limited attendance.
| Smaller hacker conferences in the US are not much different
| in terms of baseline acceptance of government/defense
| presence. It's more of a cultural thing, and not a new one.
|
| (That's not to say that there _aren 't_ conferences that
| are explicitly anti-MIC, because there are. But if you just
| sample by size, I suspect you'll find no correlation
| there.)
| CalRobert wrote:
| Maybe What Hackers Yearn or CCC?
| sneak wrote:
| > _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.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| If you honestly think that they're not either backsliding
| into the full-on military-industrial complex _or_
| benefiting from the American military-industrial complex, I
| have some nice ocean-front property in Kansas City to sell
| you.
|
| EDIT:
|
| If you don't believe me, ask the USMC about their nice new
| H&K service rifles. Did we need to do that? No, we could
| have thrown a nice piston upper on M16 lowers, but that
| doesn't keep the bier flowing in Oberndorf am Neckar. Or
| ask someone in the Pentagon about their partners at BAE.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| That's easy to do when you have the US on speed dial.
| okasaki wrote:
| To do what? Blow up our pipelines? Use us as staging for
| bullshit invasions?
| orwin wrote:
| I mean, in the last 50 years, US called Italy, Germany
| more than the reverse. And if you don't count logistical
| units, US has France on speed dial, not the reverse. The
| one time France asked the US something military-wise,
| Obama refused.
| busterarm wrote:
| France doesn't need to call anyone, they have spies
| everywhere. They're the world leader in industrial
| espionage with a few hundred-years head start over
| everyone else.
|
| And also don't forget they're the second largest global
| arms exporter after the United States. Which is amazing
| when you realize they only have one manufacturer (Airbus)
| in the global top 15...
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| CCC might be able to survive because it's European and multi
| lingual
| sunaookami wrote:
| CCC is not counterculture for ~10 years now. They have also
| become way too big and the vast majority of presentations
| are (extremely left-leaning) politics.
| shazbotter wrote:
| Hacker culture has always been left leaning, lol. Open
| source is a grand anarchist experiment.
|
| You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We
| love strong hierarchies!"? Don't be daft.
| ecshafer wrote:
| We are on a message board run by a VC firm.
| busterarm wrote:
| I've been in this scene 40+ years and for every Emmanuel
| Goldstein-type there's also a Dale Gribble.
|
| At least dale never fucked kids.
| tekla wrote:
| > Hacker culture has always been left leaning
|
| No it hasn't. It started as counterculture. 90's hacker
| ethos might as well make you a fascist these days.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| > You expect hackers to be like, "we love capitalism! We
| love strong hierarchies!"?
|
| You should ask the old-schoolers, if they can hear you
| over the roar of the air conditioning in their cushy
| corporate offices and the engines of their Volvos.
|
| When all you have left is petty political bitching, the
| conference has lost its meaning, it's just a Reddit
| meetup at that point.
| anonym29 wrote:
| There is another framing/view that the authoritarianism-
| anarchism axis is perpendicular to the left-right axis.
| Nobody's suggesting that fascism isn't fundamentally
| authoritarian, but "left leaning" is not mutually
| exclusive with "authoritarian", nor is it a synonym for
| "anarchist". See: East Germany, Soviet Union, China,
| North Korea.
|
| Also, it's not kind to call someone 'daft' for expressing
| a political view you disagree with. Nobody's saying you
| should accept their perspective uncritically, but you
| don't need to be mean-spirited or engage in name-calling
| to critique their perspective.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| esseph wrote:
| > (extremely left-leaning) politics
|
| This is like complaining about water being wet. Hacker
| culture has always been anti-right wing.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| 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_k wrote:
| 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.
| sugarpimpdorsey wrote:
| Something something discreet hookers and a company credit
| card.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| I thought they are more into techs.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| Ah I don't about know about that, thought it is extra
| expensive. Guess summer is actually the low season due to
| weather?
| Fomite wrote:
| Getting people _to_ Vegas is heavily subsidized under the
| assumption that while they are there they will spend
| rather freely.
| chupasaurus wrote:
| The summer is a "dead" season for that specific reason.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Strictly speaking, I don't think Vegas has a low season.
| It's cheap to visit and stay in because they bilk you on
| everything else.
| Kirby64 wrote:
| The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is
| historically slow. Not much going on then, and things are
| quite cheap usually. Weather is also not miserable.
| bluedino wrote:
| You still can, depends on where you go and where you stay.
| I'm seeing $300 for two nights and round trip flights from
| the other side of the USA right now if you don't mind
| staying at the Flamingo, Luxor, or Linq. Add $50 for
| something like Park MGM or Paris.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Are you finding those in a package deal? What platform
| are you using?
|
| Just curious as I didn't find many package deals that
| were much cheaper than finding each individually. I was
| just using stuff like Expedia and similar.
| __alexander wrote:
| CCC would be better but REcon is kind of niche because it's
| focus is reverse engineering and not "hacking"in general.
| aakkaakk wrote:
| CCC still have this crazy way of selling tickets, where you
| cannot know more than month in advance if you will be able
| to get a ticket, i.e. impossible to book hotel/flight that
| late.
| tete wrote:
| To be fair CCC is theoretically primarily a German club
| with an event that is overbooked by so so many people,
| all of that is done by people NOT being paid for anything
| (from security to health emergency to infrastructure,
| ticket checking, audio, recording, etc.).
|
| I wouldn't call it crazy that a pure volunteer event that
| constantly has to switch places because they use up ALL
| available space of their venues does have a ticketing
| system that is still better than the one of a lot of big
| pop stars.
|
| It probably also keeps commercialization down to a
| minimum.
|
| Yes, sucks that what you describe isn't possible, but I
| think in perspective it's not exactly "crazy".
|
| It's still always sold out with whole conference areas
| and more used up.
| tucnak wrote:
| Defcon is a "joke" compared to CCC.
| zevon wrote:
| 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.
| tedivm wrote:
| 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.
| px43 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Talk attendance was much higher the last time I went, but
| that might have been 10 years ago.
| px43 wrote:
| 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.
| busterarm wrote:
| 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.
| mattmanser wrote:
| No where else in the world would describe anything in
| American politics as going hard left.
|
| All of your politics and news has been swinging hard right
| for over a decade.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| If you don't mind, I have a genuine question. (as in, I'm
| not looking for a fight and I won't comment furthermore
| even if I can't agree.)
|
| But genuinely, what do you define by saying that American
| culture has shifted hard to the left and what do you define
| by left.
|
| I am really not looking into fight, but that's not a take
| I've heard often and I want to hear you out.
| anonym29 wrote:
| I am not the person you are responding to, but I think
| the ground reality is nuanced. What follows is my opinion
| / perspective, which I do not assert as irrefutable fact,
| nor as the only opinion / perspective which should be
| considered.
|
| Politics in the US have become more polarized, but a
| historical view shows this as more of a reversion to the
| mean than a novel phenomenon, as we are increasingly
| distanced from a period of greater economic prosperity
| for large swathes of the middle class, which seemed to
| have a (now disappearing) byproduct of a degree of
| psychological satiation with "big picture" concerns.
|
| There is a documented tendency for the political left, at
| least in the US, to accept and tolerate a much narrower
| range of thought, that is to say, the left has a much
| smaller Overton Window, than the political right in the
| US, who mostly seem unified only around opposition to the
| policies of the political left. (https://bpspsychub.onlin
| elibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjso....)
|
| I suspect, but do not necessary assert as fact, that the
| above effect on the left may be partially explained by a
| rigid adherence to the paradox of tolerance, which itself
| demands an unwillingness to tolerate people who hold
| intolerant ideas, views, or beliefs, even if those people
| do not act on those ideas, views, or beliefs to
| meaningfully _practice_ intolerance. The end result, from
| my perspective as someone who fits cleanly in neither
| political camp (I 'm more of a libertarian than anything
| else) is that the left makes little to no room for allies
| and increasingly engages in litmus testing with an end
| goal of ostracizing and socially shunning even LGBTQ+
| people who don't fit neatly into the smaller Overton
| Window. As an example, it is considered intolerable by
| many on the left to merely be vocally supportive of adult
| LGBTQ+ rights, while expressing discomfort with the idea
| of children being exposed to pride parades with fully
| naked adults embracing all manner of sexual diversity and
| kinks, or discomfort with the idea of irreversible
| chemical gender affirmation therapy for minors on grounds
| of bodily autonomy / age of consent considerations.
| Meanwhile, to the surprise of some of my friends on the
| political left, large swathes of the political right
| (though not the most extreme fringes), in my lived
| experience as an LGBTQ person in Texas (which to be fair,
| may not be entirely representative of the rest of the
| country), hold more of a "live at let live" philosophy
| that, paradoxically, is more tolerant of LGBTQ+ persons
| with nuanced views than the political left is.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)
|
| I think as the emotional investment of typical political
| partisans increases, there is a widespread perception of
| hostility or outrage from the political left at nuanced
| positions that are nominally but insufficiently
| progressive, like the one in the example above. Anecdata
| for this might include the perspective of Bill Maher, who
| was once considered to be subversively progressive, then
| gradually seen as "center left", and is now perceived by
| many on the left as "right of center", in spite of a
| rock-solid track record of being notably left of
| Republicans on almost every issue.
|
| To be clear, I'm not trying to assert normative views
| that either side is "right", morally superior or inferior
| to one another, just attempting to offer my perspective
| on what I think the underlying mechanisms driving the
| disconnect between perceptions of the political system
| itself (which is increasingly dominated by right-of-
| center figures in all three branches of the federal
| government, particularly at the SCOTUS level in the
| judiciary), and perceptions of cultural values. That
| cultural perception is probably further strengthened by
| widespread, rapid, and vocal adoption of DEI values
| across almost all institutional settings (academia,
| corporate America, public sector, even institutions that
| are traditionally conceptualized as right of center, like
| Wall Street firms) following the protests over the death
| of George Floyd; the relatively swift mainstream
| acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights (marriage equality went from
| fringe to mainstream in under two decades); climate
| change moved from "environmental issue" to a mainstream
| economic/social concern in roughly the same period;
| social media amplification of progressive voices and
| causes, including, at times; coordination between left-
| leaning administrations and social media companies to
| suppress right-leaning perspectives, some of which are
| now widely acknowledged to have likely been true
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files), to name a
| few large changes over both the last two decades and the
| last five years or so.
|
| And again, I'm not asserting that any of these changes
| were good or bad (regardless of how I personally feel
| about any of the changes in question), nor am I trying to
| assert a normative framing one way or another, just
| attempting to dissect the mechanisms of the perception
| itself.
| yndoendo wrote:
| When I think of the _Paradox of Tolerance_ I always think
| of Godel's _incompleteness theorems_.
|
| Say you are restaurant owner that is tolerant of any
| consumer, it brings in money. Left, right, center, no
| matter the political spectrum; gay, straight, bisexual,
| no matter the sexuality. You provide them a good meal and
| they gladly pay. Now comes in a client and he starts
| trashing the place, tipping over tables, spitting in
| people's food. Do you stay tolerant and let it happen or
| brake your tolerance and deal with the situation and get
| him out? Your clients will no longer be tolerant of you
| and your business if you keep letting having is way.
|
| Reality, you have defined "tolerance of others" with
| axioms that they do not maliciously destroy the property
| in our restaurant and they don't spit in the food of your
| clients. _Paradox of Tolerance_ highly resembles an
| inconsistent formal system pertaining to the proof of
| tolerance. "Tolerance of others" is a constant formal
| system in order to be tolerant.
|
| Both you and your clients have agree upon definition of
| tolerance. It is the man destroying your property, you,
| and your clients that have differences in the definition
| of behavioral tolerance. The three do not share the same
| axioms. A universal definition of tolerance cannot be
| obtained.
|
| Tolerance is also contextual, based on set and setting;
| who else is around, making it a malleable definition.
| This means _tolerance_ is a set / highly parameterized
| function. Location of public or private is just one
| parameter of many. For instant the scenario above about
| the business would most likely be accept if the setting
| was on set for a scene in a move.
| anonym29 wrote:
| The issue I think arrives when there is an unwillingness
| to tolerate people who hold intolerant ideas, views, or
| beliefs, even when those people do not act on those
| ideas, views, or beliefs - i.e. when the people with
| intolerant views are not actually _practicing_
| intolerance.
|
| It's one thing to shun a customer for _practicing_
| intolerance, it 's another to shun a customer for holding
| intolerant beliefs without actually practicing
| intolerance or materially affecting the quality of life
| of anyone around them, is it not?
| lazyeye wrote:
| What if the restaurant gets a customer who is perfectly
| polite, tips well but is wearing a red maga hat?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Then IIUC in California, the restaurant could be liable
| for throwing them out for the hat alone. I may be
| mistaken because I'm not quite sure precisely how wide
| California's protections for "political affiliation" are.
| (ETA: I am probably mistaken here; I think political
| affiliation is protected for employment relationships but
| not customer relationships. A member of kitchen staff who
| got tossed for wearing their red hat to work could have a
| case; a customer? N'ah).
|
| In most (all?) other states, the restaurant could ask
| them to remove it or leave purely because it will impact
| the restaurant's perception with other customers and they
| want to keep and/or grow their current clientele. If the
| bar owner tells you to take your Nazi armband off or
| leave because he doesn't want to own the Nazi bar... he
| doesn't want to own the Nazi bar, that's that.
|
| (I've been asked to remove specific clothing articles in
| a restaurant before because it made other patrons
| uncomfortable. This is not unheard of and with the
| exception of very narrow and specific legal carve-outs,
| generally understood to be a right of the owners within
| the purview of their private property. "No shirt, no
| shoes, no service" as the old saying goes).
| somenameforme wrote:
| Not the GP, but I feel the same. The reason is that my
| views haven't really changed, yet somehow my political
| positioning went from quite liberal to something most
| people, below a certain age, would consider conservative.
| I value: free speech, equality of opportunity, antiwar,
| anti political correctness, anti megacorp, and view the
| liberty of the individual mattering vastly more than than
| dictates of authority/hierarchy.
|
| More generally, I think politics has shifted such that
| left/right is no longer meaningful, as people tend to be
| much more split on libertarian/authoritarian world views
| - particularly on the degree to which accredited
| individuals ought be able to impose their views on
| society in an effort to 'tweak' people's behaviors. That
| nuance, more or less, immediately leads to the shifting
| winds on the issues I mentioned.
| tucnak wrote:
| Kool-Aid man lives in the world of corporate logos...
| Palomides wrote:
| "it's counterculture if you ignore all the military/mass
| surveillance stuff" doesn't strike me as a strong defense
| giantg2 wrote:
| If that's your mindset, the internet must be similarly
| disappointing to you. In either domain, you can select
| where you want to go and what you want to do.
| monocasa wrote:
| The difference being that I don't think anyone in their
| right mind would declare the internet as a whole as
| counterculture in the first place anymore.
| giantg2 wrote:
| This goes for Defcon in my opinion too
| overfeed wrote:
| > In either domain, you can select where you want to go
| and what you want to do.
|
| In both cases, there was a time when both were
| exclusively people-powered and "the man" was entirely
| absent.
|
| "There are some authentic nuggets if you know where to
| go" are the last kicks of a fast-gentrifying
| neighborhood, to use mixed metaphors. In the past
| anywhere/everywhere you could go was authentic.
| wrs wrote:
| The Internet was originally funded by "the man" (DARPA)
| so this isn't entirely accurate.
| overfeed wrote:
| DARPA funds all kinds of things without being involved /
| having a military or government presence in the thing - a
| contemporary example would be DARPA kick-starting self-
| driving vehicles.
|
| IMO, the web was authentically p2p before online Paypal,
| banner ads and Bonzi Buddy. It's still possible to
| subscribe to blogs (said nuggets) via RSS - which is
| miraculously having a renaissance - but it's all going to
| be drowned out by the relentless, unfeeling firehouse of
| AI slop.
| wrs wrote:
| OK, but that seems like a funny definition of "military
| presence", since DARPA _is_ the military.
|
| The goal DARPA was trying to accelerate by funding self-
| driving, btw, was to "achieve the fielding of unmanned,
| remotely controlled technology such that ... by 2015, one
| third of the operational ground combat vehicles are
| unmanned". [0]
|
| [0] https://www.grandchallenge.org/grandchallenge/docs/Gr
| and_Cha...
| zevon wrote:
| I'm curious to lern when this phase of absence of _the
| man_ and its entities - like publicly funded agencies and
| labs and suchlike - from the internet happened and how?
| Palomides wrote:
| the internet isn't a single centrally planned social
| context, and it has five plus billion users, of course it
| isn't counterculture
| dogleash wrote:
| 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.
| anonfordays wrote:
| >Defcon is no longer a counterculture conference
|
| Being in tech and partnering with the US Army on 2025 _is_
| counterculture.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "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.
| tekla wrote:
| Cool, whats your handle so I can suggest your name to
| organizers to set it up for them
| giantg2 wrote:
| I'd be open to working on it if they actually want to
| pursue it and want to provide contact info for whatever
| subgroup handles the comms/networking.
| tekla wrote:
| Join their discord or forums and whatever and get crackin
|
| https://defcon.org/html/links/get-involved.html
| spydum wrote:
| 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).
| giantg2 wrote:
| Doesn't have to be wifi. There are many different ways to
| communicate. It's a matter of finding the best one.
| Unfortunately, the largest drawback is the potential for
| malicious/mischievous actors to interrupt them given the
| crowd. Something as simple as FM transmission, like at a
| drive-in, could be an option.
| cess11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| stickfigure wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| sebstefan wrote:
| >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.
| ecshafer wrote:
| 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.
| sebstefan wrote:
| It doesn't erase the last 50 years
|
| Broken clocks, all that.
|
| State of the clock pending what's going to come out in the
| news about Orange guy's meeting with Putin where they are
| discussing the surrender of Ukrainian territories without
| Ukraine's opinion.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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?
| sebstefan wrote:
| The flimsy support for Ukraine doesn't erase 50 years of
| catastrophic effects of USA interventionism
|
| You can cherry pick a few good things. Ukraine, Kosovo,
| Korea, maybe Libya, the first Gulf war, the Berlin air-lift
|
| Then you come back to reality. The war on terror, El
| Salvador, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Laos, arming the
| Saudis, Irak, Afghanistan
|
| If you engage in 50 or so interventions and all except one
| fail miserably, often in horrifying ways that result in the
| deaths of millions of people, it's really hard to maintain
| that that's a good record.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| OK, so we're just going to handwave away any positive
| impact the US has had in preserving the rules-based
| international order for the past 70 years and amplify
| every US failure, while not even taking into
| consideration the alternatives like Russia and China.
| Keep living in your bubble.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Exactly. We can just look at the North/South Korea divide
| to see the alternative world histories that could have
| been.
| sebstefan wrote:
| You do whatever you want.
|
| >preserving the rules-based international order
|
| The USA's foreign policy is anything but rules-based.
| They're brutal and barbaric. You can agitate China and
| Russia as being scarier, that doesn't make the U.S.
| military a force of good.
|
| If you're asking the whether they have their place being
| shoved at the center of Defcon you have to take in the
| whole picture
| chupasaurus wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.)
| tete wrote:
| 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!
| moc_was_wronged wrote:
| In the US:
|
| * employers can rescind job offers over 20-year-old social
| media posts.
|
| * rents are sky high and constantly increasing.
|
| * health insurers routinely kill people if they are deemed too
| expensive to be alive.
|
| * a literal fascist rapist billionaire is now president.
|
| Consequently, we have a society no one will defend. It's not
| that people like Putin or Xi. What Putin is doing in Ukraine is
| unforgivable, even if the West is partially at fault too.
|
| The human rights issues of US-led capitalism have always been
| severe, but 50 years ago there were redeeming qualities, at
| least domestically. These days, those are gone, and I don't
| blame Gen Z for deciding there is nothing about our society to
| defend.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| 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.
| shazbotter wrote:
| 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.
| HamsterDan wrote:
| Articles like this are a stark reminder of just how disconnected
| the internet is from reality. Survey 100 people at random and
| you'd be hard pressed to find a single one who would be offended
| if their employer partnered with the military. But the internet
| is filled with loudmouths who insist there's no reason to have a
| military and that anybody who partners with the military in any
| capacity is an evil fascist.
| esseph wrote:
| Hacker culture is and has always been anti-fascist and anti-
| capitalist _by nature_ , at least the version that grew in the
| west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew in
| the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with open source
| in the early to mid 90s.
| ixtli wrote:
| Exactly: we live in a capitalist society which has been in
| decline into fascism for generations which makes the counter
| culture the opposite of those things.
|
| I get the sense that because people can think of a few
| examples of mercenary security people or a few white
| supremacist groups that "hack" that this is somehow a
| refutation. It's not. You know about these people because 1)
| they usually are mean and suck and 2) they are outliers.
|
| As you say: the phreaking / hacking / hobbist subcultures
| have always been collectivist by nature and the product of
| those subcultures will always chafe at the profit motive.
| ThrowawayR2 wrote:
| The considerable number of libertarians and anarchists
| among the old-school hackers would probably be rather
| surprised to hear themselves described as collectivist.
| drdrek wrote:
| I think anti Fascist is way too narrow, it's anti
| establishment, any establishment period. Anything anyone with
| power does is bad, that's the mentality for 50 years.
| saintjavelina wrote:
| Thanks for another stark reminder of how comments here are
| disconnected from reality. Most IRL are tired of people who
| call everything fascist and froth at the mouth about "anti-
| fascism."
| zevon wrote:
| Let me assure you that the population that you will find at
| Congress is rather anti-fascist. And so is the constitution
| of country where the event happens. As far as I remember
| from a few side-notes in my history classes, there are a
| few historic reasons for that. One may go so far as to call
| those reasons pretty stark reminders of why anti-fascism is
| a good thing...
| saintjavelina wrote:
| Yeah this is exactly the sort of anti-historical menacing
| puffery I was talking about. The vast majority of polled
| WW2 GIs were against racial integration and homosexuality
| and in favor of white supremacy by the way. Somehow I
| don't think they'd fit your idea of "anti-fascist."
| Neither them nor the literal fasces on the wall in the US
| Senate.
| anonfordays wrote:
| Hacker culture is and has always been anti-Marxist and anti-
| Communist by _nature_ , at least the version that grew in the
| west. It was an offshoot of hippie culture in the 60s, grew
| in the 80s phreaking scene, and highly entangled with
| _libertarian_ open source in the early to mid 90s.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Yes, it is often missed but hippies are at hacker cultures
| core, in terms of the root file directory. John Perry
| Barlow's resume shows it all.
| zachrip wrote:
| Where are you getting this claim from?
| Tarball10 wrote:
| >Most Americans continue to express positive views of the
| military: 60% say it has a positive effect, while 36% say its
| effect is negative.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/the-u-s-
| mili...
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| If we hadn't gone to Iraq, Afghanistan, and supported the
| Israelis, I imagine these numbers would be much higher with
| the young.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Based on those numbers I'd be surprised to _not_ "find a
| single one who would be offended if their employer
| partnered with the military".
| ixtli wrote:
| This isnt anywhere near my experience at all. People don't like
| empire and if you look around your life and think everyone you
| see would be pleased to do military contracts you're in a (
| really disconcerting ) bubble.
| busterarm wrote:
| Everyone living in a western nation today is a direct
| beneficiary of empire.
|
| Ask them to swap their standard of living with that of
| someone living without the influence of empire and you'll get
| nothing but hard stares.
| bigyabai wrote:
| 250 years ago, every American was a beneficiary of slavery
| too. Help remind me how that one ended, will you?
| anonym29 wrote:
| I don't think this is your point, but semantically,
| doesn't this necessarily assert that either:
|
| 1. African Americans were not Americans, or
|
| 2. African Americans, the victims of slavery, somehow
| benefited from it?
|
| I would disagree with both of those assertions.
|
| Further, consider that a vast majority (90%+) did not own
| slaves. Were non-slave-owners beneficiaries of slavery?
| What about poor, unskilled whites, who had their own
| wages effectively suppressed due to the negligible labor
| costs of slavery - were they really net _beneficiaries_
| of slavery? They certainly were not the main victims, but
| that doesn 't automatically make them beneficiaries,
| either. Slavery was overwhelmingly a horrific practice by
| wealthy elites for wealthy elites, not by all white
| people for all white people.
| busterarm wrote:
| It ended with one half of a country being so mad about
| their standard of living changing that they had a bloody
| civil war about it. You're proving my point entirely.
|
| I was never talking about right or wrong, I was talking
| about whether people are willing to sacrifice their
| standard of living substantially just to be "right" about
| something.
| esseph wrote:
| Now realize there are 8 billion people on the planet, and
| the 95.6% of people are... really tired, and really upset
| with the 4.4% of that empire.
| busterarm wrote:
| So you only care about one specific empire then. Got it.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| The US federal budget goes to:
|
| (based on FY 2025 budget proposal )
|
| category, billions, % of federal spending
|
| Social Security 1,543 21.2%
|
| Medicare 936 12.9%
|
| Medicaid 589 8.1%
|
| Food Stamps (SNAP) 94 1.3%
|
| WIC 8 0.1%
|
| Section 8 33 0.5%
|
| Defense 900 12.4%
|
| Other Entitlement Programs 1,168 16.1%
|
| Other Agencies (Non-Defense Discretionary) 1,029 14.2%
| lesuorac wrote:
| Where's interest payments?
|
| Based on their omission I assume you're computing these
| numbers with them split out but it hardly seems fair to
| say you're spending "900" on defense when the total cost
| of paying that "900" is going to be much more since you
| had to borrow.
|
| It's like saying a house only costs 1M when you end up
| paying over 1M in interest as well as the principal for
| 2M.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| oops....
|
| Net_Interest $965 billion, 13.3%
| theginger wrote:
| The x files def con was always a defense conference
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| qwertytyyuu wrote:
| Whelp might as well just only go to black hat now
| mi100hael wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think many would be surprised how many people 20+ years ago
| were feds.. or became feds
| dogman144 wrote:
| 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!
| tucnak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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