The Black Hat Briefings has been the best computer security conference for a decade or so. Twinned with Black Hat is the not-corporate DEFCON meetings, often described in days past as where the freaks come out. In a good way. Kind of.
Well DEFCON has come a long way, baby. The Director of the NSA briefed it. The Feds have turned the tables on the long standing "spot the Fed" game by going there and hosting a panel called "Spot the l4m3r". And the quality of the talks have gone way, way up. This one from last summer's conference (by a West Point professor) is particularly interesting - RoboCop is already here, with automated detection and enforcement. So what are the implications?
It's sobering that perhaps the only thing standing between us an dystopia is the Police Unions.
BTW, I'm planning on going to Black Hat and DEFCON this summer. Any of y'all who are in IT (or Law Enforcement) should seriously consider going, too. We could even have a blog meet, perhaps at the annual DEFCON machine gun shoot in the desert.
UPDATE 15 March 2013 14:49: This is the kind of cool stuff you get at DEFCON now: Building an open source drone. "Weaponized Lego" FTW. And exempt from the ITAR because it's open source. Cool.
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