Admission impossible: NSA, CISA brass absent from RSA Conf
There’s a notable absence from this year’s RSA Conference that kicked off today in San Francisco: The NSA’s State of the Hack panel.
The annual talk by current and former chiefs of Uncle Sam’s surveillance super-agency is a favorite among the cybersecurity conference’s attendees and is always filled to capacity with a waiting list to get in the door. Until this year.
Earlier this month, RSA Conference organizers emailed anyone who had signed up for the session, alerting them that the NSA’s State of the Hack 2025 had been “canceled and will be removed from your schedule.”
The Register also had an interview scheduled with NSA Director Dave Luber during the conference, and shortly after receiving an email notification about the State of the Hack session being cancelled, an agency spokesperson told us that the talk with Luber was also scrapped:
In line with new leadership guidance, Dave Luber will not be participating in any external engagements at this time. We truly appreciate the opportunity to highlight the NSA mission and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance