Admiral Mike Rogers, the new Director of the NSA, did not receive an invitation this year to either of the two major hacking conferences (Black Hat and Def Con) as was the case last year with his predecessor Keith Alexander at Def Con.
Thus while the hackers are preparing to gather in Las Vegas, the leadership of the U.S. National Security Agency probably will not make the trip.
Vanee Vines, a representative of the NSA, confirmed Rogers' absence from the conferences, and stated that he did not know if he had received invitations for the conferences. He also mentioned that he does not know if any other senior NSA official will attend.
A representative of Black Hat, Meredith Corley, said that “we meet to talk with all members of the security community, both public and private. This year we did not invite Admiral Mike Rogers.”
The US intelligence services will of course have some representation. The keynote speaker at Black Hat, which starts on Saturday, will be Dan Geer, an information security specialist who currently serves as chief security officer of In-Q-Tel, the technology arm invested in by the CIA and the broader intelligence community.
Def Con delegates, through conference founder Jeff Moss, publicly called on federal government employees to take a “time out” and stay away. (Moss is a member of the Department of Homeland Security advisory board.)
Let us remind that the predecessor of Rogers, Keith Alexander, made an appearance at Def Con in 2012 urging “the best of the community” to work for the NSA and its military twin sister, US Cyber Command, while agency employees were handing out flyers to participants.
We recall Keith Alexander's speech because at that time he had responded to a question from the audience by saying, "the story that we have millions or even hundreds of millions of surveillance files is absolutely false."
However, the technology community seems to be watching and reacting. The "grounding" of the intelligence agencies may of course be a reaction, but that does not mean that there will not be government hackers at the conference, or that the secret services will always be looking for personnel from the participants.
At least while they are there they will have the opportunity to listen to presentations by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU who will speak on topics such as "Blinding the surveillance state" and "The year in digital civil liberties".
