I asked what were the most interesting talks he’d seen.

“When they don’t start just spouting off about what they know and try to brag about how smart they are.” It’s just the way they move and the general feeling you get and the confidence that some of these guys project,” Chuck said. “That’s why you pay cash only and you get a badge that just says ‘Human.’ There’s everything from DOD entities, to NSA agents, to cybercriminals and everything in between.” Then last year, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s massive leak exposing NSA surveillance, conference founder and patriarch Dark Tangent (his hacker handle) wrote an open letter asking Feds to sit out the event so everyone could cool off. Not all of them are covert two years ago former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Feds, especially in the post-Snowden era, are not especially popular, though the place is rumored to be “crawling” with them, as one long-time attendee put it to me. I spent the weekend reporting at Defcon and though I never went to claim a prize-I don’t think journalists are invited to play anyway-I do think I found a Fed.Īs a conference that hosts speeches on topics like how to cyber-hijack a jetliner, Defcon takes pride in skirting the edge of legality. At Defcon, the annual hacker conference that met over the weekend in Las Vegas, attendees play a semi-official game called “Spot the Fed.” The object is to identify who among the rabble of computer geeks and hackers is an employee of the federal government.

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