Taia Global and other sponsoring companies are hosting the first Suits and Spooks Security Town Hall at the Ritz Carlton San Francisco on February 27, 2014 (7pm-10pm). The Suits and Spooks is a 3 hour debate and discussion being held to help raise awareness about the complexities involved in balancing security objectives with our privacy rights. EFF's Nate Cardozo will be speaking.
In 2014, the world’s population and its nation states are increasingly dependent upon digital networks for everything from communications to entertainment to power and water. For the world’s intelligence agencies, it is the golden age of Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). For privacy advocates, it seems like the beginning of the Dark Ages. Many companies today engage in an ever more difficult balancing act between maintaining the trust of their customers and assisting their respective government’s national security interests. Even within the Intelligence Community in general, and the NSA in particular, there is an apparent conflict between defending military networks with novel technology and finding ways to infiltrate or break that same technology when it is used by our adversaries.
Suits and Spooks was created in 2011 to address novel challenges just like this one. Instead of bringing together 125 people over two days, the event will be held for one evening and tackle one challenge: How may the dynamic tension between security and privacy for the U.S. government, its corporations and its private citizens be maintained without one side overpowering the other?