Sean Penn, Hot Off El Chapo Interview, to Talk Cybersecurity at San Francisco Conference The controversial actor will have a one-on-one interview with RSA President Amit Yoran.
By Nina Zipkin
Actors and entertainers often have favorite causes that they lend their spotlight to, but sometimes it makes for strange bedfellows.
This week, attendees at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, an annual gathering of members of the cybersecurity and cryptography community, will hear from speakers such as Symantec CEO Michael A. Brown; Bret Arsenault, Microsoft's chief information security officer; and Michelle Dennedy, Cisco's chief privacy officer.
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But there's another notable name on the list: Sean Penn.
That's right, the actor -- who made headlines of his own recently after secretly interviewing the notorious Mexican drug lord Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, a.k.a. El Chapo, for Rolling Stone -- will have a chat with RSA's president Amit Yoran, "covering a variety of topics."
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Penn isn't the first famous face that has attended the RSA Conference, or the only one that will be there this week. The cast of CBS's CSI: Cyber will also give a keynote presentation.
In 2014, Stephen Colbert gave the conference's closing keynote address amid controversy that RSA, the IT security company behind the conference, had an undisclosed $10 million contract with the NSA to develop a back door for encryption software. And last year, Alec Baldwin was on hand to talk about the "intersection between Hollywood and Privacy."
