Surveillance scandal rips through hacker community

Via Bill 

 

The Edward Snowden look-a-like contest at this year's Defcon shows that the hackers still have a sense of humor about current events, but few among them think that the pre-surveillance scandal status quo will hold fast. (Credit: Seth Rosenblatt/CNET) 

 The good ol' days of chummy games of "Spot the Fed" at Defcon are finished as hackers and security entrepreneurs plan next steps in the wake of government spying revelations.

- It used to be that the playful Defcon contest of "Spot the Fed" gave hackers and the government agents tracking them a chance interact in a less serious manner.

Hackers who found a government agent among the conference attendees would wear with pride T-shirts that read, "I spotted the Fed." The agent would be given a shirt that read, "I am the Fed." And by flipping the cat-and-mouse dynamic for at least one weekend a year, the two groups more or less came to a greater understanding of each other.

The relationship had gotten friendly enough so that when Gen. Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, visited Defcon for the first time last year, the conference's founder Jeff Moss told CNET, "It's eye-opening to see the world from their view," and noted that he had wanted to score an official visit from the NSA since Defcon began.

It would go too far to say that the uneasy marriage of friendship between the two groups now lies torn asunder in an acrimonious divorce. Hackers, information security professionals, and security experts looking to turn their knowledge into businesses won't stop working or communicating with the U.S. government. But the response to the scandal has driven many of them back to their more skeptical roots.
"What we need to realize is that [Gen. Alexander] is asking us to destroy ourselves," said Moxie Marlinspike, a well-known information security professional and entrepreneur who has had equipment seized and returned and been detained but never charged by the U.S. government.

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