This week saw the start of the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s two day ‘London conference on Cyberspace’. The event has a large focus on cybercrime, online safety and security, and aims to ‘launch a focused and inclusive dialogue to help guide the behaviour of all in cyberspace’.
Yet, on Tuesday morning, some reporters were feeling left out, with tweets [1] [2] [3] [4] on the event stating that media attendance has been heavily restricted.
Being very interested in security, I try to attend as many of these kinds of events as I can, and have been in sessions before where media have been asked to leave. I never really understood this as, if you’re promoting the event, why have sessions on the agenda that should be restricted? If something really needs to be top secret, why not make it so? What about the risk of someone blagging their way in anyway?
This goes to show how important it is to fully anticipate the variety of possible responses to events. There has been a huge amount of media interest in the conference for some time now – and I must say the organisers have done well in using social media and promoting the #LondonCyber hashtag – they just won’t have wanted some of the tweets or articles they’ll have seen in response.
Did you get the chance to attend the conference? Tell Jonathan your highlights on Twitter @JonathanMathias.
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