"Ubiquitous surveillance prevents millions from speaking
freely. BlackHat keynote attendees, let's not let Gen.
Alexander speak freely today."
I anticipated the protest to be effective, since black-hat hackers have somewhat of a culture of booing presenters who they morally object to. See for example an undercover reporter that was booed out of DEFCON in 2007. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/undercover-nbc-dateline-reporte...
I think the thing that made this disruption ineffective is the majority of attendees weren't black-hat hackers. They were mostly corporate professionals. See Black Hat's own demographic survey http://www.blackhat.com/docs/bh-us-12/sponsors/bh-us-12-spon...
It's therefore not really surprising that most of the audience wanted to hear the general speak, and was annoyed by the disruption.
If, on the other hand, the general were speaking at DEFCON I think he probably would have been almost unanimously booed off the stage. But the feds are staying away from DEFON this year (for that reason).
So in retrospect, I think the disruption was a miscalculated PR move for the hacker community.
I think Moxie Marlinspike truly and deeply cares about these issues, isn't an outrage tourist, and has done more for online privacy than I probably ever will. I think he truly believed that attempting to disrupt the talk could be an effective strategy. But I also think he was wrong about this.
I'm actually less interested in our external perception than in how we see ourselves. I think the value of being disruptive isn't necessarily to show the world anything, but to define ourselves as a community with a cultural narrative that is unsympathetic to government surveillance.
If that's the narrative we want to create, then I think we need to take every opportunity we can to inject whatever cultural influence we can, because keynotes like this are the NSA's effort to do the opposite. I agree that one or two people heckling doesn't mean much, but I appreciate the bravery of the people that were disruptive, and I only wish that everyone there critical of Gen Alexander had contributed to an enormous chorus of boos and forced him off the stage.
In the end, at the very least the title of this story is "NSA director heckled on stage at Black Hat security conference" rather than "NSA director universally applauded by Black Hat security conference."
In the end, I don't think it matters much either way.
I think the walkout would have had the benefit of creating a wall of peers waiting outside the conference hall watching their peers who refused to participate. Also, again, good photo op.
It's funny, you and I are on the same page about wanting to disentangle software security (and I guess infosec) people from USG/SIGINT/LEO work, but for I suspect are somewhat different reasons. So many people on HN seem to think the whole industry is in the back pocket of the USG, which just isn't true; I think a lot of people considering careers helping with online privacy think they need to surrender their moral qualms about assisting the USG, which just isn't true.
I think the thing that made this disruption ineffective is the majority of attendees weren't black-hat hackers. They were mostly corporate professionals. See Black Hat's own demographic survey http://www.blackhat.com/docs/bh-us-12/sponsors/bh-us-12-spon...
It's therefore not really surprising that most of the audience wanted to hear the general speak, and was annoyed by the disruption.
If, on the other hand, the general were speaking at DEFCON I think he probably would have been almost unanimously booed off the stage. But the feds are staying away from DEFON this year (for that reason).
So in retrospect, I think the disruption was a miscalculated PR move for the hacker community.