It has been said the the Black Hat conferences are not nearly as ominous as they sound. They are merely computer security conferences, not meetings of evil, "Black Hat hackers". On the other hand, if you have ever attended a major trade conference, you know how it works.

Pardon my digression, but it will make sense at the end.

I used to attend NAMM and the Consumer Electronics Shows when both were in Chicago. There is a zoo for the public, but the real parties are private. National Association of Music Merchants rented out the entire Museum of Natural History for an evening - the party went well into the wee hours. Consumer Electronics of course had a similar setup, but more arcane. The show was nominally at McCormick Place, but it was at Hotel Nikko where I met Mark Levinson and other wizards of the trade. None of these meetings were on the official agenda.

Imagine the contrast between the public and private sides of Black Hat. A couple of agents from the Defense Intelligence Agency understood it to be a "training event" and didn't reveal they were with the Cyber Counterintelligence wing of the Pentagon, and we find them mentioned at the bottom of p.65 in this report. It's only about 18 megabytes - small compared to the 9 gigabytes of data we now have from Greg Hoglund, CEO of HB Gary/HB Gary Federal.

The pentagon report is heavily redacted, and had to be extracted with a lawsuit by Electronic Frontier Foundation, in spite of the fact that it never was classified.

Even from this redacted version, we know Defense Intelligence was at Black Hat USA 2007, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas .

Where was Gary Hogland on August 1st and 2nd of 2007? Thanks to the searchable index provided by anonymous, we can now correlate their data the way they like to correlate ours.

(update1) I couldn't find any emails from 2007 that relate to Black Hat, but there are numerous mentions of the conference, as you can guess. It is where like minds meet.

Make hay while the sun shines folks, the gold mine is open. One set of key words that will work if you choose to investigate the banking connection instead is "quality product". Bingo.

David Roknich

DOGSPOT