<story><title>For first time ever, feds asked to sit out Defcon hacker conference</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/07/for-first-time-ever-feds-asked-to-sit-out-defcon-hacker-conference/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>wrath</author><text>If they are going to ban the feds from attending the conference, are they going to ban the contractors who are working with the feds also?  I imagine that the majority of the &amp;quot;security and hacking&amp;quot; type work is not done directly by the feds but by their contractor (e.g. in Snowden&amp;#x27;s case he was not working for the NSA but for Booz Allen Hamilton).&lt;p&gt;If they are just banning the feds then I think this is just a press stunt since it won&amp;#x27;t change a single thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>For first time ever, feds asked to sit out Defcon hacker conference</title><url>http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/07/for-first-time-ever-feds-asked-to-sit-out-defcon-hacker-conference/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>DanielRibeiro</author><text>Long HN discussion on this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6024094&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=6024094&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>