NSA at RSA
The NSA has a booth here. It’s a gray cube with entrances on two sides, each of which has a happy, smiling booth guy handing out badges.
“Can’t go inside without badge!” sez one.
“What’s inside?” sez I.
“Take a badge, go inside and see!” sez he.
I take a badge and go inside. There’s a kiosk in the middle with some posters on it, and rotating red lights on top like it’s the world’s slowest gray fire engine. One side of the booth has interesting historical stuff, a little bio of Alan Turing, and an actual working Enigma machine. They have some free booklets with mathematical analyses of the Enigma cipher.
The other side of the booth has some computers for people to do stuff with and some more posters on the wall. It’s just so different from the other booths. Too much blank space, too many smiling people and none of them trying to sell you anything. There’s no way to tell why they’re here, and there’s certainly nothing in the booth worth issuing badges for.
I go out the other side, vaguely unnerved, and just as I’m ready to hand back my badge a woman comes up to the badge guy on this side of the cube.
“No, no, no,” laughs he, pushing the badge back at her, “it’s yours! Free! A souvenir!” I check my NSA booth badge again, in case I’m missing something.
It’s just a badge.
The woman tries to give it back again, but the guy won’t let her, still smiling and very friendly. The woman finally gives up and tosses it into her bag. I walk out and dump my badge into the nearest trash can.
You see, I’m a security guy. I’m thinking, they’re putting RFID chips in the badges and tracking everyone’s movements through the show, seeing what things people are looking at, thinking about buying. That kiosk in the middle of the booth could have hidden any amount of hardware. The whole scene was just that creepy. Pod people from the NSA, planting RFID chips on people buying crypto software and hardware.
By the time I got out of the building, I realized that I was being either too paranoid or not paranoid enough. I mean, it’s the NSA. They don’t need to get me to take an NSA booth badge to track me - they could have put them into the Enigma booklet I took! Or dusted me with them as I walked through!
There just aren’t many good explanations for putting a creepy opaque booth in the middle of several thousand security people. Well, maybe NSA people just get uncomfortable out in the open, maybe they need the walls to cut down the sight lines.
Maybe they are tracking us all for nefarious purposes. Or for marketing.
You know what I think? I think they revel in their creepiness, enjoy unsettling the proles.
