As hackers prepare to gather in Las Vegas for a pair of annual conventions, the leadership of the National Security Agency won’t make the trek.



While the technically sophisticated US surveillance entity has often mingled in recent years with some of the world’s elite engineers and digital security experts at Black Hat and Def Con, Admiral Mike Rogers and Rick Ledgett, the newly minted director and deputy director of the agency, won’t prowl the Mandalay Bay and Rio hotel-casinos this year.

Vanee Vines, a spokeswoman for the NSA who confirmed Rogers and Ledgett’s absences, said she was unaware of any invitations the hacker conferences extended to NSA officials, and did not know if staffers would attend, either.

A spokeswoman for Black Hat, Meredith Corley, said the conference “exists to cultivate conversations among all members of the security community, both public and private. We did not invite Admiral Mike Rogers to [be a] keynote this year.”

US intelligence will still have some representation. The keynote speaker of Black Hat, which begins on Saturday, is Dan Geer, a highly respected information security expert who currently serves as security chief of In-Q-Tel, the technology-investment arm of the CIA and the broader intelligence community.

Def Con representatives did not reply to Guardian inquiries. Last year, in the wake of the surveillance revelations from Edward Snowden, Def Con founder Jeff Moss publicly urged employees of the federal government to take a “time out” from the convention. (Moss is a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s advisory council.)

Rogers’ predecessor, Keith Alexander, made a now-infamous keynote appearance at Def Con in 2012 urging “the world’s best cybersecurity community” to come work for the NSA and its twin-sister military structure, the US Cyber Command, all while representatives of the agency passed out brochures to conference attendees.

Alexander’s speech might not have caused a stir had he not answered an audience question by saying, “the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is absolutely false.” The comment prompted Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat on the intelligence committee, to seek clarification for public remarks that Wyden considered misleading due to the robustness of NSA’s domestic and foreign data collection. The result was Wyden’s March 2013 exchange with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in which Clapper falsely claimed NSA was “not wittingly” collecting information on millions of Americans.

Keith Alexander, former NSA director, told Def Con attendees the agency sought talent from their ranks. Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Last year, before the Guardian and the Washington Post began publishing Snowden’s disclosures, Black Hat invited Alexander to present. His speech amounted to a defense of NSA in the wake of the Snowden leaks, and he was heckled for it.

The reason Alexander and other NSA officials attended the conferences in the recent past – assured-software chief Kris Britton spoke at Black Hat 2011, and former director Michael Hayden did the same in 2010 – is to improve the sometimes fraught relationship between hackers and the government, a necessity for an agency seeking to surpass the state of the art for its digital penetration, data harvesting and cybersecurity competencies. Convincing people with advanced technical skills to work for NSA rather than a private firm has been a difficult sell for the agency even before the Snowden disclosures brought unprecedented criticism upon it.

Suspicion of the NSA is reflected in several presentations scheduled for this year’s Def Con – even as their subtext is arguably one of fascination with the agency.

One boasts of a bespoke encryption tool for “kind of keeping the NSA from watching you pee”. (Or, at least, hardening security around data transiting across peer-to-peer networks.) Another promises to display a homemade version of an NSA device called Wagonbed that siphons data from an unsuspecting computer. Another explores a method of radar-enabled surveillance revealed by the leaked NSA ANT catalog.

Privacy technologists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU will also present on topics like “blinding the surveillance state” and “the year in digital civil liberties”.

Yet the conventions hardly appear to be foreclosed to the NSA in the future.

“We encourage researchers from both the private and public sectors to apply for a speaking slot at any of our annual shows,” Corley said.