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>>What's interesting is why he attempted PR reconciliation at a relatively niche conference. He was recruiting. Don't let the tattoos and black shirts worn by

>>What's interesting is why he attempted PR reconciliation at a relatively niche conference. He was recruiting. Don't let the tattoos and black shirts worn by the crowd fool you, many work and/or consult for the government.

tptacek 13y ago
NSA recruits from engineering universities. They are quite good at it. The idea that he needs to troll Black Hat for talent dignifies the audience at Black Hat and misses the truth of what was happening there.
- samstave 13y ago
  Can you enlighten me on the truth of what was happening there? (Serious request) Your write-up of Alexander is spot on. He has been referred to both the most powerful and the most feared man in the world.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    I have no idea why anyone outside of the DoD would fear him. Again, the truth is simple: it was a press op. The event was corporate enough that nobody was going to throw pies at him, but just countercultural enough that he could be assured that someone would make him look better by heckling.
    - samstave 13y ago
      >"I have no idea why anyone outside of the DoD would fear him." It was said, which is basically confirmed with this latest revelation, that he has all the information on everyone and can blackmail anyone.... I am trying to recall where I heard that though, originally.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        I don't think anyone as savvy and successful as Keith Alexander wants to bake J. Edgar Hoover's image into their legacy.
        jlgreco 13y ago
        Many people consider legacies to be overrated. Reputation while still alive and kicking is something that concerns just about everybody though.
        temphn 13y ago
        http://jontaplin.com/2008/03/11/eliot-spitzer-the-nsa/ http://jontaplin.com/2008/03/11/eliot-spitzer-the-nsa/ "I’ve been tough on Spitzer, but we can’t forget that the reason he got in trouble was because of the new NSA domestic surveillance apparatus that was so brilliantly depicted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Here’s the Lede. Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon anti-terrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system. Spitzer was what the data-mining experts at the NSA call a PEP–a politically exposed person. Banks now monitor PEP’s money wiring activities figuring they are classic targets of blackmail or bribery. Spitzer got caught in the data mining screen. I know people will probably say that even Mukasey had to sign off on an investigation as explosive as this. Spitzer was a self-detructive idiot, but at the end of the day, we have to realize that nobody has any privacy anymore."
      - sneak 13y ago
        I wrote something about how ubiquitous surveillance can be used to blackmail anyone about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5974734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5974734
    - umsm 13y ago
      Fearing someone for organizational reasons is different than the fear I believe he is referring to. People may fear him due to the power he holds on changing people's lives with the information he controls and has access to.
    - griffordson 13y ago
      And his detractors look like a bunch of OWS hooligans even if only subconsciously. I haven't actually seen the Black Hat talk yet, but I can imagine the audience does not compare favorably to another recent PR event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fawN4OZEt-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fawN4OZEt-Y This kind of thing helps build up the conscious and unconscious associations in the minds of many that favor the NSA a great deal.
      - tptacek 13y ago
        The audience for this event is infosec professionals wearing t-shirts, for whatever that's worth to you. Demographically pretty compatible with Reddit, or at least the subset of Redditors with top-quartile (for IT) incomes. To the extent that this audience has any engagement with public policy, that engagement is likely to take a Ron Paul-ish flavor.
        griffordson 13y ago
        Sorry, my comment wasn't very clear. I was comparing the behavior of the two audiences more than appearance or socioeconomic status or anything else. When the video comes out, people are likely to be reminded of the people doing Mic Checks at board meetings etc. And for many, that sort of thing is just rude and out of bounds. Notice how he wore his uniform this year instead of something more casual like he did at last year's Def Con. I agree, this was very carefully orchestrated to help discredit his detractors.
        lawnchair_larry 13y ago
        That's not the BlackHat audience that I've seen for many years now. It's basically RSA these days. I think that demographic exists at BH as a vocal minority. When you're actually on the floor, it's difficult to actually find anybody you're thinking of. Don't forget that attendance is over 8,000 lately, IIRC.
        tptacek 13y ago
        I'm not going to say the conference isn't vendor-y and commercial; it is definitely that, and more so than it started. But it's nothing resembling RSA. Also: Defcon is nothing like what it was in the 90's; it's had a trajectory reminiscent of Burning Man's.
- Cowen 13y ago
  > NSA recruits from engineering universities. They are quite good at it. Given the nature of the technical problems they face, they would have to be pretty incompetent to not be good at recruiting from engineering universities. "Would you rather build yet another CRUD app, or build systems that trawl through 20+ TB of data every day?" Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe.
  - saraid216 13y ago
    > Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe. The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis. It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.
    - wpietri 13y ago
      Yeah. As much as a flaming atheist as I am, I regret that people aren't spending as much time getting an ethical education as they once did. I suspect that one could teach an excellent non-religious Sunday School class by only asking difficult questions. The only people who scare me more than people who have never thought much about ethics are the ones who think they know The Answer.
      - saraid216 13y ago
        Absolutely. That's roughly what philosophy courses are meant to do. They fire a shotgun round into the air to show you as much variance and disagreement between cogent and prominent thinkers and then ask, "So... what do you think?" (Speaking solely in terms of American education,) Literature classes also do this to a smaller extent. In elementary schools, more so but it's supposed to be done in social studies... which converts into history class later on. These are all huge opportunities to teach ethics. We don't take them, because ethics isn't a marketable skill and has always been an implicit lesson. So we wrote standards and tests and teach to those and now here we are. Most people who graduate from high school do so believing that democracy is a flawed-but-least-flawed model of government they just have to endure, that history consists of great figures who dwarf the capabilities of the little people, and that actually understanding the breadth of our social fabric is pretty much impossible. Ethics? Ethics is whatever doesn't piss off your best friend and still gets you laid.
- moxie 13y ago
  I speak at one of those universities almost every year, primarily so that I can talk in opposition to the NSA recruiter who is always there giving a talk at the same time. Those young people look strongly to the culture defined in large part by conferences like Defcon and BlackHat in order to make their choices. For many of them, the trip to LV is the highlight of their year. If the culture of those events changes to be substantially hostile to the NSA and its employees, I can believe that young people in that demographic would at least think twice about joining the NSA. Basically, I think keynotes like this are part of a cultural war for this community, and I think it's an important one.
  - foobarqux 13y ago
    > I speak at one of those universities almost every year, primarily so that I can talk in opposition to the NSA recruiter who is always there giving a talk at the same time. Wow. That's really above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks for being one of the good guys. Sometimes it doesn't feel like there are any left.
  - fragmede 13y ago
    You do a good job of it too. I also wish that Good Will Hunting were required viewing, if only for the NSA monologue. I think it's also worth mentioning that while sometimes indistinguishable, BlackHat != Defcon, even if tptacek wants them to be.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Give me a break. Black Hat was started as an excuse to get companies to pay for their infosec teams to attend Defcon. I was at Defcon in the '90s, and spoke at the second-ever Black Hat; my partner Jeremy spoke at the first.
      - fragmede 13y ago
        I think that start is exactly why BlackHat != Defcon, a decade and half later. Defcon's a "Let's Spend a Weekend in Vegas", while BlackHat is now held around the world. Abu Dhabi anyone?

tptacek 13y ago

NSA recruits from engineering universities. They are quite good at it. The idea that he needs to troll Black Hat for talent dignifies the audience at Black Hat and misses the truth of what was happening there.

samstave 13y ago
Can you enlighten me on the truth of what was happening there? (Serious request) Your write-up of Alexander is spot on. He has been referred to both the most powerful and the most feared man in the world.
- tptacek 13y ago
  I have no idea why anyone outside of the DoD would fear him. Again, the truth is simple: it was a press op. The event was corporate enough that nobody was going to throw pies at him, but just countercultural enough that he could be assured that someone would make him look better by heckling.
  - samstave 13y ago
    >"I have no idea why anyone outside of the DoD would fear him." It was said, which is basically confirmed with this latest revelation, that he has all the information on everyone and can blackmail anyone.... I am trying to recall where I heard that though, originally.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      I don't think anyone as savvy and successful as Keith Alexander wants to bake J. Edgar Hoover's image into their legacy.
      - jlgreco 13y ago
        Many people consider legacies to be overrated. Reputation while still alive and kicking is something that concerns just about everybody though.
      - temphn 13y ago
        http://jontaplin.com/2008/03/11/eliot-spitzer-the-nsa/ http://jontaplin.com/2008/03/11/eliot-spitzer-the-nsa/ "I’ve been tough on Spitzer, but we can’t forget that the reason he got in trouble was because of the new NSA domestic surveillance apparatus that was so brilliantly depicted in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. Here’s the Lede. Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon anti-terrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans’ privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But the data-sifting effort didn’t disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system. Spitzer was what the data-mining experts at the NSA call a PEP–a politically exposed person. Banks now monitor PEP’s money wiring activities figuring they are classic targets of blackmail or bribery. Spitzer got caught in the data mining screen. I know people will probably say that even Mukasey had to sign off on an investigation as explosive as this. Spitzer was a self-detructive idiot, but at the end of the day, we have to realize that nobody has any privacy anymore."
    - sneak 13y ago
      I wrote something about how ubiquitous surveillance can be used to blackmail anyone about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5974734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5974734
  - umsm 13y ago
    Fearing someone for organizational reasons is different than the fear I believe he is referring to. People may fear him due to the power he holds on changing people's lives with the information he controls and has access to.
  - griffordson 13y ago
    And his detractors look like a bunch of OWS hooligans even if only subconsciously. I haven't actually seen the Black Hat talk yet, but I can imagine the audience does not compare favorably to another recent PR event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fawN4OZEt-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fawN4OZEt-Y This kind of thing helps build up the conscious and unconscious associations in the minds of many that favor the NSA a great deal.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      The audience for this event is infosec professionals wearing t-shirts, for whatever that's worth to you. Demographically pretty compatible with Reddit, or at least the subset of Redditors with top-quartile (for IT) incomes. To the extent that this audience has any engagement with public policy, that engagement is likely to take a Ron Paul-ish flavor.
      - griffordson 13y ago
        Sorry, my comment wasn't very clear. I was comparing the behavior of the two audiences more than appearance or socioeconomic status or anything else. When the video comes out, people are likely to be reminded of the people doing Mic Checks at board meetings etc. And for many, that sort of thing is just rude and out of bounds. Notice how he wore his uniform this year instead of something more casual like he did at last year's Def Con. I agree, this was very carefully orchestrated to help discredit his detractors.
      - lawnchair_larry 13y ago
        That's not the BlackHat audience that I've seen for many years now. It's basically RSA these days. I think that demographic exists at BH as a vocal minority. When you're actually on the floor, it's difficult to actually find anybody you're thinking of. Don't forget that attendance is over 8,000 lately, IIRC.
        tptacek 13y ago
        I'm not going to say the conference isn't vendor-y and commercial; it is definitely that, and more so than it started. But it's nothing resembling RSA. Also: Defcon is nothing like what it was in the 90's; it's had a trajectory reminiscent of Burning Man's.
Cowen 13y ago
> NSA recruits from engineering universities. They are quite good at it. Given the nature of the technical problems they face, they would have to be pretty incompetent to not be good at recruiting from engineering universities. "Would you rather build yet another CRUD app, or build systems that trawl through 20+ TB of data every day?" Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe.
- saraid216 13y ago
  > Obviously there are ethical issues, but peoples' ethics are much more pliable than most of us like to believe. The irritating thing about this is that most of us aren't taught ethics. Most people don't take philosophy courses. Most people don't take civics courses. We're expected to just figure it out through osmosis. It's not about pliability. Most people never actually develop their own approach to ethics.
  - wpietri 13y ago
    Yeah. As much as a flaming atheist as I am, I regret that people aren't spending as much time getting an ethical education as they once did. I suspect that one could teach an excellent non-religious Sunday School class by only asking difficult questions. The only people who scare me more than people who have never thought much about ethics are the ones who think they know The Answer.
    - saraid216 13y ago
      Absolutely. That's roughly what philosophy courses are meant to do. They fire a shotgun round into the air to show you as much variance and disagreement between cogent and prominent thinkers and then ask, "So... what do you think?" (Speaking solely in terms of American education,) Literature classes also do this to a smaller extent. In elementary schools, more so but it's supposed to be done in social studies... which converts into history class later on. These are all huge opportunities to teach ethics. We don't take them, because ethics isn't a marketable skill and has always been an implicit lesson. So we wrote standards and tests and teach to those and now here we are. Most people who graduate from high school do so believing that democracy is a flawed-but-least-flawed model of government they just have to endure, that history consists of great figures who dwarf the capabilities of the little people, and that actually understanding the breadth of our social fabric is pretty much impossible. Ethics? Ethics is whatever doesn't piss off your best friend and still gets you laid.
moxie 13y ago
I speak at one of those universities almost every year, primarily so that I can talk in opposition to the NSA recruiter who is always there giving a talk at the same time. Those young people look strongly to the culture defined in large part by conferences like Defcon and BlackHat in order to make their choices. For many of them, the trip to LV is the highlight of their year. If the culture of those events changes to be substantially hostile to the NSA and its employees, I can believe that young people in that demographic would at least think twice about joining the NSA. Basically, I think keynotes like this are part of a cultural war for this community, and I think it's an important one.
- foobarqux 13y ago
  > I speak at one of those universities almost every year, primarily so that I can talk in opposition to the NSA recruiter who is always there giving a talk at the same time. Wow. That's really above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks for being one of the good guys. Sometimes it doesn't feel like there are any left.
- fragmede 13y ago
  You do a good job of it too. I also wish that Good Will Hunting were required viewing, if only for the NSA monologue. I think it's also worth mentioning that while sometimes indistinguishable, BlackHat != Defcon, even if tptacek wants them to be.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Give me a break. Black Hat was started as an excuse to get companies to pay for their infosec teams to attend Defcon. I was at Defcon in the '90s, and spoke at the second-ever Black Hat; my partner Jeremy spoke at the first.
    - fragmede 13y ago
      I think that start is exactly why BlackHat != Defcon, a decade and half later. Defcon's a "Let's Spend a Weekend in Vegas", while BlackHat is now held around the world. Abu Dhabi anyone?