Happy holidays everyone, bringing you a hacked classic to tide you over on the break while Scott and I both relax and prepare for the new year. This is a favorite of mine from a couple years ago, a simpler days of summer 2022, and honestly one of my favorite interviews I think we've ever done. It's with a music professor named Merrill Goldberg.
Story has Cold War intrigue, hidden codes, klezmer music. I want to make a movie about it. So if you're 2025 wish list is to set a bunch of money on fire, get at me. I hope you had a happy holidays and a festive new year. If you're still traveling safe travels, if you're home, I hope you're relaxing. This episode is called the Phantom Orchestra. Excited to get back to 2025. Enjoy.
Once you practice a code, you get pretty good at it. It's 1985, and Merrill Goldberg, a saxophone player with the Klesmer Conservatory Band, is at a border, trying to cross the Iron Curtain into the USSR. And she was about to find out how well that code she'd been practicing had really worked
And then we were brought into a back room and had our first heavy duty interrogation. So that was a little disheartening. It was a good cop bad cop interrogation and the bad cop
Big burly guy behind a big, big desk banging and kind of yelling at us and saying, why are you here? Who sent you? What does your father do? What does your mother do? How old are you? When were you born? And our translator, who I nicknamed Kevin, well, actually, I don't know if I nicknamed him, but we nicknamed him Kevin. Kevin was the good cop, translating for the angry soldier bad cop.
Kevin would say, what he's asking you is, so he was kind of like good guy to Mr. Big Burley Russian yellow guy. Who was shouting at her and her bandmates as a bunch of other soldiers went through all their baggage. Thoroughly, page by page through every single document looking for something hidden inside.
And clearly we had already been flagged for one reason or another, and they searched every single thing of ours. I mean, like a thorough, thorough search. They took my music notebook. They opened up every single page, went through it, but then just handed it back. And Meryl and her group crossed the border into Moscow.
Having successfully brought with them something they weren't supposed to. This is a story about obfuscation and people encrypting information and navigating a system undetected. And then a first for this show, I don't think it has one computer in it. This is the Phantom Orchestra. Here, unhacked.
The year was 1985 and I had already been performing professionally for a couple of years. My undergraduate degree was from New England Conservatory of Music and that's where I met my colleagues. We formed a band called the Klesmer Conservatory Band. Meryl Goldman is, amongst many other things, a Klesmer musician.
Klesmer is this folk music that combines a bunch of different European musical traditions, but sort of the main one, the pillar in the middle of all of it, is Ashkenazi Judaism. In the West, Klesmer was imported by Jewish immigrants, many of whom spoke Yiddish, so a lot of the classics of the genre have Yiddish lyrics over these often up-tempo bass and brass and string arrangements.
Some of the stuff you'd know is the kind of thing you'd dance to at a wedding or a bar mitzvah, but as a genre, it goes way deeper than that. Meryl is a saxophone player, and in the 1980s, she becomes part of this Klesmer band at the New England Conservatory Music. They would go on to put out 11 records, all bangers, of Klesmer music. So that's Meryl. Meanwhile, in the USSR,
There's this term that Merrill used that I had to look up. Refusenik. It was really difficult for Jewish people to leave the USSR. For several decades and for a bunch of different reasons, from about the late 1960s onwards, it was prohibitively difficult, if not impossible, to get an exit visa if you were Jewish in the Soviet Union. Refusenik was the unofficial name for Jews that couldn't leave the Soviet Union. People refused to exit visas.
And since then, the term has come to mean a dissident or a rowel rouser. Probably because a lot of people refused exit visas, refused nicks, would go on to become dissidents. People that refused to go along with something. And there were a bunch of different dissident groups in the USSR. There were the refused nicks, Catholic groups, Helsinki monitor groups, folks essentially spying to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords.
And they were all separate, operating in isolation. But eventually this story starts coming out. Amnesty International first got out the word and then a Guardian journalist wrote a story about it, about this dissident group in the Soviet Union made up of musicians.
At that time, it was very unusual for people who were part of different, dissident groups to get together. And I think that was enormously threatening to the Soviets that, you know, it's one thing, okay, the Jewish refusenics are over in this corner. We can deal with them. The Catholic refusenics, they're over there. The Helsinki monitors, ugh, they're a pain in the neck, but, you know, they're in their lane. But in this case,
they came together. And I think that was one of the things that was quite powerful for people in the West to understand. So in the case of the Phantom Orchestra, they named themselves Phantom because they couldn't really exist. The Phantom Orchestra.
So in the mid 1980s, Meryl is in this Jewish folk music band of renown in the US. And word of this group of at least partially Jewish musician dissidents in the USSR, distance who want to make contact with the West starts to come out. The Phantom Orchestra wants to make contact. They want to share their story with the world. In some cases, they want to try and make contact with family in the West to help sponsor them for exit pieces.
In order to apply to emigrate, someone from the West needed to invite you. And if the people in the West had all your information, then they could ask for an invitation. So there were a lot of people who wanted to be invited and had family members somewhere in the West, but didn't have a way to get their request out.
And eventually this advocacy group for Jewish Soviets based out of Boston finds out about the Phantom Orchestra. And they come up with this scheme to make contact. And they start having conversations with Merrill and the Klesmer Conservatory Band and the folks in Boston were like, jeez, wouldn't it be cool if we could send in some musicians to go meet them, to support them just to find out what's going on with them.
Until finally, four of them. Myself, Hankis Netzky, Rosalie Garrett, and Jeff Worschauer say, OK, we're going to go. It's going to be an adventure. You know, at that time in my life, I was totally game for an adventure. It sounded like super cool, super undercover. And I thought, OK, why not? We're going to get tourist visas, and we're going to make contact with the Phantom Orchestra.
We knew going into it, having about four months of prep, of learning both about the situation, the political situation, but also about the people we were about to meet. We had that very long learning curve, well, about four months. And through that, we understood that there were risks that
You know, if we came in and we had their names and addresses written, you know, down where it was super visible, then we would be tagged and thrown out right away. And, you know, put them in jeopardy, put us in jeopardy. So we were trained, so to speak, and figuring out that we had to, in some way, sneak in, you know, stuff that we needed to remember. Imagine you're a musician.
trying to make contact with a dissident group. And you've got all of this information about the members, who they are, where they live, their addresses, their phone numbers. But you don't have any computer to store it in.
And if you cross the border with a list of names and locations of dissidents written down on a piece of paper, you're basically bringing that list directly to the KGB. So the question is, how do you smuggle that information in correctly, knowing that every page you bring with you might get read.
Meryl used what she had and what she knew to encrypt this information. She is a musician. So she started there with sheet music. And if you use a chromatic scale, you could assign, I did assign letters to each note. In cryptography, this is called a substitution cipher. Each letter of the alphabet that you're writing in gets substituted for something else.
Simplest version is another letter in the same alphabet, so A becomes R, B becomes S and so on and so on. Some of the most complex substitution ciphers are mechanical, like the Enigma machine famously used by the Germans in World War II, but it's always the same basic mechanism. You're just substituting a letter for something else. So in the case of Western music, of a Western chromatic scale,
The letters range from A, B, C, D, E, F all the way up to G. When you add in sharps and flats, that gets you 12 notes. Still not enough to map a letter to each note to create a substitution cipher using Western music for English's 26-letter character set. But on sheet music, you've got a bass and a treble clef, more than just one scale.
So you can get to 26 just by assigning the letters to the notes. So if C, C sharp D, just keep going. And even though you've got another C up there, you just keep the code going. Then what I did is I created
I guess a lot of things that would make it harder to break it. So I use different clefs, so like it looks like piano music. I have a G clef, I have an F clef, and you know, I would put, I wrote it like it looks like piano music, but it's really just the same code. But even though it's in different clefs, and then I added rhythms,
She could use the key signatures, temple markings. She could use indicators like slurs and ties to bake more information into her code. Numbers are difficult, right? So I would just write in some numbers if I had to write in numbers. I would just put them in almost like, you know, like you have dynamics. So that gets you a full alphabet encrypted into sheet music and numbers and other stuff. Because the nice thing about sheet music as a code
is sheet music can be messy. Here's the beauty of music, right? It's a continual invention, and people invent notation and invent stuff to put in music all the time. So Merrill could kind of just mark it up after that point, because who would notice if the word legato was spelled in kind of a funny way?
you know words like legato or alla you know uh... allegro or whatever i wrote in little things like walk left uh... almost like legato and i think it well the russians aren't gonna you know the Soviets aren't gonna speaking russian aren't gonna be able to read my little teeny notes that say you know whatever and and i titled the pieces
Like, if people or directions were in Moscow, usually I would title the piece with an M. You know, like, Matarado or in, we didn't get to Riga or Leningrad, because we were, which is now St. Petersburg, because we were thrown out before then. But, you know, I would Rigoletto or, you know, I would just like name it.
So you've got this encryption system for letters, numbers, even little drawings and directions of where to go. All the information they could possibly need right there on the piece of paper hiding in plain sight. And there were certain points where
only a little picture could show me like I needed to know where an apartment was and it was easier to draw a little tiny diagram so I have like little diagrams embedded in the music too that if someone were really looking at it closely might say
What musical thing does that depict, right? Like, what is that composer trying to tell the musician who's reading this music, what to do? Instead of a composer telling her what to do through the sheet music, she was telling herself and her bandmates what to do in the future once they got there. Where to go? Who to meet? Phantom instructions.
to meet the Phantom Orchestra. When we got to Moscow, I went with Rosalie. Hankus went with Jeff. We were on different planes. We arrived and the guys were also interrogated, but separately. Rosalie and I were interrogated and Hankus and Jeff were
interrogated as well. And they actually did more kind of physical searches with them, not with us. There are notebooks and documents read through word by word, page by page. But at that point, you know, we ultimately, we made it through. But Merrill's encryption worked. They smuggled the information in.
Anyways, we make it through that. They bring us, you know, because we're tourists and, you know, you can't, you really can't go anywhere on your own. And well, you can. We did. But, you know, they took us to our hotel. Here's a funny story. We get to the hotel and, you know, we get our stuff in the rooms and we go to have dinner and some people come running at us. Are you the people from the Klisberg Conservatory Band?
And we're like, oh my God, you know, trying to keep a low cover and we were recognized right away. And now for the easy part. Ditching your escort and making contact with a dissident group of musicians in the Soviet Union. After the break.
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It's a great place to structure data. It's a great place to build small apps. It's a great place to use contextual AI to facilitate my work and personal life. I store everything in it now. I literally have notion documents that store all of my bikes and my wife's bikes and every part on them so that when I have to order maintenance pieces for them, I know exactly what model of rear shock it has.
Like I use it for so many things. So I can't tell you why I love it. I just love it. It's just a feeling, something you feel in your heart. When you get a really good piece of software that combines your notes and docs into one place that's simple and beautifully designed with the power of AI, just a little right inside of it. Not another separate tool in a different browser or a tab. You don't have 75,000 tabs around alive. You just got notion. We used it just the other day. We use it every day. It's a huge part of our workflow.
Just the other day, it's like I have two instances of it in front of me right now. Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize and rediscover the joy of like, it makes work feel a little bit more playful and that's really, really cool. It's a workplace design, not just for making progress, but like, you know, getting inspired, like you're in the same room together. It's also like the big thing for me is that it's like a
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Every once in a while, a new security tool comes along and just makes you think this makes so much sense. Why has nobody done this already?
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then blocks those attacks or behaviors directly in the browser. In effect, making the browser a control point for security. Push uses a browser agent like endpoint detection response uses an endpoint agent. Only this time it's so you can monitor your workforce identities and stop identity attacks like credential stuffing, adversary in the middle attacks, session token theft,
Think back to the attacks against Snowflake customers earlier this year. These are the kind of identity attacks that push helps you stop today. You deploy push into your employees existing browsers, Chrome, Arc, Edge, all the main ones. Push then starts monitoring your employees log in so you can see their identities, apps, accounts, and the authentication methods that they're using.
If an employee gets fished, push detects it and blocks it in the browser. So those credentials don't get stolen. Like we said before, it's one of those products where you ask yourself, why isn't everyone already doing this? The team at Push all come from an offensive security background. They do interesting research into identity, SaaS attack techniques and ways of detecting them. You might know of the SaaS attack matrix. Well, that was the folks at Push that helped develop it. And those are the kind of attacks that they're now stopping at the browser.
A lot of security teams are already using push to get better visibility across their identity attack services and detect attacks that they couldn't previously see with endpoint detection or their app and network locks.
I think this is an area that's blowing up and not just identity threat detection response, but also doing threat hunting at the browser level. Like it just makes sense. Push security is leading the charge here. It's a very cool product, a very cool team, and it's well worth checking them out. Push security dot com slash hacked. That's push security dot com slash hacked.
We noticed right away people were following us. They made it somewhat obvious. Getting into Moscow was step one. Next, they had to make their way out of Moscow and into to bleasy, the capital of Georgia. They're going to end up going on this whole tour through the USSR, but that is step one. But again, the Klesmer Conservatory Band is being monitored. So before they could actually make contact,
They had to at least try and ditch their tail. Here's a crazy story. I was only 26 years old, so keep that in mind. We think, okay, let's outwit the KGB.
We created a scenario where it looked like all four of us were getting on the subway in order to, you know, go to where we were going to. And by the way, you know, all the directions to get to where we were going to, which was the gold family called the gold scenes to their apartment.
We couldn't call them they didn't have a telephone but we had directions to get to their apartment which meant getting on a subway and you know like turning right on this street and left on this street and finding this apartment blah blah blah.
all get on the subway but after the first or second stop we all get off but Rosalie and I get right back on so if there's only one person following us they'll probably follow Jeff and Hank is and they won't be able to follow all of us right in hindsight they were following us no matter what but of course we didn't know that
Rosalie and I make it to the place we're supposed to go to and we get off the subway. We actually make our way to the building. Someone approaches us and we don't know if we should trust this person, not trust this person, but they were speaking English and they knew a couple of words in Yiddish. Ultimately, we decided to trust them and they led us to the Goldstein's apartment. We knock knock knock.
You know, we're musicians, we're here to meet you. We know we're being followed. Do you want us to come in or would you like us just to turn around and go away? And they're like, no, come in, come in. And they start to exchange information like they'd been sent to do. We need not to be afraid. This is our only way to essentially survive and get the word out and hopefully change things. And in general, the plan is working.
But also, they're band kids. So they do pretty much exactly what you'd guess after all the subterfuge for the evening is done. We play music that very first night.
It was amazing. You know, in the meantime, poor Jeff and Hankis are like, oh my God, what happened to Maryland Rosalie? Because we're gone for hours and they're, you know, back at the hotel. We didn't make it back probably till, I don't know, after midnight. So those poor guys had no idea what was going on. You can imagine how relieved they were when we got back.
And, you know, yeah. And, you know, weren't, didn't land in a jail, at least not yet. And as more of the Klesmer band was able to join in on the meetings, the rest of the crew, the Phantom Orchestra started tapping their networks, too. And more of their people started coming to these nightly meetings, where they were swapping information about aid campaigns and encrypting details about the membership seeking exo visas back into the sheet music code to smuggle it back out.
and in general, it sounds like, is playing a lot of music together. When we were there, the playing of music together was this space of camaraderie, of power, of empowerment, of feeling free, and of
you know, musicians can really bond together just by playing, right? It's this kind of communal thing that you do and you can get lost in that space and, you know, it's like the whole world around you just doesn't exist.
And in this situation where members of the Phantom Orchestra had already been arrested and imprisoned and beaten and, you know, they had gone through already horrible, horrible things because of their outspokenness. But when they played music, they were free. But meanwhile, over at the KGB, they're like, we're not dumb.
We do see you. We lost you for a minute there on the train, but we found you. We kind of know about some of these folks, these dissonance. We're starting to see what this is. You're not tourists making contact with dissonant groups. Also, you're playing plasma music, which I imagine is not quite. So the KGB starts sending folks by. The first night they send someone, it's a subtler message.
They shut off the power to the apartment where the Phantom Orchestra and the Klesmer Conservatory are meeting. But eventually, it escalates. First, to officers showing up at the apartments to ask questions. Next, to an interrogation. And over the week that follows, it keeps escalating. But the Klesmer Band keeps meeting every night.
And after that, after a couple nights of playing and more interrogations, so we were called in and more interrogations and yelling and screaming.
And they told us they could not guarantee our safety anymore. That, you know, we took it a little bit with a grain of salt. Then, you know, at the time, I remember, okay, I was kind of expecting that to come. And in our prep for going there, they told us they might tell us that.
But I thought, what are they really going to do? They could make life pretty miserable for us. So we tell this to the Phantom Orchestra members. And they immediately knew, OK, they might be in a little bit of trouble themselves. So let's give them some tips on what to do if you actually get under house arrest.
Here's the thing about all this. The Klesmer band has American tourist armor. If you're the KGB, you don't want to have to mess with the tourists you let in because that's messy. Cold war, diplomatically speaking. But by the time the KGB says, okay, shut this down.
The band is in Yerevan and Armenia, so pretty far from Moscow. So even though the orders are coming from the KGB, the Armenian officials that were actually doing the footwork and forcing it didn't like the KGB intrusion into their turf. So even though the band ended up under house arrest and they had their passports taken away, which is bad and scary, they could still kind of move around a little bit.
What Merrill didn't know is that the Phantom Orchestra had found out about the house arrest. They really didn't like where this is going. What we didn't know was after we left Tbilisi, they contacted Reuters, which was such a good idea because to let them know, to be on the lookout that we might be in trouble. So the Phantom Orchestra is able to go through some folks and eventually make their way to a journalist at Reuters.
And they tell the journalists what's happened about these musicians that have come to make contact with them and have had their passports taken away and put under house arrest. And this proved to be really smart because for however much the KGB wanted to avoid a diplomatic spectacle, having contend with a media spectacle was nearly just as bad.
They already had kind of gotten the word out to the west, which was a very good thing because we land in Armenia. As we get on the plane, Kevin from our first interrogation, Mr. Nice Guy, is on the plane.
And we get into, we land in Yerevan in Armenia, and they do not let us go into the terminal. There are two, maybe three cars on the tarmac. And, you know, we go from the plane to the tarmac to these cars. They don't tell us where we're going. They start driving us around. You know, all you can think of is in your head is, you know, oh, my God, where they taking us, they didn't tell us anything.
what's going to happen, they didn't put us all together. Fortunately, Rosalie and I were together, and Hankison, Jeff were together. Ultimately, the next morning, we were called down again to the office in the hotel, and at this time, we were told we were being deported. And then, you know, that our trip was over.
And that you know we needed to gather our stuff and they gave us this little bag. I'll never forget it with a tea bag and a boil that hard boiled egg and a piece of salami and a piece of cheese and maybe a piece of bread I don't know but this little baggy.
And then they bring us to the airport. And Kevin is with us at this point. And Kevin speaks English great. And Kevin says, well, they were going to send you to Beirut, but we're going to bring you back up to Moscow.
anything you know for Jews 1985 going to Beirut that would have been like a total death sentence but you know clearly a bluff they didn't do that and then the funny thing was on in going back to Moscow they Kevin said here's the deal
There are three seats together, and there are two seats together. One of you needs to sit with me. And so we drew lots. I lost. So I ended up next to Kevin, which was actually the most interesting thing. As you can see, my 26-year-old self was also pretty vibrant and curious. And I remember Kevin
You know, had said to me, he had gone out drinking the night before he was a little hungover. And he was sorry. He said if it was up to him, he would let everybody go. There were at least four pieces of internationally published coverage about the trip. The first headline read, four Americans expelled after Soviet meeting. The next, Boston banned expelled after meeting activists
In the last read, Soviets expelled four Americans for contact with rights group. The Phantom Orchestra across this coverage was described as human rights organizers, dissidents, and refusenix. In each article about the Klesmer band, a story about the Phantom Orchestra, who they were, what they were trying to do.
We get back to Moscow. And at this point in hindsight, we know that what we didn't know at the time. But since Reuters had gotten the story out, the US embassy was on the lookout for us. And so what they did, what the KGB did,
or the officials is they put us again in two cars and they drove us for hours. At this point, we don't know again where we're going.
could have been to Siberia, could have been to a prison. But after a couple of hours, we land at what I would consider kind of like a dormitory. And they put us all in the same room. It was like up on the ninth floor or something. The reason why I say that is because outside our room, there's a
Russian soldier with a with a you know a machine gun and downstairs when we look out the window as if we would jump eight or nine flights right there's you know all sorts of guards with machine guns. And then you know and where they don't tell us what's going on we're just.
you know, confined to that room. Like I said, maybe like a hotel room or a dormitory. And we do what the Phantom Orchestra folks recommended. We played music. You know, we did that. And then we did a really kind of, I guess, nod. I don't know how to say it, but it was a little bit mean-spirited.
We played a super famous Russian folk, beloved Russian folk tune, but we played it purposely out of tune.
It gave us a sense of empowerment to do that and maybe gave us a little levity among this, you know, like, oh my God, what's going to happen to us? Is this just a way station? Are they going to throw us into a jail cell? We don't have our passports. Ultimately, Kevin comes back to us and says, you're being deported to Sweden.
We're going to take you to the airport. They bring us to the airport. We are surrounded by military. There's no way anybody is going to get to us.
We go through security. We're brought to this Swedish plane. The port pilot and crew, it's an empty plane because they had just brought tourists over and they were going back empty. The port pilot and the crew were only told that they had no choice to accept for deported Americans or they were not leaving the Russian airspace.
the Soviet airspace so we get we get up to the plane and the poor captain he looks at us like what the heck did you do um you know we tell them the story they took
care of us. And when we landed in Sweden, the US ambassador to Sweden was ready for us because we had several debriefings once we landed in Stockholm. You know, there were several protocols, obviously, that were broken. I mean, you're not supposed to take away people's passports. I guess that was probably the biggest one.
locking us up was also not such a great thing. But in any case it took us a while to debrief and it took us a while I would say also to kind of feel like we weren't being followed.
From the second this project started, the Klesmer band knew that for however much they were taking a risk, the Phantom Orchestra members were taking a way bigger one. The orchestra understood the risk. They wanted to make contact and share their story, and with the Reuters coverage and the subsequent articles off of that, they got their story out in an arguably a way bigger way than the Klesmer Conservatory Band could ever have hoped to.
But after the band's plane takes off, Phantom Orchestra is still there. We came back. We really worked on behalf of everybody. And, you know, sadly, they, most of the people in the Phantom Orchestra were arrested, were beaten, they were ultimately let, you know, out. And ultimately, most of them emigrated. So, you know, in the end, it did work. So the orchestra got what they wanted.
But it came with a cost. And the Clesem Revan got what they wanted, and they were on a plane home. I got on this weird Google rabbit hole thinking about Merrill's code. This question of, you know, what is sheet music?
And the part about the secret code is that it really worked. And not only did we have the code in order to remember a whole bunch of stuff that would have been too hard to memorize ultimately, but we were able to take out invitations, people's information, birth dates and names and stuff they needed to get invitations out. And a couple of stories of people who
You know, their plight hadn't been known to the West yet. So we coded that again in music and took it right out. Music is not a natural language. I can't use it to describe an idea or give you directions to the store. But it is a language. It's a programming language. You're giving instructions to be executed. The machine in question just happens to be a human.
Michael Muccieroni writes about this idea that written music is a way of programming a human, giving them object-oriented instructions that they can execute. And Meryl figured out how to encrypt natural language into this analog programming language, because she could read both.
It's funny because with my college students, I teach them how to read music. And even though regular music only goes from the notes, A, B, C, D, E, F, K, it still can spell a lot of words. And so in the beginning of every class, my music class, I call it the secret code and I write a word, you know, like baggage or cabbage or dad or, you know, whatever. And I have my students break the secret code.
So I still do it, but on a much simpler level. Thanks for listening everybody to this JB solo adventure. My co-host Scott sends his love. Couldn't make it for this one.
So you just got me with my narrator voice. I hope you liked it. Hope you enjoyed the story. Patreon.com slash hacked podcast. If you did, it's the best way to support the show. Big shout out this episode to NeoFear. Thank you for supporting hacked at patreon.com slash hacked podcast.
Thank you to Meryl Goldberg for hopping on the surprise interview. I hope I captured everything accurately. The Klesmer music in this episode, not from the Klesmer Conservatory Band, is the music we had was not as good as their music, but I didn't want to dip my toe that aggressively into the copyright.
infringement pool. If you are interested in very, very good classroom music, I highly recommend you give them a listen. This wasn't a story about computers, but I found out about it through the RSA conference where Merrill was invited to speak about her experience encrypting stuff into sheet music. I thought it was interesting. I hope you did too. If you did like this kind of a, you know, cast in a wider net type story, feel free to reach out and send us a message. Hit us up on Twitter.
We love feedback. And if you have a past RSA, I highly recommend you give the video of her talk. Watch. That is another one in the bucket. Thank you so much for listening and we'll catch you in the next one.
