It's reference to general Keith Alexander and secretary of homeland security Alejandro Mayorkas having infiltrated, assimilated and neutered Defcon. The latter did the last keynote speech.
As a former Defcon attendee from the 90s, what made Defcon so successful as a business IMHO was that it was run and managed by folks who were only tangentially associated with the wider hacking community. Most of us who considered ourselves "underground" would never have dreamed of commercializing a conference the way DT did. At best you'd sell t-shirts to help pay for the cost of the venue.
It was definitely not associated with the military or govt. at the time though. That really came about with the founding of Blackhat and the open wooing of the Feds.
I should also say that almost no "hacker" conference, even back then, was primarily attended by hackers. We used to joke back then that Defcon was a "retarded fashion show" (sorry for the offensive terminology). There were always more journalists, narcs, and hangers-on at cons back then than people who were actually hacking anything.
As a former Defcon (and Summercon and Pumpcon) attendee from the 90s, I think this is revisionist. "Spot the fed" was a friendly game at Defcon years before Black Hat. Was Defcon more commercial than Pumpcon? Absolutely. It was in Vegas! Pumpcon was an overgrown 2600 meeting! But Summercon in 1995 had Bob Stratton and Winn Schwartau as speakers.
The reality is simply that there aren't that many people seriously criming, and there weren't that many before. Attendance at these events has always been driven primarily from enthusiasts and spectators; you couldn't even fill a bar with the number of meaningfully active people, even in 1995.
(Obviously, this is a private-sector and America/Europe-centric observation).
Heh, if you were at both Defcon and Pumpcon then I'm sure we know each other. Summercon 95 was the height of Con chaos. But I wasn't trying to say Feds didn't attend Defcon from the beginning, they absolutely did. I was just saying that they weren't doing keynotes and certainly weren't running the con.
I understand the broad point. What I am asking for is if there are specific examples of intelligence agencies infiltrating the staffing of hacker zines, which is what the parent was suggesting.
Ahh, sorry. I do not have specifics myself. They may be hard to come by.
In my experience, and I have some that is a good parallel but is also not software / hacking related, these things happen in layers. There is a core layer, call it the actor guild, who are three letter lifers, let's say. They are insular, not having broad contact outside trusted peers.
These people won't be doing the work directly.
They will seek others who have various inclinations and or liabilities who can do that work, or even more insidiously, they know who will do the work due to those inclinations or simply being misguided. These people may be almost entirely removed from the actors guild, or if associated, it's murky. They will be directed by people who clearly are of the guild, but also are not core. There are layers of these people who actually do the work and are in contact more generally and who also lack knowledge and or may well be unaware of the real purpose behind their actions.
A good look at what was done, and frankly is still being done in various civil rights, environmental and political activist groups would hint very strongly at what I would be shocked to find is not being attempted (with some degrees of success) in these more technical circles.
Life has taken me well into territory exposed to this stuff, and is currently taking me well out of it for now. Good opportunities tend to work that way, so this is largely a matter of curiosity for me and maybe more should I return to a closer place one day.
In terms of things like activist collectives, I've seen the following:
Promotion of people inclined to favor established interests, who then influence the potential of the group toward low value actions.
Division. Basically, start shit among key players and watch the thing dissolve into uselessness meta.
Pollution. Increase group size and or decrease coherency with a combination of people and misinformation.
Dilution. Impact vital players in ways that reduce their agency and zeal to participate.
