FBI Director James Comey will send the FBI’s top lawyer in his place to South by Southwest, the famous music, film and tech festival, due to scheduling conflicts.
The festival, abbreviated SXSW, announced the change in a post on its website Tuesday morning. James Baker, the bureau’s general counsel, will take Comey’s place in a discussion of “the tensions between privacy and national security” with the CEO of Washington D.C.’s Newseum, a journalism museum.
SXSW has played host to a variety of tech- and privacy-related discussions throughout its two-decade history. Twitter gained a significant early following at the festival nine months after its launch. And NSA leaker Edward Snowden directly addressed Americans for the first time – from a webcam in Russia – in 2014 at the festival.
Baker, who said he considered himself “a privacy lawyer” in April of last year, revealed in November at a public meeting that the FBI had been able to crack a majority of devices it had encountered that were protected by passwords or passcodes.
