Adi Shamir visa snub: US govt slammed after the S in RSA blocked from his own RSA conf
Adi Shamir, the S in the renowned RSA encryption system, didn't take his usual place on the Cryptographers' Panel at this year's RSA Conference in San Francisco – because he couldn't get a visa from the US government. And he's not alone.
Shamir – the 2002 Turing Award co-winner and a member of the US, French, and Israeli Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society – lives in Israel, and applied for a US visa two months ago to attend the information-security conference, the largest of its type in the world, which is being held this week in California. Shamir, along with Ron Rivest and Leonard Adleman, invented the widely used RSA cryptosystem, and cofounded RSA Security, which has been running the RSA Conference since 1991.
Shamir usually attends the USA event each year to speak on a panel with fellow cryptographers. However, he heard nothing back about his visa application this time around, and so is stuck at home.
