Kashmir Hill writes:
Hacker conference Defcon has a long tradition of playing “spot the fed,” a game that involves outing government types who attend under the radar to learn about the latest hacking tricks and those who are expert at developing them. There was little challenge in the game this August when it came to one group of infiltrators from Washington, D.C. The Federal Trade Commission sent a host of employees and a newly-minted commissioner to Las Vegas to run a ‘robocall honeytrap’ contest, inviting hackers to come up with a tech tool to catch companies illegally auto-ringing consumers. There is sometimes antagonism in the relationship between hackers and the government but the FTC was welcomed warmly, perhaps because it has something in common with the group: the art of the hack. While the security researchers who attend Defcon are expert in hacking technological devices, the FTC has been steadily hacking the law, to make itself into a privacy and security officer responsible for protecting Americans’ data.
Read more on Forbes.