Of course, this being Stephen Colbert, there’s a decent chance he was already planning to use his speech to take down his hosts, like the time he was called to testify before Congress in 2010:
But the group Fight For The Future is not taking any chances, and has set up an online petition asking Colbert to back out of the conference, which will take place in February in San Francisco. “Stephen, we know that when you agreed to speak at the RSA conference you didn’t know they were taking bribes from the NSA,” the petition says. “It’s ok, we still love you! Cancel and head out the ‘back door.’ Help us send a message to companies that violating our privacy and trust is not an option.”
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As Reuters wrote in December, according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the NSA “created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a ‘back door’ in encryption products…RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.”
Reuters then reported that RSA received $10 million from the NSA for setting that formula as the default in its Bsafe software.
In a statement last month, RSA denied this:“Recent press coverage has asserted that RSA entered into a ‘secret contract’ with the NSA to incorporate a known flawed random number generator into its BSafe encryption libraries. We categorically deny this allegation.”
Colbert and the NSA make strange bedfellows, considering how many times he’s mocked the agency on his show since the Snowden revelations. Here’s one recent segment about the NSA spying on online video games:
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