NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Revealed in a Rare Behind-the-Secnes Look

I found this to be extremely interesting and funny — and also informative. The presenter is pretending to be an NSA agent, giving a highly secret security briefing, which will "of course, never leave this room".

Why This is Important Today

In some ways the fear of this kind of thing can be highly exaggerated in people's minds. For example, it was always easy enough for anyone with the required authority (or anyone with the skills to get around that somehow) to eavesdrop or "wire tap" traditional voice telephone conversations. Yet this was rarely talked about as being a massive frightening privacy risk.

Also, there are more real hackers out there than anyone will ever know. Many of them in other countries, and many of those are where their laws are less strict about certain things.

If there were no systems like this in place (i.e. people who are mostly on our side, in the sense of actively participating in national security — much of which is done for the explicit reason of identifying and then minimising or removing legitimately malicious criminal cyber attacks), it's likely that modern life as we know it could not exist.

If that seems like a strong statement, consider how vulnerable most computer systems are. If there was no deliberate, large-scale effort being made on our behalf to track and identify criminal behaviour, things like the international banking system would be literally impossible.

In the 1930s a "bank job" type of robbery happened with mafioso-like criminals (using tommy guns smuggled in violin cases, perhaps) physically breaking into buildings and safes. Because that's how and where the valuable items (like money) were stored.

In the modern era, almost all of this is digital — that is, on networked computer systems.

Even much of actual warfare in the future is expected to be fought between un-manned "drone" aircraft and missiles — and pretty much a whole army of "drone" devices driven and piloted by people sitting in bunkers, which might be on the other side of the world from the battles themselves.

What Poul is Talking About

The video is meant to be satirical. There is no real "Operation ORCHESTRA", nor (presumably) most of the other top-level code names he gives for the "secret programs of the NSA", which Poul is "revealing" here. Yet, many of the more specific details he talks about are perfectly true (for example, the way that self-signed SSL security certificates in web browsers are handled — and this is still just as current in 2021 as it was in 2014 when Poul said it).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwcl17Q0bpk

As quoted from the link below, ‘Poul-Henning Kamp (a.k.a. “PHK”) delivers the presentation as if he were a mid-ranking NSA staffer intending to brief NATO in Brussels. But “being American, he ends up [at FOSDEM] instead”. The truly scary part of this presentation is that it could all be completely true.’

The page says a little more about it https://baldric.net/2014/04/16/nsa-operation-orchestra/

The video is a bit old now perhaps, Poul's talk was the closing keynote to 2014’s FOSDEM conference. Which probably means the tech is even more advanced now. And much of what Poul discusses is still very much in use today.

The Scariest Part

Personally, I don't think the scariest part is whatever extent Poul's talk does mirror how it's really done.

I think the scariest part is how the removal of almost all physical distance barriers (by computerised networks, and especially the Internet), combined with the near-unimaginable overall complexity of this global network, combined with the number of vulnerabilities in its component systems, combined with how much of our lives are driven by them — has led to an entirely new "race to the top" between good guys and bad guys, never before seen in the history of the world.

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