Marcus Hutchins is a British citizen. Extradition before the event was feasible and would have been a far more honorable path than the snatch and grab that transpired.
British security experts might insist on Grand Cayman for any further conferences in the Americas.
That would be exceptionally nice of them, but also extremely poor investigative practice.
I will say, though, as one of the many people in my field that is bone-tired of schlepping out to the worst place in the United States every damn year for these events, any other location in the world would be fine for me, and I endorse the actual suggestion you're making.
† (Yes, obviously, I know virtually nobody who attends Defcon is a criminal).
It's a minor networking hit for me, but a total win otherwise (and I can make up by networking elsewhere - I cannot get time spent in Vegas back).
Plus it's in the middle of a desert, so options are pretty limited.
"good restaurants": (1) lots of top-tier cooks go there because money and it's cheap because Vegas, or (2) lots of off-strip places with good chefs trying to make it big.
"crappy, overpriced food": (1) Wolfgang Puck etc, or (2) Even off-strip food is bad and expensive because they can't afford water.
So in reality which is it?
However, there are also some of the best buffets in the world there (if you're into that). There are also some awesome high-end restaurants: https://www.tripsavvy.com/michelin-guide-rated-restaurants-l...
Because Vegas is a massive tourist destination where you are guaranteed to have a deep market of people eating out every day of the week, it attracts tons of restaurants so you do need to do a little research. Picking a random one will likely get you overpriced 'meh'.
We've gone off the strip for sushi, Korean bbq, Thai, and Ethiopian and had good luck; I don't know enough about greater Las Vegas to judge it. But the strip is bad.
Plus the fact that it works on a plurality of tourists coming through makes it sad.
I leave Vegas with less faith in humanity than I had when I came. It's been a few years though.
Hunter S. Thompson had it right: try to cram as many drugs into your body as possible, seek out the ghosts of America's dead dreams and you may come out with some semblance of spirit intact.
There's a brazillion reasons not to arrest someone the minute you think you've got them.
The point I was making RE: "basis of an arrest" is that if you wait for him to do something stupid, like get arrested by local LEO for drunk and disorderly, that gives you cover to approach him in an interrogation and threaten him with prosecution over the malware... unless he agrees to be a witness/informant. Because he's in with local LEO for something innocuous, there's cover.
In the end, they indict him for the malware, which pretty much ruins him from that perspective. Or, perhaps, they already figured he wasn't worth using and it's not above a US Attorney to go after someone well known in order to further their own career...
Very particular definition of a word criminal I guess. Kevin Mitnick, James Clapper, veew, plenty of criminals attend/panel at defcon.
It doesn't make sense to move it to the Caribbean. That would cause attendance to drop by a lot, and some other organization would just start another conference in the US, and most people would go to that one.
The Bahamas might also be a reasonable choice, as they only declared independence from Britain in 1973.
But running a snatch and grab at a security research conference looks really bad, and is bound to have a much wider chilling effect on people's willingness to attend US conferences.
Is this just for alleged computer crimes, or would you apply that to all alleged crimes?
For example, suppose I run a fraudulent mail order business targeting people in, say, France, and this is a crime in France. Would you argue that if I visit France, and the French authorities want to arrest me and bring me to trial, they should let me go home and use extradition to try to force me back, rather than arrest me while I am in France?
The pall which is descending over foreign attendees is a harbinger of either relocation or vastly reduced attendance.
I think we can all rest assured, unfortunately, that Black Hat isn't going anywhere.
But the alleged crime here is years old, and I have don't remember anything (or find anything in a google news search-by-date) to suggest there were charges or an arrest warrant before July 2017. That makes it seem like they didn't think the evidence was strong enough to get British cooperation, and waited to even mention it until they'd have have a chance to act alone.
Either that, or they really had nothing linking Hutchins to Kronos until very recently. If it turns this really was based on new information, and the timing really was coincidental, I'll be a lot more comfortable with how it was handled. But that's sure not what it looks like right now...
Sure, so he was a suspect in a criminal investigation before attending DEF CON. The US doesn't try to extradite literally everyone suspected of a crime from every other country we have an extradition treaty with. Extradition is a pain in the ass so the DOJ decided that it probably wasn't worth their time. Then he comes to the US, he's flagged at immigration, and the DOJ is like "OK, now it's worth our time".
Seems completely acceptable to me.
If we want justice to be seen to be done, we shouldn't encourage "forum-shopping" by law-enforcement, letting them bring prosecutions in a country where the defendent will be artificially disadvantaged.
> Seleznev, the identity thief who is the son of the Duma deputy, chose to vacation at a five-star resort in the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of the Maldives in 2014 precisely because it has no extradition treaty with the United States. U.S. officials got word and persuaded Maldives authorities to intercept Seleznev at the airport, where in a fast-paced operation he was bundled on a private plane to Guam
Personally - I think in this Hutchins case they just wanted a new hire.
http://hamodia.com/2017/04/02/u-s-sweeping-russian-hackers-b...
A case of smart people doing stupid things.
>Extradition before the event was feasible
It wasn't feasible for political reasons. By attempting to extradite yet another sympathetic character from the UK the US would have risked undermining the extradition treaty for no gain.
Anyway, I don't understand how extraditing him from the UK would've been any more honorable.