Hi, my name is Bo Woods, and I am the Policy Department Lead at DEF CON this year.
Hi, my name is Peter Stephens, and I work at the OECD.
Hi y'all, I'm Mosfet. I've been coming to DEF CON for over a decade,
as long as I've been a hacker.
Hi, my name is Sarah Pawozik, and I'm so excited to welcome you
to the Policy Department at DEF CON.
DEF CON Policy Department is really about bringing together hackers,
policymakers, lawyers, people from the legal community,
in order to bridge the gap between the public policy and the technical communities.
I came to DEF CON to really ask hackers a number of questions.
The first one is, how can we, as international organizations,
learn from you, and how can we work together?
Because at the moment, I think it's quite often based on individual relationships,
and it's hard to really get more detail from that.
And the other part of that is,
what are the policy areas that we need to be really going into detail?
What are the basics we need to be applying around the world?
How can we make sure that we're amplifying good practice already that takes place,
and seeing it happening around the world?
I do really believe that by having that rising tide, we do raise all boats.
I was a hardware hacker, a firmware hacker, and now I'm a policy hacker.
Two years ago, I quit my day job, moved to DC,
and started working in Congress, having no idea how cyber policy worked.
DEF CON Policy is here, so you don't have to quit your day job.
You don't have to be me, and you don't have to jump in the deep end.
Dip your toe in the water at DEF CON Policy,
start to engage in the conversations with policymakers,
learn how cyber policy affects your day job, affects your life.
For the last four years, I was the policy lead for the UK government
on an initiative called Secure by Design.
And as part of that, what I got to see was the amazing impact that can be had
when the security community really partners with the policy teams.
And I'm really proud of the fact that we introduced the world's first legislation
that is helping to protect consumers from harm from consumer IT devices.
And I think it's a huge testament to that relationship we've had for that community.
In the policy department, we have several types of content
and several types of activities that we do.
First, we have daytime sessions.
These are sessions that we lead in roundtable format or work groups,
highly interactive, really mixing the public policymakers that we bring to DEF CON
as well as the DEF CON attendees to have better public policy outcomes.
Second, we have evening program.
We have lounges, which can be fun and entertaining.
We also have lounges where it's very intimate, fireside chat style,
a small group of people really getting to know a policymaker,
their perspectives, their opinions,
and how the hard challenges get dealt with in public policy.
Third, we have main stage content.
This year, we brought the National Cyber Director for the United States, Christopher Inglis.
We also brought the Director of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency,
Director Jen Easterly.
We brought them both to DEF CON, gave them main stage opportunity
to really connect and engage with the hacker community.
We really believe that hackers and practitioners
are a really integral part of the policymaking process.
And we're here to bring everyone together in the same room
to come up with new and awesome ideas.
You don't need any experience to participate.
And we're here to tackle the next big challenges like ransomware,
securing our elections, and securing critical infrastructure.
So come check us out in person at the policy department at DEF CON.
Check us out online.
We've recorded the main stage talks with some of our really high level,
great public policy people.
And we're building up a policy repository at defcon.org slash policy.