Public Service Journeys (To and From Hacking Culture)

The session is a pair of origin stories from two speakers who reached the hacker community from different directions. One spent 24 years as an Air Force pilot before moving into cybersecurity work at the Pentagon and in the private sector. The other began as a graduate intern and later worked on homeland security programs. Both see their paths as a way of translating between technical researchers and the policy makers who write rules about them.

The middle traces how the Aerospace Village grew out of an aviation cyber initiative. Researchers struggled to get manufacturers to act on flaws, and government had little sense of what the community was doing. A neutral federal party helped run disclosure conversations, and the village became a place where agencies could meet researchers directly. The speakers then describe a COVID-era task force that mapped vaccine supply chains and found overlooked dependencies, such as single-source components and cold storage materials. Smaller organizations were offered free federal scanning services.

The closing advice is practical: build relationships before a crisis, bring diverse voices into policy work because later fixes are slow and costly, expect change to take years, and plan for burnout in long efforts.