This past July, the highest profile hacker conference in America – known as DEFCON – made a show of publicly disinviting all federal employees from attending. It was a shock, and a reversal: Last summer not only were the Feds in the audience, they were on the stage: National Security Agency chief General Keith Alexander was the keynote speaker; he had come, he said, to “solicit” support for cybersecurity. “You have the talent,” he said, and called for more sharing between private companies and the government. (He also denied that the NSA keeps a file on every U.S. citizen.)
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=204353