Logan Arkema
Logan is a Sr. Cybersecurity Specialist at a government agency and the Union Rep for its IT & Cybersecurity Team, but is speaking in a purely personal and union capacity. Professionally, he has worked across technical topics, including incident response, privacy, and cloud engineering. He has been a union rep for five years; serves on his union's bargaining, dispute resolution, and legislative committees; provides informal tech policy advice to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers; and is a member of the Tech Workers Coalition and the Federal Unionist Network. He has a Master's Degree in Tech Law and Policy, but is not a lawyer and certainly not your lawyer.
In his spare time, he built and sells a """badge""" of a live LED display of the DC Metro System and developed ResidueFree, a privacy-enhancing tool for personal computers, as part of an academic paper and presented as a DEF CON 30 demo lab. He has volunteered with BSides NoVA, the DEF CON Policy Village, and Hackers on the Hill. Outside of tech and labor, he can be found doing Typical Nerd Things (playing D&D).
Session
As a community, we can no longer count on power, be it the government or our employers, to engage with us out of goodwill. As workers, we cannot assume that "the cybersecurity workforce shortage" will protect us either. While our jobs, working conditions, and friends are threatened, the institutions we would turn to have also been eroded. However, this community knows how to build things for each other, and it's past time we turn that solidarity into broader power by channeling it through one of the few robust institutions left: unions and the labor movement.
This talk will use my experience as a member of the InfoSec community and as my department's union rep to make an argument for all of us, at least those of us who currently or want to sell our skills for a paycheck, to focus on building power as workers. It will build on existing arguments for tech worker unions by adding context specific to the InfoSec community, my practical experience in a union and the labor movement, and the current moment. All views are my own and not necessarily my employer's or any labor organization’s.