You make some pretty serious errors in logic here But the most egregious is the supposition that all who attend Black Hat are untrustworthy, bad people. The vast majority are actively engaged in cyber-defense related activities. They are there to gain a better understanding of what the potential threats are, what current techniques are used in exploitation and how to defend against them. There is, of course the standard spread of good/bad/indifferent people, but don't make sweeping assumptions about people out of ignorance. That being said, the United States has a very serious asymmetric threat issue in cybersecurity. No nation is more connected, more dependent or more vulnerable. It is in the best interest of this nation to have NSA recruit where the smart people are. And this week, that's in Vegas. p.s. You can be a "bad" hacker, one who builds attacks, exploits and payloads and still be a "good" American. Exploits and payloads are no different than bullets and missiles, it takes special talent to build them, they cause damage and they are exceptionally useful.

"I feel that the chances of being caught or the consequences of my actions are almost insignificant." Just like criminals that use the Internet. There is almost no chance for attackers to be correctly identified and an even slimmer chance that they will be held accountable. It is the reality of the Internet, and will be a major concern for governments. Expect "verified identity" as a key government policy over next few years. And expect the EFF and ACLU to have plenty to do for the foreseeable future.

Crypto is non-trivial. If this is true, and depending on the talent of those adding the backdoors, there might be less than 100 people who aren't employeed in classified environments who are qualified to do this review. Backdoors here aren't "I can log in remotely", but instead are a set of mathematical operations that can be used to determine the key, or to reduce the set of probable keys to a manageable size. If you're going to pull shenanigans, crypto is the place to pull it.

They also allowed the release of "Vortex", http://sourceforge.net/projects/vortex-ids/, created by Charles Smutz of Lockheed Martin. Its a Near-Real Time IDS system that captures streams and allows multiple threads to evaluate the captured data. Very nice. (Not LM, just a fan).