That became apparent when Alexander began pandering to the crowd. "Sometimes you guys get a bad rep," Alexander reasoned with attendees. "From my perspective, what you're doing to figure out the vulnerabilities in our systems is absolutely needed." But the appeal was rebuffed in some corners, Cowley reported:

A few rows further back, a group of cynics kept up a running counterpoint to Alexander's talk ... "Then stop arresting us!" one of the hecklers called back.

Other moments of tension occurred during the Q&A, according to CNET's Elinor Mills.

Asked ... whether the NSA keeps a file on every U.S. citizen, Alexander said that notion was "absolute nonsense," partly because managing 260 million or so individual citizen files would be impossible for the department to handle. "No we don't. Absolutely not," he said. "Our job is foreign intelligence."

That's a denial that's already inviting scrutiny. According to William Binney, a former technical director at the NSA, Alexander is playing a "word game," and as a matter of fact, the NSA is " indeed collecting e-mails, Twitter writings, internet searches and other data belonging to Americans and indexing it." In remarks at the conference captured by Wired's Kim Zetter, Binney refuted Alexander's claims. “The reason I left the NSA was because they started spying on everybody in the country. That’s the reason I left,” said Binney, who left in late 2001. “Unfortunately, once the software takes in data, it will build profiles on everyone in that data,” he said. “You can simply call it up by the attributes of anyone you want and it’s in place for people to look at." Similar claims were advanced by ACLU staff attorney Alex Abdo, who also attended the conference. "A gaping loophole in the laws governing the NSA allows the agency to do dragnet surveillance of non-Americans and, in the process sweep up the data of Americans they may be communicating with, and hold onto that data even though the Americans aren’t the target," he said.

Clearly, there's a philosophical clash of opinions between the NSA and some elements of the hacking subculture. Whether or not the promise of a yearly salary and government benefits can smooth over those differences will play out on case-by-case basis. But according to Cowley's report, there are definitely some willing to make the jump. "I think it would be thrilling," one researcher said. "I mean, that's the real deal ... They're trying to protect the country and people. It would be absolutely awesome."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.