RSA booked TV's Stephen Colbert to give the final speech. This is what happened next

  • 2 March 2014
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Comic gives security bods a healthy dose of truthiness

By Iain Thomson, 1 Mar 2014 RSA 2014 Comedian Stephen Colbert closed down the RSA 2014 conference in San Francisco on Friday with a characteristically smart yet snarky roasting for his hosts, the NSA, and Edward Snowden.
 
"RSA developed this conference in 1991 as a forum for cryptographers to gather and talk shop, and I assume breed with one another. Of course officially that's called exchanging private keys," he joked.
 Colbert said that he had been asked not to come and speak at the conference afterclaims that RSA had cooperated on pushing duff crypto with the NSA. This was weird, he said, because he's usually asked not to show up again after he has given a speech. But he decided to come for three reasons.
 
"First, as a freedom lover I don’t engage in boycotts; I eat Iranian apricots, smoke Cuban cigars, and snort North Korean meth. Two I looked at the signatures on the petition and then looked at my signature on the contract for my appearance here so my conscience is clear, as long as the check clears. Although they didn't give me a check but a stash of Bitcoins from Mt Gox," he quipped.
 
"But it wouldn’t have been fair for me to boycott the conference because, when it comes to companies accused of playing footsie with the NSA there's no room under the table any more because of all the feetsies."
 
There was some gentle ribbing of the organizers for their choice of keynote speakers. Inviting Scott Charney from Microsoft was like booking a speaker from an Orwellian dystopia, he said, and the FBI director James Comey was an odd choice. He noted that Comey had said that good security enhanced liberty.
 
"Well said director," Colbert commented. "I'm sure that under enhanced liberty you can have all the privacy that you want, just like under enhanced interrogation you can breathe all the water you want."
 
 
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Is there a video of it anywhere?  I'd like to see that.
Userlevel 7
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@ wrote:
Is there a video of it anywhere?  I'd like to see that.
http://youtu.be/f7gGtVScrQo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3QH4d4qNOQ&list=UUDJz4fffgW0iGpKN_YCyQUw&feature=share&index=1
 
Userlevel 7
Badge +56
@ wrote:
@ wrote:
Is there a video of it anywhere?  I'd like to see that.
http://youtu.be/f7gGtVScrQo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3QH4d4qNOQ&list=UUDJz4fffgW0iGpKN_YCyQUw&feature=share&index=1
 
Thanks!
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Video: Stephen Colbert pitches, pokes security pros in RSA keynote
The satirist needles RSA for its NSA links, while also hyping his own security measure, with trademark biting humor
The RSA conference, as Stephen Colbert states in the video below, is "the premier forum where security professionals gather to discuss the latest, most bleeding-edge technology that the NSA had five years ago." And he was just warming up.
Over the course of his address, Colbert touched on the controversy at RSA (the conference) about RSA (the company) working with the NSA and the resulting calls for RSA boycotts. He also found time to pitch his own data security company, CloudFog, in truly Colbertian fashion: "We take a novel, horizontal approach to vertical socket encryption. The result can only be described as diagonal." Plus, his bit about his random number generator, an "advanced polyhedral extruded polymer infosolid," is nerd humor at its finest.
Note: The binary string Colbert recites at the beginning of his address translates to "hi" -- well played, Mr. Colbert, well played.
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