In roughly not very many minutes, President Barack Obama is going to chat cybersecurity with the Silicon Valley types. He’s following Apple’s Tim Cook onto the stage. The event, in case you are behind, is the White House Summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University.
Today’s event is notable for the number of tech executives that are in attendance — along with TechCrunch! — and the CEOs that decided to not show up at all. Regardless, strap up and tune in:
The event is important as it may help set the tone for this year’s relations between the government and the technology industry. It’s a relationship that has become fraught with tension in the wake of the NSA revelations. That the United States government is willfully tapping the core cables of the Internet, trying to hack into foreign data centers of American tech companies, and working to weaken encryption has led to a rift between Washington and the Valley.