Colbert turns his funny gun on Snowden in RSA keynote

No joke: Stephen Colbert's not a fan of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, the political satirist tells a packed house at the closing RSA Conference keynote speech.

Stephen Colbert kept San Francisco's Moscone Center audience of around 6,000 laughing as he mocked the state of computer security and expressed a vote of no-confidence in Edward Snowden on Feb. 28, 2014.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Don't mistake this for something out of the mouth Stephen Colbert's ultra-conservative, Bill O'Reilly-modeled TV persona: The popular funnyman actually believes that former NSA contractor and domestic spying whistleblower Edward Snowden should come back to the US and face trial.

In front of more than 6,000 people at the RSA Conference's closing keynote at the Moscone Center here, Colbert had the audience roaring within minutes over his computer security and encryption jokes.

Colbert described the conference jokingly as a place where the best security experts "gather, talk shop, and breed with each other. That's called exchanging private keys."

He quickly changed the subject to address the petition that demanded that he join the RSA Conference boycott over the conference's parent company colluding with the National Security Agency.

Colbert said that he had signed a contract with RSA that he wasn't going to break, in part because, he was "paid in Bitcoin, from Mt.Gox."

Then he got serious. There was "no evidence in Reuters' story," he said of the original report that broke the news.

"Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products," wrote reporter Joseph Menn in the story.

Menn then cited two anonymous sources who said they were familiar with the $10 million contract between the NSA and the RSA division that promoted the flawed encryption as the default encryption to use in RSA's BSafe encryption tool.

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Colbert turns his funny gun on Snowden in RSA keynote