Just last weekend, the hacker group AntiSec has threatened to releas over 10 Gigabytes of information that it downloaded from seventy different law enforcement agencies around the globe. The intent of  the probable re-distribution of the information is to embarrass and humiliate the police and was in retaliation for recent arrests of the group’s members. However, the extreme amount of animosity that you might expect between hackers and law enforcement agencies didn’t stop several policemen and federal agents from attending two hacker conventions in Las Vegas over the last few days. 

The idea of law enforcement officials at a hacker convention sounds more than a bit bizarre to me. First, a convention specifically for the purpose of sharing information about what is essentially an illegal activity strikes me as unusual. I’m guessing that there aren’t any official drug dealer conventions, for example.  Second, law enforcement officials and hackers mingling together just seems wrong, but it has to be a little thrilling for both sides of the law on some level. According THIS BLOG from the NYT, many of the law enforcement officials at the convention are there to recruit some of the hackers at the convention. 

Many of the law enforcement officials who attended the Defcon conference in Las Vegas weren’t exactly representing the Mayfield police department; the United States Cyber Command, which is a special force of the Pentagon, sent representatives to the hacker convention for the purpose of trying to attract high-level hackers at the convention into federal service. The federal agents at the Defcon conference even had a special panel entitled: “Meet the Federal Agent 2.0.”

If the reports about the hacker convention from the New York Times are truthful, everyone seemed fairly amicable. The hackers asked the federal agents some fairly interesting questions about the possible positions available at the federal level and about how the feds actually worked--possibly to glean some inside information so that hackers wouldn’t be caught. 

From the New York Times:

"Do you use informants in computer cases, as you would in other cases? Yes. Do the agents attack the computer systems of suspects? No. How seriously do the agents regard Lulz Security, the loose-knit vigilante group under the F.B.I.’s watch lately for attacking government and corporate Web sites, asked a young man from Sacramento. Mr. Hartvigsen said it would not be prudent to comment on an active case, offering only: “We investigate folks who break the law.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard about the idea of hackers turning legit. A few months ago, I came across THIS Craig’s List ad, which shows either companies or law enforcement agencies advertising for employees under the search term “hackers.”