Late night tin foil post: Numbers Stations move to VoIP

I've always found the whole Numbers Station things interesting (and a little spooky), but the latest few messages with phone numbers to show up on Craiglist are beyond odd. I was curious if anyone else had been following this and what your thoughts were.

As for me, I fall pretty firmly into the 'spy channel' category. Nothing else makes sense. Who else would have the resources to do so many and for so long? It's also rather interesting that the ads have been removed from CL.

For those who have not been stocking up on tin foil:
Numbers Stations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
Recordings: http://www.spynumbers.com
First Number on CL info: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/05/31/the-212-796-0735-mystery
Second Number info: http://www.homelandstupidity.us/2006/06/01/another-phone-numbers-station-415-704-0402
/. discussion: http://slashdot.org/articles/06/06/01/2332251.shtml

and the numbers stations always perplexed/fascinated/scared me.

Sure sounds like a classic example. Whether it's authentic or not, only the spooks know for sure. ;)

IP address of anyone who listens?

:shrug:

There's some discussion of that over on /. which might interest you.

There are 100s of 'hot spots' throughout the nation, many of them are home users or small business owners who don't know how (or haven't bothered) to secure their home connections. You can also often find access outside of hotels, although most of those are bit more secure.

This is actually one of the more interesting aspects of this: Why? Shortwave is easy, accessible and allow the receiver to stay relatively invisible (even if the sender is discovered). When you already have a system so cheap and effective, why switch to something else?

:evilgrin:

...which I think are superior in a few senses, to radio. Shortwave relies on the propagation of radio waves through the notoriously fickle atmosphere. While there is a certain charm to using radio, it's much more efficient to use Usenet (or far-less-elegant, Web forum) stego'd conversations. Whereas a numbers station draws attention to itself because of its lack of contextual relevance, a stego'd conversation is so much more convincingly real because to make a stego'd message contextually relevant to any believable degree is pretty damned difficult. Much more difficult than stego-ing data inside a picture or mp3, for instance. Anyway, cut out the weak link (propagation via atmosphere) and replace it with a stronger one (propagation via Usenet) and you have enhanced and strengthened the existing model, all for a fraction of the price of equipment it would require to send transmit a radio signal.

I've seen messages on Usenet which I have determined to be stego'd which are as long as my reply #5, and almost as contextually-relevant, but which just don't pass the sniff test, especially when both parties are sending messages to the same thread. As I said at the beginning of this message, a numbers station draws attention to itself because of it's conspicuous lack of context. But with stego'd conversation, as long as you have a good algorithm in place, no one would ever suspect you're sending a stego'd message in the first place.

Little contextual anomalies give away the good stuff- the best appears to have 100% contextual adherence and can never be discerned (from its apparent content) as anything other than (usually inane) chatter.

PB

   I was first introduced to the concept by an English teacher almost 25 years ago- I was only 12 but he knew my interest in the world's affairs and he would kick me down his used copies of The International Herald Tribune. One day he pointed out a curious birthday greeting in the personals section. "See that?", he said, "It says 'Happy Birthday Boekel'. Except it's the same message and it runs only on certain, but not always the same, days of the week. I wonder if it's a handler talking to a spy?" I had never been introduced to such a concept before! I might be looking at some coded message to a spy! I was fascinated and went through all the personals in all the back-issues I could, trying to discern a pattern. I never did.

   But my fascination didn't stop there. A few years later I was introduced to the magic of Shortwave radio and quickly found out about the numbers stations. I'd heard The Russian Woodpecker and The Lincolnshire Poacher and couldn't get enough. Because of the oddities of wave propagation there were lots of other interesting things, like happening on one-half of a conversation between a pilot and ground control seemingly half a world away.

   Anyway, after I got into the Internet sometime in the late 80's (when porn was hardly present and represented with ASCII characters, LOL) I forgot about the numbers stations for the most part and concentrated on interacting with and later, spelunking Usenet. But in the mid-90's I came across the case of Serdar Argic and became fascinated with parse/response technology (not pure AI, which has far fewer political implications), basically "response bots". It was then, a little over 10 years ago, that I decided to start spelunking Usenet, as an amusement and purely for entertainment purposes, to discern other signals hidden on the carrier of Usenet. Billions of headers and a few gigs of ram later, I still enjoy, now and again, loading up 30 days of a discussion group and literally skimming over every message until I find something that just doesn't contextually fit. And then analyze until I get bored.

   In a nutshell, PGP posts are no fun at all- Since I can't decrypt the transmissions I assume they're either pedophiles, organized crime, pre-ship software transmissions or stolen dailies from whatever film Spielberg happens to be working on at the moment. The really good stuff, in my opinion, are the friendly conversations you run across which are very nearly contextually accurate but on any close inspection reveal themselves to be nothing more than stego'd data of some sort. But the process they use is so good it just looks like bullshit chatter, and on a variety of topics depending on the newsgroup. Hide the signal in the noise in the signal, a diabolical brilliance. In my opinion, stego conversations are the new numbers stations- and slicker by a factor of 10 because they don't seem out of place at all.

   But who runs 'em? I dunno! The data, unless spread out over x-hundred or thousand newsgroups (where the one-time code book would be replaced with a one-time .nzb file, or something similar) is too thin to represent a picture but could easily carry a short message, instructions, whatever. The Skype/Craigslist thing looks cool but it's far too inelegant, in my opinion, to represent the subtlety of a modern intelligence-gathering organization or even rogue members, therein.

   So next time you're reading a message, maybe even a reply on DU, and you wonder "Hey, this is sort of what I'm talking about but why does the guy have to give me his whole life's story" (like I appeared to, above) maybe it's just the rambling of a poster with a bad sinus infection who's whacked on medication (as is the case) or maybe it's a reply for another set of eyes. Wearing the appropriate red and blue spectacles, of course.

;-)

PB

that was a fascinating post. Thank you for sharing (and the links!).

I'm not at all surprised. How many old movies picked up on the personals ad thing? Or messages involving pages and word numbering of some book?

All of this stuff, and a lot more, has been tried over the years, and we used to have some fun with a lot of it back in the Signal Corps radio shacks. Aside from picking up lots of TTY (Radio Warsaw was transmitted clear, and was a favorite source of propaganda on the more boring nights) we got some really wierd stuff over the air that we always assumed was just more Cold War spy games.

It does give you a thrill to eavesdrop on who-knows-what plot being hatched, but most of that stuff tended to be simply comm checks, regular boring reports of silly stuff, and other useless things that spooks who regularly do that sort of thing tend to take far too seriously.

It does, of course, give the lie to the importance of spending all that precious supercomputer time listening in on phone calls. Even the Mob learned long ago not to say anything important on the phone.