When counterculture and empire merge
DEF CON has alienated many hackers by officially aligning its geopolitics with those of the U.S. military and announcing partnerships with the authoritarian countries of Bahrain and Singapore.
Amidst a backdrop of continually airborne beach balls and a remix of the indie rock hit “Heads Will Roll,” entrants to the ‘Arcade Party’ on the second floor of the Las Vegas Convention Center on Friday were given free glow stick bracelets by the Military Cyber Professionals Association. Led by a who’s who of former U.S. offensive cyber operations officials, the nonprofit also passed out flyers encouraging “Loyalty to the United States.”
The popular party took place at the end of the opening night of the 33rd annual DEF CON — widely recognized as the world’s largest hacker conference — and attendees socialized over LED-lit foosball tables and free arcade games. Two participants donned full-body furry suits and danced feet away from the DJ and a screen alternating between the logos of the Reston-based defense contractors CACI and Peraton.
In November, a U.S. federal court ordered CACI to pay $42 million in damages for its support for the torture of Iraqi civilians within the Abu Ghraib prison during the U.S. invasion of the country, which more broadly killed at least 200,000 civilians. One of the plaintiffs of the successful lawsuit, Al Jazeera journalist Salah Hasan Al-Ejaili, described the CACI torture methods as involving being “kept naked, handcuffed, the hood on your head, then they would bring a big dog.” “You hear the panting and barking of the dog very close to your face,” Hasan told Democracy Now! in 2014.
DEF CON attendees appeared to pay little attention to the human rights atrocities committed by CACI while resting their Vegas-priced beverages on a table prominently displaying the company’s backlit logo. The conference has also recently announced its controversial plans to expand into two authoritarian countries militarily aligned with the U.S. Government: Bahrain, the home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, and Singapore, a member country of the Irregular Warfare Technical Support Directorate.
The contradiction between the countercultural self-image of the U.S. hacker community and its close partnership with U.S. military and intelligence agencies is arguably the defining feature of DEF CON, with the 50-something founder Jeff “Dark Tangent” Moss recently telling a media property of the U.S. intelligence-backed threat intelligence firm Recorded Future that “If you don’t have a seat at the table, the decision might be made against you.” (Moss was inducted into the “Order of Thor” in thanks for his contributions to the U.S. military cyber community in 2023 and became an advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as far back as 2009.)
Moss recounted the recent history of official collaborations between DEF CON and the U.S. military in the closing session of the conference, naming the 2016 DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s 2023 Hack-a-Sat competition, and then the last two years’ DARPA AIxCC vulnerability patching challenge.
The U.S. Army also hosted an Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) competition at this year’s DEF CON for an artificial intelligence data fusion tool, seeking “real-time fusion of noisy, unstructured, and multimodal data sources based on tactical priorities.” (The winner was the California-based defense technology start-up Hoplynk.) And the American defense contractor Anduril Industries — which produces lethal loitering munitions — was the sponsor of the Maritime Hacking Village, whose events heavily focused on potential conflict in Taiwan.
Roughly six hours prior to the start of the NSA-affiliated Arcade Party, the prominent hacktivist Jeremy Hammond — recently released from a 10-year prison sentence for his role in the December 2011 hack of emails from the intelligence contractor Stratfor — was forcibly ejected from the conference at the end of a fireside chat between Moss and former NSA director Paul M. Nakasone.
Shortly after Moss took a final jello shot next to Nakasone, shouting “Go Army,” Hammond cried out that Nakasone was a “war criminal,” further referencing the Israeli military’s ongoing, U.S.-backed genocide of Gazans by calling out “Free Palestine!”
Though DEF CON strictly prohibits official press from filming talks, leaked footage of the exchange was published on the social media platform X by security writer Arin Waichulis. (Photography within DEF CON is also strictly controlled, protecting the anonymity of hackers and spooks alike; one “goon” volunteer with this year’s event is widely known by his color-based hacker pseudonym and has helped support a significant U.S. intelligence program built on top of his custom scraper for the text-sharing platform Pastebin.)
During the final transparency disclosure section of the conference, Hammond’s ejection was obliquely referenced as one of two “left wing” removals, with both said to have been “earned.” (The same transparency session further disclosed that four employees from an unnamed cybersecurity company attending the conference — including the CEO — were arrested in Las Vegas for doing “something stupid” and had not yet been released.)
“Real hackers don't go to DEF CON. Real hackers get kicked out of DEF CON,” wrote the journalist and transparency activist Lorax B. Horne on Friday, in reference to Hammond’s ejection.
Despite the controversy from his fireside chat this year, Nakasone also spoke at last year’s DEF CON, and then-NSA director Keith Alexander keynoted DEF CON in 2012.
Nakasone also provided a private media briefing to official DEF CON press on Friday morning in his capacity as the founding director of Vanderbilt University’s Institute of National Security, which has recently led a media campaign arguing that a Chinese artificial intelligence company’s usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) has crossed a new technical threshold in government-aligned information operations. Beijing Thinker Technology Ltd. is widely known for its ‘GoLaxy’ artificial intelligence tool for playing the board game Go and has been alleged, based upon unpublished documents said to be leaked by a former employee, to have conducted influence campaigns aligned with Chinese government objectives.
When asked by All-Source Intelligence about how GoLaxy’s alleged usage of LLMs is technologically distinct from the U.S. military’s open advertisement of plans to equip U.S. Special Operations Forces with LLMs to scale up information operations, as well as ongoing information operations in the Philippines run by the U.S. intelligence contractor Rhombus Power, Nakasone argued that “There’s not an equivalence between the United States and China when it comes to the rule of law.”
But Mr. Hammond’s protest of Nakasone’s fireside chat was not the only pointed criticism of U.S. military activities at the conference. Micah Lee, an independent security researcher who previously collaborated with Horne through the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, gave a popular overview on Saturday afternoon of his research into the second Trump administration’s first major scandal, widely known as ‘Signalgate.’
Lee received thunderous applause after emphasizing that, while U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth deserved scrutiny for severe operational security failures, the far more significant scandal was the U.S. military’s intentional lethal bombing of an entire residential building in Yemen, which Lee concluded was a “war crime.”
Similar applause erupted in a later section of Lee’s talk, when he explained the catastrophic security vulnerabilities in the Israel-based fork of the private messaging app Signal which President Trump’s then-national security advisor was revealed to have been using in his official duties through a high-resolution photo captured by Reuters. “For context, Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza,” Lee noted. “Free Palestine,” added an audience member, on top of widespread applause.
Updated on August 11 with a link to Anduril’s sponsorship of the Maritime Hacking Village. Clarification was also added regarding Lorax Horne no longer being affiliated with Distributed Denial of Secrets.