Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 18 Sep 2018In Detroit, dependence on law enforcement has proved insufficient to keep people safe. Enter Dale Brown, a threat management professional who specializes in stopping violence and empowering individuals to protect themselves and their loved ones.
September 20, 2018
Mind Your Business Ep. 3: Public Safety from Private Security
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September 14, 2018
A sensible post-Brexit farming policy
Tim Worstall linked to his 2016 post at the Adam Smith Institute that nicely summarizes the best post-Brexit farm policy for Britain:
We have an alternative policy framework to suggest. Let’s just not have a policy. No subsidies, no payments, no department, no Minister, nothing, nowt, zippedy dooh dah. The New Zealand option. You’ve had it good for a century or more now there’s yer bike and have a nice ride.
We would not swear that this is true but we have heard that it is so — British farming has long passed Parkinson’s Event Horizon. There are now more bureaucrats “managing” farming than there are farmers farming. Let’s not pay the farmers anything and thus we don’t need the bureaucrats paying it — a double saving. Instead of £2 to £3 billion a year in taxes going to the farmers, plus whatever the amount again to pay it to them, we could just keep that what, £5 billion? And go and buy food from whomever.
Sounds like a plan really and we recommend it to all. Let’s use Brexit to right some of the wrongs of our current system. One of those wrongs being the incessant whining and demands for bribery from the farming sector.
The correct design of the new domestic agriculture policy is that there isn’t one. And nor is there any funding for either it or its absence. In short Meurig, go away.
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September 13, 2018
Mind Your Business Ep. 2: Aceable in the Hole
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 11 Sep 2018Believe it or not, parallel parking is not an impossible task. Meet Blake Garrett, the entrepreneur who is using VR to teach people how to drive, without actually getting behind the wheel.
____________
Produced & Directed by Michael Angelo Zervos
Executive Produced by Sean W. Malone
Hosted by Andrew Heaton
Original Music by Ben B. Goss
Featuring Blake Garrett
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September 11, 2018
Fear the Internet-of-Things
Martin Giles talks to Bruce Schneier about his new book, Click Here to Kill Everybody:
The title of your book seems deliberately alarmist. Is that just an attempt to juice sales?
It may sound like publishing clickbait, but I’m trying to make the point that the internet now affects the world in a direct physical manner, and that changes everything. It’s no longer about risks to data, but about risks to life and property. And the title really points out that there’s physical danger here, and that things are different than they were just five years ago.
How’s this shift changing our notion of cybersecurity?Our cars, our medical devices, our household appliances are all now computers with things attached to them. Your refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold, and a microwave oven is a computer that makes things hot. And your car is a computer with four wheels and an engine. Computers are no longer just a screen we turn on and look at, and that’s the big change. What was computer security, its own separate realm, is now everything security.
You’ve come up with a new term, “Internet+,” to encapsulate this shift. But we already have the phrase “internet of things” to describe it, don’t we?
I hated having to create another buzzword, because there are already too many of them. But the internet of things is too narrow. It refers to the connected appliances, thermostats, and other gadgets. That’s just a part of what we’re talking about here. It’s really the internet of things plus the computers plus the services plus the large databases being built plus the internet companies plus us. I just shortened all this to “Internet+.”
Let’s focus on the “us” part of that equation. You say in the book that we’re becoming “virtual cyborgs.” What do you mean by that?
We’re already intimately tied to devices like our phones, which we look at many times a day, and search engines, which are kind of like our online brains. Our power system, our transportation network, our communications systems, are all on the internet. If it goes down, to a very real extent society grinds to a halt, because we’re so dependent on it at every level. Computers aren’t yet widely embedded in our bodies, but they’re deeply embedded in our lives.
Can’t we just unplug ourselves somewhat to limit the risks?
That’s getting harder and harder to do. I tried to buy a car that wasn’t connected to the internet, and I failed. It’s not that there were no cars available like this, but the ones in the range I wanted all came with an internet connection. Even if it could be turned off, there was no guarantee hackers couldn’t turn it back on remotely.
Hackers can also exploit security vulnerabilities in one kind of device to attack others, right?
There are lots of examples of this. The Mirai botnet exploited vulnerabilities in home devices like DVRs and webcams. These things were taken over by hackers and used to launch an attack on a domain-name server, which then knocked a bunch of popular websites offline. The hackers who attacked Target got into the retailer’s payment network through a vulnerability in the IT systems of a contractor working on some of its stores.
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QotD: Debunking the “company store” story
First, company stores flourished in many parts of the USA, especially in the coal regions and other places with many isolated work sites, long before any legal minimum wages were put into effect. Second, Alchian is right that the workers understood perfectly how these stores worked (how could they not have when the stores were so common?): they provided basic consumption goods — flour, bacon, beans, kerosene, matches, cotton cloth — at the work-and-living site on credit, as advances against the workers’ future pay. Yes, the prices were higher than in, say, the closest towns. But the closest towns were often much too far away to allow the workers or their wives to go there easily, frequently, or cheaply. So, what the stores actually did was to reduce transaction costs for the workers, who otherwise would have been unlikely to accept employment in remote, isolated places far from stores.
Robert Higgs, letter to Don Boudreaux, 2016-11-06.
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September 9, 2018
Hunter S. Thompson, Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone
Darcy Gerow on the sudden rise and long, long decline of Rolling Stone:
The suffocating media bias of the 1960s was difficult to escape. A lethargic gray specter of middle-class America was distributed with cunning sterility through the generic, bogus smiles of cable news networks and traditional print. Despite the election and assassination of Kennedy and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, if you had turned on a T.V. this was still Eisenhower’s America: regimented, religious, conservative. And the cultural vacuum created by the Eisenhower years had began to suck even harder with Lyndon Baines Johnson at the helm.
American media was out of touch with this new generation. Elitist authoritarians were preaching their moral superiority stamped with stars and stripes to a generation of cynics. These kids didn’t have a fucking clue what they wanted, but they wanted no part of what they were being given. So rose Rolling Stone, a counterculture bible for babyboomers, co-founded by Jann Wenner.[…]
Things were different in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were a just cause. The catalyst for a just movement of equal rights for women and gays and minorities was free speech, of which Jann Wenner was a huge proponent. When students at U.C. Berkley marched in the streets in the 1960s, it was an attack on the elitist, authoritarians and an establishment hellbent on keeping opposing viewpoints and the ideas of personal liberty stifled. The gang of “cruel faggots” kept the official narrative running but no one under 30 was listening.
The whole goddamn world had had enough of the travesty of war in Southeast Asia. There was no ignoring the ineptitude of American politics. The only reasonable thing to do in 1969 was to drive out to Altamont for the weekend, load up on heinous chemicals, hunker down and rethink your approach to the political process.
Thompson, the then-young, liberal anti-hero, could often be found gobbling LSD and firing his guns (he was a lifetime member of the NRA) at propane bottles for a crowd of jeering burnouts or Bay area bikers at his fortified compound, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek Colorado.
It was Jann Wenner’s idea to put Hunter, with all of his fear and loathing, on to the campaign trail in 1972. Why not get the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels? Hunter was someone with a penchant for dealing with vicious thugs and sick freaks gone crazy on power, someone who could draw a parallel between Richard Nixon and Sonny Barger.
Thompson’s openly-biased, subjective and wild account of the 1972 presidential election was the red Chevy convertible of campaign coverage. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on repeat and at full volume, barrelling across the country at 110 miles an hour or so and in search of an honest politician. In Hunter’s eyes, the only one that even came close was George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota.
McGovern’s non-interventionist platform focused on a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and a Milton Freidman-inspired, negative income tax meant to replace the bureaucratic burden of social welfare programs and a complicated tax code. Thompson’s version of events is the story of an idealistic underdog fighting against the odds only to be crushed by postmodern Americanism and the establishment incumbent, “Tricky Dick Nixon.” McGovern might have owed a White House win, in part, to Thompson’s and Rolling Stone’s relentless support had he not owed his White House loss to the mental distress of his vice-presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton.
There’s no way to properly explain how great Rolling Stone was in those early years. How well the magazine represented the anti-establishment culture, individual liberty and equality for everyone. It can’t be compared to anything else because there was nothing else, only the traditional mainstream garbage and Rolling Stone.
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September 5, 2018
Mind Your Business Ep. 1: Breaking the Mold
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 4 Sep 2018Join host Andrew Heaton as we profile the stories of interesting entrepreneurs from around the country for FEE’s newest series, Mind Your Business.
In this episode, we’ll meet Jeremy Umansky. He’s a chef with a true passion for unusual food and his unique brand of cuisine is making a big splash in the culinary world.
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September 2, 2018
Amtrak service and the “takings” clause
Back in August, Fred Frailey reluctantly came to the conclusion that at some point American freight railways are going to have to challenge in court Amtrak’s legislated ability to pre-empt freight traffic on their networks:
Amtrak’s
Eastbound Empire Builder crossing Two Medicine Trestle at East Glacier MT on 20 July 2011.
Photo by Steve Wilson via Wikimedia Commons.
We all know about “taking the Fifth.” It’s our right under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution not to be compelled to testify against ourselves. In other words, a court cannot force us to admit to driving 60 mph in a 45-mph zone (or something worse). That amendment has another, less-well-known clause, which says government cannot take away our property without just compensation. Lawyers know this as the “Takings Clause.” The Fifth came to mind the other day as I rode Amtrak’s Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago. I’ll get to my point, but first the experience.
[…]
All of this did terrible things to our schedule-keeping. By the third morning, as the train approached Devils Lake, N.D., we were more than eight hours late (the next day’s eastbound Builder was even later). But imagine what the Empire Builder does to BNSF’s freights every day. The Amtrak Improvement Act of 1973 reads: “Except in an emergency, intercity passenger trains operated by or on behalf of [Amtrak] shall be accorded preference over freight trains in the use of any given line of track, junction, or crossing.”
BNSF appears totally committed to obedience of this law but doing so devours the capacity of this route. It’s not just that freights give way; whizzing along at a 79 mph versus 55 or 60 for the freights, the Empire Builder eats capacity as if it were two or three freights, Six high-priority Z trains prowl the northern Transcon every day, and I don’t think a single one of them that I observed was moving as we went by. One Z train was sandwiched between two stopped manifest trains, all making way for our Builder.
Obviously, Amtrak pays BNSF for the right to run trains over the freight railroad. But whatever it pays is but a fraction of the cost in delays to its own trains incurred by BNSF. Were the northern Transcon double-tracked all the way, these delays would obviously be minimized. But at $3 million or more a mile, double tracking consumes capital like a dry sponge, and it’s not Amtrak’s capital, either.
So now to my point: Isn’t it fair to say that Amtrak, which the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015 decreed to be an arm of government, is confiscating the property (track capacity) of host railroads? And if it is, shouldn’t the freight railroads be fairly compensated for the delays to their freights caused by the loss of this capacity? Try as I might to say otherwise, I am forced to answer “yes” to both questions.
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September 1, 2018
The legal tangle around the Trans-Mountain pipeline approval process
Jay Currie suspects the process has been intentionally complicated to the point that there may not be a way out for this government:
What the Court essentially asked was, “Did the Federal Government consult enough?” and then concluded, “No, not enough.”
How much is “enough”? That is a question which this decision really does not answer. And I suspect it does not answer it because there is actually no answer which is even close to true.
In a normal process a reasonable level of public consultation would be reached when the public has been given an opportunity to comment on the matter at hand. Which is a bit vague but there is case law which fleshes out what such an opportunity might look like.
However, once environmentalists and First Nations are engaged it is not at all obvious that merely having the opportunity to comment is sufficient. Unlike a rezoning application, an application to build a pipeline (or, realistically, virtually any other large undertaking) creates the opportunity for First Nations to talk about everything from ancient hunting rights, to sacred grounds, to former village sites, to disruptions to present First Nation culture and so on. Having the environmentalists involved ensures that the relatively easy solution of simply paying the First Nations’ people for their consent, is off the table. That solution will be denounced by the enviros as cultural genocide and worse.
All of which creates, and might arguably have been intended to create, a Gordian knot when it comes to considering major projects. Consultation becomes an endless task and one which has no defined parameters. The decision today indicates that an extensive consultation process is not enough but it does not indicate what might be enough.
Delightfully, the shareholders of Kinder Morgan – which owns TransMountain – voted today to sell the project to Canada’s feckless Federal Government for several billion dollars.
I suspect the CEO danced a little jig relieved that he no longer had to guess at how far consultations have to go. But Canada is stuck with a completely dysfunctional system which is being exploited by environmentalists and First Nations to prevent infrastructure from being built. That will have to be fixed.
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August 31, 2018
Farewell, buck-a-beer publicity stunt, we hardly knew ye
Chris Selley on the all-too-brief publicity stunt of cheaper beer for Ontario:
President’s Choice is ending its buck-a-beer promotion on Sept. 3, just days after it started: We get one week, one long weekend and then out of the pool, party’s over, back to class. PC-branded beer will rocket back up to $1.38 a bottle when you buy 24 at The Beer Store or $1.65 when you buy 12, which highlights just how steep — and presumably unsustainable — the discount really was. We shall see how long the two other participating breweries’ offers last, but they made it quite clear, as did PC, that this was a limited-time offer prompted by Doug Ford’s most shamelessly blunt populist pledge.
My goodness, though, what a commotion it will leave in its wake. Some brewers quite understandably took the opportunity to note the impact of aluminum tariffs on their bottom lines, to complain that Ford’s government was playing favourites by giving away expensive product placement in LCBO stores for $1 beer, and to note the government is actually raising taxes on beer.
Others, however, waxed utterly scandalized. “How about buck a pound of steak? Who would eat that?” asked one Toronto brewer who had perhaps not entirely thought through his rhetorical question. “We haven’t even given two thoughts about this,” Great Lakes Brewery’s communications manager, Troy Burtch, told the Toronto Star. “Why would anyone do this?” Burtch and Great Lakes have signalled their total uninterest by tweeting incessantly about it.
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation went after some of the affronted craft brewers for accepting taxpayer subsidies for their higher-end products. People on social media lined up for and against buck-a-beer, vowing to boycott the participants or those complaining about the program.
The whole thing was a dumb Ford Nation stunt, no question. But good grief. You can hardly blame the breweries, either for participating or for not: they were just trying to wring as much publicity as they could from the situation. No one is really any worse off, or at least not much. What we were really seeing among the chattering classes was a rerun-by-proxy of the June 6 election: to drink Ford’s swill was to vote Ford Nation; to boycott it was to stand bravely against their entire agenda.
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August 30, 2018
Britain “forgets” to regulate e-cigarettes, youth smoking drops substantially
Last month, Matt Ridley sang the praises of the regulators who didn’t regulate:
A selection of e-cigarettes
Photo by Ecig Click via Wikimedia Commons.
Britain is the world leader in vaping. More people use ecigarettes in the UK than in any other European country. It’s more officially encouraged than in the United States and more socially acceptable than in Australia, where it’s still banned. There is a thriving sector here of vape manufacturers, retailers, exporters, even researchers; there are 1,700 independent vape shops on Britain’s streets. It’s an entrepreneurial phenomenon and a billion-pound industry.
The British vaping revolution dismays some people, who see it as a return to social acceptability for something that looks like smoking with unknown risks. Yet here, more than anywhere in the world, the government disagrees. Public Health England says that vaping is 95% safer than smoking and the vast majority of people who vape are smokers who are partly or wholly quitting cigarettes. The Royal College of Physicians agrees: “The public can be reassured that ecigarettes are much safer than smoking.”
Lots of doctors are now recommending vaping as a way of quitting smoking. It is because of vaping that Britain now has the second lowest percentage of people who smoke in the European Union. The youth smoking rate in the UK has fallen from 26% to 19% in only six years.
How did this happen here? It’s partly the fault of the advertising executive Rory Sutherland; he is the Walter Raleigh of this revolution. In 2010, he walked into an office in Admiralty Arch to see an old friend, David Halpern, head of David Cameron’s new “nudge unit”, formally known as the Behavioural Insights Team. Sutherland pulled out an electronic cigarette he had bought online, and inhaled. By then, several countries including Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia had already banned the sale of electronic cigarettes — usually at the behest of tobacco interests or public-health pressure groups. California had passed a bill banning them, though Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the governor, had vetoed it. It looked inevitable that Britain would follow suit.
“I was a very early convert,” Sutherland tells me now. “Partly because I was a longtime ex-smoker myself who found them much better than constant relapses; I was also interested in the placebo effect they offered by mimicking the act of smoking. But I was almost equally fascinated by the psychology of the people who instinctively wanted to ban them.”
Halpern took notice. He knew the theory of “harm reduction” — that it is more effective to give somebody the lesser of two evils than insist unrealistically on immediate abstinence. So he asked his nudge team to get digging. Over coffee at No 10, he was surprised to learn that even the anti-smoking group Ash was leaning in favour of ecigarettes. So when public-health nannies started calling for them to be banned, Halpern made sure the government resisted.
In his book Inside the Nudge Unit, Halpern wrote: “We looked hard at the evidence and made a call: we minuted the PM and urged that the UK should move against banning e-cigs. Indeed, we went further. We argued we should deliberately seek to make e-cigs widely available, and to use regulation not to ban them but to improve their quality and reliability.”
H/T to Rafe Champion for the link.
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August 29, 2018
The Conservative convention, bought and paid for by the friends of supply management
Colby Cosh relates the details of how well stage-managed the Conservative convention in Halifax was … from the point of view of the beneficiaries of supply management:
A copy of a “briefing binder” that the Dairy Farmers of Canada had given to representatives of supply-managed agriculture was carelessly discarded, found by a Calgary delegate named Matthew Bexte, and splattered onto the internet. The contents of the binder describe the strategy and outline the available forces of the supply-management squad. The resolutions being discussed by the convention included one favouring the repeal of expensive tariff protection for Canada’s egg, dairy, and poultry cartels, and the binder lists the particular responses and tactics to be used depending on how far the offending free-trade resolution advanced in the debate.
Which it didn’t. The motion in favour of letting Canadian suckers buy foreign cheese in dangerous unregulated quantities died noisily in a “breakout session,” never even reaching a vote, much less the plenary session of the convention. As the National Post’s uncannily versatile Marie-Danielle Smith documented before the briefing book was leaked, free-trade delegates had already caught the scent of a rat, complaining that the motion had been suppressed through strategic delay by operatives working for party leader Andrew Scheer.
The Dairy Farmers of Canada briefing describes this motion-suppression tactic as “Scenario 2,” calling it a “sub-optimal” outcome: “It buys us (supply-managed farmers) a reprieve, but doesn’t put the issue to rest.” According to the briefing notes, if the motion had passed in the Friday breakout session, that would plunge the world into “Scenario 3.” Under Scenario 3, a Friday evening reception at an Irish pub, with free food and potables, would come into play: quota-sucking farmers and their public-relations goons would have been given a chance to mingle with well-lubricated CPC delegates, with “infographics on a slideshow” pulsing subliminally in the background.
The hope here would be to prevent a devastating “Scenario 5,” in which the destruction of supply management came before the whole CPC assembly for a vote and won it. The prospective talking points accompanying Scenario 5 warn that “Members of the Conservative Party of Canada have sent a clear signal that they do not support Canadian farmers” and they hiss menacingly that “Canadians will remember the position taken by Conservatives today.”
Fortunately, even in the event of a flat-out Scenario 5, there would still be what the book calls the “Safety Net.” The safety net is that annual party conventions are meaningless, expensive balderdash anyway. Or, as the Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) book puts it: “The powers of the Leader are far-reaching in preventing a policy from being in the party platform. DFC has been told by the Leader’s office that he will exercise this power … regardless of the outcome at convention.”
Good old Andrew … he knows who put him in his current position and has signalled in advance that he’ll “stay bought”. Too bad for Canadian consumers, but great news for the leeches who benefit from the market distortions of supply management.
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August 24, 2018
From Software-as-a-Service to emerging Techno-Feudalism
The shift from selling software to selling software subscriptions was a major sea-change in the technology world. Here’s a bit of historical perspective from The Z Man to explain why this could be a very bad thing indeed for the average user:
Feudalism only works when a small elite controls the source of wealth. Then they can control the exploitation of it. In Europe, as Christianity spread, the Church acquired lands, becoming one of the most powerful forces in society. The warrior elite was exclusively Catholic, thus they had a loyalty to the Pope, as God’s representative on earth. Therefore, the system of controlling wealth not only had a direct financial benefit to the people at the top, it had the blessing of God’s representative, who sat atop the whole system.
That’s something to keep in mind as we see technology evolve into a feudal system, where a small elite controls the resources and grants permission to users. The software oligopolies are now shifting all of their licensing to a subscription model. It’s not just the mobile platforms. Developers of enterprise software for business are adopting the same model. The users have no ownership rights. Instead they are renters, subject to terms and conditions imposed by the developer or platform holder. The user is literally a tenant.
The main reason developers are shifting to this model is that they cannot charge high fees for their software, due to the mass of software on the market. Competition has drive down prices. Further, customers are not inclined to pay high maintenance fees, when they can buy new systems at competitive rates. The solution is stop selling the stuff and start renting it. This fits the oligopoly scheme as it ultimately puts them in control of the developers. Apple and Google are now running protection rackets for developers.
It also means the end of any useful development. Take a look at the situation Stefan Molyneux faces. A band of religious fanatics has declared him a heretic and wants him burned. The Great Church of Technology is now in the process of having him expelled from the internet. As he wrote in a post, he invests 12 years building his business on-line, only to find out he owns none of it. He was always just a tenant farmer, who foolishly invested millions in YouTube. Like a peasant, he is now about to be evicted.
How long before someone like this monster discovers that Google and Apple will no longer allow him to use any apps on his phone? Or maybe he is denied access to his accounting system? How long before his insurer cuts off his business insurance, claiming the threat from homosexual terrorists poses too high of a risk? Federal law prevents the electric company from shutting off his power due to politics, but Federal law used to prevent secret courts and secret warrants. Things change as the people in charge change.
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August 23, 2018
Cultural Appropriation Tastes Damn Good: How Immigrants, Commerce, and Fusion Keep Food Delicious
ReasonTV
Published on 1 Aug 2018Writer Gustavo Arellano talks about food slurs, the late Jonathan Gold, and why Donald Trump’s taco salad is a step in the right direction.
———-Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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The late Jonathan Gold wrote about food in Southern California with an intimacy that brought readers closer to the people that made it. The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic visited high-end brick-and-mortar restaurants as well as low-end strip malls and food trucks in search of good food wherever he found it. Gold died of pancreatic cancer last month, but he still influences writers like Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times columnist and author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America.
Arellano sat down with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie to talk about Gold’s legacy, political correctness in cuisine, and why Donald Trump’s love of taco salad gives him hope in the midst of all of the president’s anti-Mexican rhetoric. The interview took place at Burritos La Palma, named by Gold as home to one of the five best L.A. burritos.
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August 15, 2018
Hotel security theatre meets DEF CON attendees in Las Vegas
Las Vegas hotels have a clear duty to be more vigilant about their security procedures, but the folks at the most recent DEF CON gathering were perhaps not the best-chosen group to try out a new “swaggering bully-boys security enforcement” policy:
In the wake of the mass shooting in Las Vegas in October of 2017, hotels in the city started drafting more aggressive policies regarding security. Just as Caesars Entertainment was rolling out its new security policies, the company ran head on into DEF CON — an event with privacy tightly linked to its culture.
The resulting clash of worlds — especially at Caesars Palace, the hotel where much of DEF CON was held — left some attendees feeling violated, harassed, or abused, and that exploded onto Twitter this past weekend.
Caesars began rolling out a new security policy in February that mandated room searches when staff had not had access to rooms for over 24 hours. Caesars has been mostly tolerant of the idiosyncratic behavior of the DEF CON community, but it’s not clear that the company prepared security staff for dealing with the sorts of things they would find in the rooms of DEF CON attendees. Soldering irons and other gear were seized, and some attendees reported being intimidated by security staff.
And since the searches came without any warning other than a knock, they led, in some cases, to frightening encounters for attendees who were in those rooms. Katie Moussouris — a bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure program pioneer at Microsoft, an advocate for security researchers, and now the founder and CEO of Luta Security — was confronted by two male members of hotel security as she returned to her room. When she went into the room to call the desk to verify who they were, they banged on the door and screamed at her to immediately open it.
Current status: two members of hotel security banging on my door after I asked to go into my room and verify them with hotel security. I'm on speaker phone with hotel security, asking for a supervisor to come verify. I'm terrified. What the hell is this @CaesarsPalace #DEFCON
— Katie Moussouris (@k8em0) August 11, 2018
In another case, a hotel employee—likely hotel security—entered the room of a woman attending DEF CON without knocking:
This evening, a man in a light blue collared shirt with a walkie talkie, entered my room with a key without knocking while I was getting dressed. He left when I started screaming. @CaesarsPalace is investigating whether it was a hotel employee. @defcon has also been alerted.
— Maddie Stone (@maddiestone) August 12, 2018
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