NSA Chief to Pitch "Common Core Values" to Hackers at DEFCON 20

Gen. Alexander will not be fair game for fed-spotting contest

The hacker community is the ultimate moral gray.  While many hackers engage in malicious activities on a daily basis, and routinely violate U.S. local, state, and federal laws, they also have been vital over the last two decades in protecting consumers.  In the 1990s corporations recklessly stored data using poor practices which threatened to allow personal financial information to fall into the hands of truly malicious individuals. 

Hackers effectively forced the corporate world to protect their users.  Sometimes it was enough to show companies via discrete disclosure.  Other times hackers looked to force the hand of entities unwilling to protect their users via more severe methods, such as full disclosure of published intrusions. On the eve of the twentieth year of DEF CON, one of the largest and most popular hacker conferences, a relationship as uneasy as that between hackers and corporations is being highlighted -- the relationship between hackers and the government.