2026-06-27 –, Prime Dome
I used to do emergency telecommunications for the United Nations. The satellite link, the field network, the thing the medics and the logisticians and the press and everyone else needs before they can do anything at all. Ebola response in West Africa. The earthquake in Haiti. Puerto Rico after Maria. The work was triage in the literal sense: not enough bandwidth, not enough power, not enough time, who gets the link first.
Then I left to do security at a token factory. People ask why. There's usually an unspoken second half to the question still hanging in the air.
This talk is the long version of the answer.
It's about what the job actually looks like from where I sit. A model that found zero-days in every major operating system, and a hard argument about who gets to use it. A company that got blacklisted by the Pentagon for refusing to enable mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. A fleet of agents I built to do my own job, which got good at it faster than I expected, which is how I know the timeline to a weird future is shorter than most people think.
It's about a few of the things that scare me: the cyber capability that could have been handed to everyone with a grudge and a GPU, the mass surveillance infrastructure that someone is going to build unless enough people refuse, and the checks on concentrated power that are supposed to catch all of this and are not, currently, ready.
And it's about leverage. This camp has more of it than it thinks: people who can build defenses and give them away, people who can refuse to build the bad thing, people who can show up when nobody else understands what's being bought. I want to spend the last part of the talk arguing about what to do with it. I used to arrive after the disaster. I would like, just once, to get ahead of one.
Dustin works on security at a token factory, where his threat model includes nation-states, his own employer's product, and possibly the future. He used to do disaster response for the United Nations, which he describes as "similar." He builds agents to do his job and would very much like to be replaced by them. He also rides an electric unicycle everywhere and would like you to know it's the most practical way to get around. He has the dental work to show for it.