Hacker, Hipster, Hustler, Humanist: Establishing the Government's Role in Public Interest Cybersecurity

The talk argues that government bodies should treat cybersecurity as a public good rather than only a technical or commercial service. The presenter, who runs a cyber program at a state fusion center, starts by defining public interest technology and public interest cybersecurity. They explain why the popular hacker, hipster, hustler and humanist team model fits poorly in public institutions, and point to neglect of public-sector needs, a heavy load of overlapping standards, and real-world effects such as fuel shortages during a pipeline outage and 911 centers hit by ransomware.

To move from principles to practice, the presenter proposes a layered "civic security stack" with application, policy, coordination, execution and infrastructure layers, modeled loosely on software stacks. Examples from their state program include quarterly intelligence sharing meetings, vulnerability scanning offered to local governments, a template incident response plan, a tabletop exercise kit, and sector-specific guidance. Mapping incidents to FEMA community lifelines is presented as a clearer way to show leaders and emergency managers what an outage means for residents.

The closing section argues that resilience and continuity planning matter as much as prevention, and that threat intelligence should be taught and applied by smaller organizations rather than simply pushed to them. Audience questions covered risk frameworks, public-private intelligence sharing, and lessons from a major endpoint outage. The takeaway for practitioners is to build partnerships, use public-sector guidance, and follow a documented path when reporting problems to government.