The Numbers Stations Analyzed, Discussed

GMontag wrote to mention a Washington Post article about the always-intriguing 'number' radio broadcasts. The numbers stations, as they are known, are 'hiding in plain sight' spycraft. Random digits broadcast at little-used frequencies are known to be intelligence agencies broadcasting their secrets in encrypted form. The Post article gives a nice run-down on the truth behind the transmissions, and touches a bit on the odd community that has grown fascinated by them. From the article: "On 6840 kHz, you may hear a voice reading groups of letters. That's a station nicknamed 'E10,' thought to be Israel's Mossad intelligence. Chris Smolinski runs SpyNumbers.com and the 'Spooks' e-mail list, where 'number stations' hobbyists log hundreds of shortwave messages transmitted every month. 'It's like a puzzle. They're mystery stations,' explained Smolinski, who has tracked the spy broadcasts for 30 years." This article made me recall a great All Things Considered story from a few years back about Akin Fernandez's 'Numbers' CD, a CD compilation of some of the most interesting strings of randomly read numbers reaching out across the airwaves.

1258965

1258965

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Re:1258965

42

Re:1258965

In Soviet Russia, this would be modded "Informative".

Re:1258965

Oh my god... The single funniest and most fitting Soviet Russia joke I have ever seen. People looked at me weird because I was laughing at a computer.

Re:1258965

8675309

Slash has its own numbers station

It was discussed on slash previously in the following article:

Numbers Stations Move From Shortwave To VoIP [slashdot.org].

Porcupine tree

I first heard one of these broadcasts at the end of 'Even Less' by Porcupine Tree. Very weird stuff.

-C

IP Addresses

What if they were IP addresses?

207 46 225 60 207 46 18 30 ;)

Re:IP Addresses

Actually no, it's spies reading the content of a suspicious #chatzone IRC log file, only they don't quite get it. See for example this transcript:


C0016UY: 1337641: 69?
1337641: 637 1057!

Re:IP Addresses

What's 1057?

The joke. On you.

Re:IP Addresses

A translation for the weak of leet:

A fine, upstanding gentleman: Dearest, skilled lady... wouldst thou join me in mine bedchambers for some chaste frolicking?
Skilled lady: Alas! No, I must not! For thou art neither truly updstanding, nor the gentleman thou claim'st to be. Now, leav'st me be posthaste!

I've picked these up on short wave

If you have a cheap short wave radio, even a "radio shack" one, you can pick up voice audio coded messages to spies that the CIA sends to agents. You will only find them by pure chance, but I have managed to find them and record them but I would say that for every 6 or 8 months of listening to short wave radio I will hear only 1 of these broadcasts. It's usually the same female voice. It's great fun when you find one, you feel like you hit the lottery.

Re:I've picked these up on short wave

I won the lottery.

Twice.

I spent a lot on booze and whores.

I wasted the rest.

Re:I've picked these up on short wave

And if you're going to steal, get it right! George's wording was far better:

"I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered."

See? That word: squandered. Much, much better than wasted. You can waste anything but only riches can be squandered. And you forgot the fast cars [photobucket.com]. Unforgivable.

Re:I've picked these up on short wave

Dude, a slashdotter said he heard a female voice. That's pretty much the same as winning the lottery around here.

Re:CIA? I suspect not.

You're a spy. You're sent in to infiltrate a terrorist organization in some self sustaining desert town full of impoverished potential recruits for the terrorist organization. Shortwave is a common technology amongst these kinds of towns. Radios have been around for over 100 years now I believe (if not almost 100 years). Your laptop, PDA, or other fancy high tech equipment is going to give you away.

Re:CIA? I suspect not.

If you are in the US military and go to the language school in Monterey, a big portion of your "lab" training is learning how to transcribe groups of numbers read in your target language. It's a big part of your "grade" in your coursework.

Now, it's hard to say if the US transmits numbers, but it's pretty clear that there appears to be some intelligence value in teaching the electronic warfare people how to listen to streams of numbers in other languages.

It's probably a great way to send one-way messages to the field. A simple AM radio can be modified work in different frequencies. With that and a normal-looking one-time-pad code book can go a long way to providing secure communication that is inconspicuous.

So, the CIA might not do it, but other countries and services probably do.

HF, VHF, UHF...

You're correct, but just in the interests of preventing confusion, the idea of what was a "long wave" in the early 20th century was very different from what an electrical engineer might think of today. What are today rather low frequencies for radio communication were at the time rather high, hence the term 'short waves.' The preferred frequencies for communication at the time are now barely used by anyone, with the possible exception of naval communication with submarines and the like. Their data-carrying capacity is just too low, and the antennas they require are obnoxiously large.

Of course, by calling things in the 1-30 MHz range "high frequency," those engineers forced us to use such terms as "very high frequency," and "ultra high frequency" when equipment finally became capable of transmitting at those wavelengths.

There was a BBC radio programme about this...

There was a BBC radio programme about this a few months ago:

http://jamesholden.net/2005/04/23/the-lincolnshire -poacher/ [jamesholden.net]

Oooo, just heard a broadcast

Radio: 1... 2... 3... 4... 5!

1 2 3 4 5? That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!

free 4 cd album of number stations recordings

http://www.archive.org/details/ird059 [archive.org]

It's not music, it's numbers stations. You can take a listen at just a few mp3s to check what a number station sounds like.

That explains it...

So the little voices I been hearing is from the spooks instead of the green little men. Maybe I been watching too much X-Files.

I suppose your questions have been answered...

... when you hear:

Forty Two.

Ob Penny Arcade

link [penny-arcade.com]

Shortwave

As an avid Shortwave fan, there are less and less clear stations broadcasting to NA, as more and more world service broadcasts move to the Internet. (YEAH I'm talking about you BBC) I wonder how long until the only people who own shortwave radios are spies? Although propaganda stations are well worth the price of the radio. Listen to Cuba's hour loop of things we blame on the US today, and keep a straight face, I dare you.

Source code

I don't know if I should do this - releasing secrets from the FBI like this commonly leads to life in Gitmo Bay - but information wants to be free!

The "numbers" stations only exist to confuse people. On Wednesdays, we have "beer" day, where you are entitled to a beer from the cooler if the number 12725 comes out.

So we had one day, last year, where somebody (I think it was the Chinese) hacked our main server, and made it broadcast 12725 continuously all day. So there we were, plastered out of our mind, when 270 Lbs of fissionable material was stolen from our floor. The investigation is due to be completed sometime around 2021 - we don't talk about that very much.

Anyway, here's the source code:

#! /bin/sh
cat /dev/urandom > /dev/bcast;

Information wants to be free!

Neat

I remember when I was 12 or so and heard one of these for the first time. A woman reading numbers in Spanish. Damned if I didn't feel like James Bond sitting there listening to it. I still have that radio, too. Too bad it doesn't pick up anything besides evangelical stations now. Yes, technology has advanced and the world has moved on. So have I. I accept that. But there was a certain thrill of finding that clandestine guerrilla propaganda station that just can't be replaced with web surfing.

Ad revenue

With these stations becoming so popular, isn't it time to sell ads? After all, spy agencies can always use the extra cash, and the people who listen to these things probably constitute a solid geek demographic.

Or worse:

1) Create personal numbers station with especially intriguing sequences to draw audience
2) Sell ads on your personal number station
3) Profit! ... why do I feel like I've missed a step there?

4 8 15 16 23 42

four eight fifteen sixteen twentythree fortytwo

Conet Project MP3 Download

You can download the mp3's for free: http://irdial.hyperreal.org/the%20conet%20project/ [hyperreal.org]

Broadcasting From Here

British Intelligence broadcasting from Cyprus

It's quite likely they're broadcasting from here Google Satellite [google.com]

That's Ayios Nikolaos [wikipedia.org]. Supposedly part of the Echelon network. If you look to the north of the building, there's a large mast that might easily be a short-wave antenna.

Next: Numbers Websites / Numbers IRC Channels

Awaiting the follow-up Slashdot article about Numbers Websites and Numbers IRC Channels ... are there any known ones?

Ron

Time Bomb.

In ten years someone who has been recording them for thirty years will have quantum breakers to decode them with. Once this first layer of protection is broken - and it will be - then I hope our information inside of that is also semantically encoded (Windtalkers) to give it a few more years after that before someone else knows our old secrets.

Re:Time Bomb.

A quantum computer is useless against a message encrypted with a properly constructed one-time pad.

Re:Time Bomb.

In ten years someone who has been recording them for thirty years will have quantum breakers to decode them with.

No.

Decrypting one-time pads isn't hard because there isn't enough compute power to throw at it. It's hard because it can't be broken, no matter what you do to it. Given a message to decrypt, the best an enemy cryptanalyst can do is random chance. There are better ways of compromising secrets.

This is a well-established result in encryption and there is no point in arguing about it. The only time one-time pad encryption has ever been broken was when the agents misused their one-time pads. The Venona [nsa.gov] decrypts are a good example of this.

(Wow! First time I've ever linked to the NSA!)

...laura

Re:Time Bomb.

There's a couple ways to generate one-time pads. The first I read was described at HotBits [fourmilab.ch]. They take a little radioactive bit of cesium, and a radiation detector which can detect atomic decay:

What we do, then, is measure a pair of these intervals, and emit a zero or one bit based on the relative length of the two intervals. If we measure the same interval for the two decays, we discard the measurement and try again, to avoid the risk of inducing bias due to the resolution of our clock.

You can find more at Wikipedia's article on hardware random number generators [wikipedia.org]:

There are two fundamental sources of practical quantum mechanical physical randomness: quantum mechanics at the atomic or sub-atomic level and thermal noise [wikipeda.org] (some of which is quantum mechanical in origin). Quantum mechanics predicts that certain physical phenomena, such as the nuclear decay [wikipeda.org] of atoms, are fundamentally random and cannot, in principle, be predicted. (For a discussion of empirical verification of quantum unpredictability, see Bell test experiments [wikipeda.org].) And, because we live at a finite, non-zero temperature, every system has some random variation in its state; for instance, molecules of air are constantly bouncing off each other in a random way. (See statistical mechanics [wikipeda.org].) This randomness is a quantum phenomenon as well. (See phonon [wikipeda.org].)

Because the outcome of quantum-mechanical events cannot in principle be predicted, they are the 'gold standard' for random number generation. Some quantum phenomena used for random number generation include:

• Shot noise [wikipeda.org], a quantum mechanical noise source in electronic circuits. A simple example is a lamp shining on a photodiode. Due to the uncertainty principle [wikipeda.org], arriving photons create noise in the circuit. Collecting the noise for use poses some problems, but this is an especially simple random noise source.

• A nuclear decay [wikipeda.org] radiation source (as, for instance, from some kinds of commercial smoke detectors [wikipeda.org]), detected by a Geiger counter [wikipeda.org] attached to a PC.

• Photons [wikipeda.org] travelling through a semi-transparent mirror [wikipeda.org], as in the commercial product, Quantis from id Quantique SA. The mutually exclusive events [wikipeda.org] (reflection -- transmission) are detected and associated to "0" or "1" bit values respectively.

Thermal phenomena are easier to detect. They are (somewhat) vulnerable to attack by lowering the temperature of the system, though most systems will stop operating at temperatures (e.g., ~150 K) low enough to reduce noise by a factor of two. Some of the thermal phenomena used include:

• thermal noise [wikipeda.org] from a resistor [wikipeda.org], amplified to provide a random voltage source.

• Avalanche noise [wikipeda.org] generated from an avalanche diode [wikipeda.org], or Zener breakdown noise from a reverse-biased zener diode [wikipeda.org].

Try cracking a "numbers station" on your own

For those of you who like this sort of thing, check out 202-386-6909 and http://code-cracker.cerbumi.org [cerbumi.org]. This is a test project that I developed for Cerbumi.org, a new and entirely non-commercial (no ads, fees, etc) website designed to help with real-world problem solving. (Think of it as a "Sourceforge.net" for projects like the "Open Prosthetics Project." [openprosthetics.org]) The first person to solve the puzzle and post the answer to the code-breaker project can choose where the Cerbumi.org team will make a $100 donation on their behalf.

If this sounds like fun, please consider signing up for the Cerbumi.org site at http://public.cerbumi.org/goons [cerbumi.org] (a "secret back door for a site that normally requires registration) and try to crack the code. Also, please consider checking out the main planning project at http://cerbumi.cerbumi.org [cerbumi.org] and our Flash-based demo at http://cerbumi.org/flash [cerbumi.org]. I'd love to hear your thoughts, too... just reply. :)

Jenny, don't change your number

8-6-7-5-3-0-9

Top Of The Pops!

Yankee [wikipedia.org]
Hotel [archive.org]
Foxtrot [wilcoworld.net]

"Most interesting strings...?"

This article made me recall a great All Things Considered story from a few years back about Akin Fernandez's 'Numbers' CD, a CD compilation of some of the most interesting strings of randomly read numbers reaching out across the airwaves.

So... who's the guy that determines which strings are more interesting than others? That's what I want to know...

boring!

i been a shortwave lister for over 20 years with a high quality R.L. Drake, i listened to number stations and after listening to them for a moment i spun the dial in search of something more interesting...

i miss the weekend evenings of listening to Pirate radio - Captain Eddie & his Radio Airplane, Dr. Tornado and Joe Mamma, frequencies like 7385KHz & 6955KHz have not had any good listening lately, i sure wish i knew of some other frequencies to monitor because dialing thru 30 megahertz of bandwidth is just too much to search thru in a single evening...

HELLO WORLD

Um, hello? Typical bloody troll. Now it's appropriate, it sods off.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

I try so hard...

I am a habitual NPR listener, but everyone I know finds it slow, uninteresting, easily dismissed radio. I try to expose them to intriguing news material that's delivered spin free and very palatable, but have not yet impressed a single person. It's times like these that I just shake my head and sigh.

"a great All Things Considered story from a few years back about Akin Fernandez's 'Numbers' CD, a CD compilation of some of the most interesting strings of randomly read numbers"

Interesting... random numbers... Ok, so my friends were right.

Numbers Rule!

nuff said!

Anyone got info on this one?

I picked up a radio station once on one of those obscure channels that wasn't registered to any radio stations. It just seemed to be random sentences and/or words, nothing all day but random sentences and words. Listened to it for a while, got bored and moved on.

I think this is to keep all those 'conspiratists' busy decrypting random data instead of real transfers going on on other channels.

Better...

This one is better than the silly numbers stations http://www.spamradio.com/ [spamradio.com]

for the price of a dime...

867-5309?

Truly random digits? I doubt that.

If they are truly "random digits" they either would not mean anything, or whatever they happened to mean would very probably be of no interest to the decoder. I'll settle for "seemingly-random digits".

Shortwave Station Leaders - nothing sinister

I listened to some of those recordings and they were clearly the leaders transmitted by commercial stations, to indicate where the real transmission is. Over the course of the day, shortwave stations move to different frequencies, that are better propagated by the ionosphere.

When a station moves to a new frequency, they continue to play a unique identifier tune and read out the frequencies where the station may be received better. For example, 39715 would be 39MHz715.

Others may simply be a station transmitting automated junk, in order to 'occupy' the channel, so that someone cannot apply to the IETF to use the unused channel. Since they all have these number voice systems to announce their frequencies, it is logical to use that system to occupy the channel with random junk.

Re:Shortwave Station Leaders - nothing sinister

I beg to disagree. Number stations are quite real. What possibly confused you is how some number stations operate.

Take the old Radio Moscow transmitter in East Berlin, for example. You are quite right that such HF broadcasts would often end with a looping tape containing info on what freq(s) the site would be transmitting next. Well and good.

Eventually, though, the tape ends and the transmitter shuts down. Fine. Now all you're listening to is a whole lot of nothing but white noise, right? STAY ON THE FREQ FOR ANOTHER 5-10 MINUTES. Suddenly another carrier comes up, and a woman's voice starts. On the Radio Moscow freq she would always start with "Achtung, achtung," then proceed to read-off a long string of number groups (NOT freqs!). When done, she would finish with "Ende," and the carrier would immediately drop.

Still sound like a freq change notice to you? :)

Triangulation to locate sources?

Shouldn't it be possible to use a directional antenna or some similar technology, from several points around the globe to locate the source of the transmissions with a reasonably high degree of precision?

I don't have any shortwave equipment myself, but it seems that would be a very interesting project.

It would be quite exciting, say, to discover signals originating from a mountain in Wyoming :)

This is pretty sweet. It's a very interesting strategy. Shortwave receivers are easy to come by, do not arouse suspicion, and no one can detect that you are listening in.

Re:Triangulation to locate sources?

The thing with HF is that there's really no way to reliably determine where the signal is coming from, because it's operating at a frequency that can bounce around in the ionosphere indefinitely. That's how they're able to send a signal from distances beyond line of sight... it's not penetrating the Earth, it's bouncing around in the atmosphere.

Given the right atmospheric conditions, you can pick up the signal decades later: one of the coolest things that ever happened to me was picking up battle chatter from Vietnam while on a training exercise with Army Signals. I'm 25. It was eerie people die in a transmission that was sent before I was born.

Re:Triangulation to locate sources?

Not to be rude, but I call BS.

The number of reflections that an HF signal would undergo in a decade of bouncing around anything the size of the earth, is simply astronomical. The efficiency of reflection would have to be similarly astronomical.

Let alone enough of the signal staying intact to still hear several seconds of it (enough to identify it as Vietnam chatter).

Re:Triangulation to locate sources?

I have not experienced this firsthand when I was in Military Signals, but I have certainly been told it can happen - by my instructors, in class and apparently in all seriousness. Its pretty rare but evidently some signals can survive up in the ionosphere for extremely long periods of time. The example they mentioned was having heard message traffic over HF that apparently dated from an exercise shortly after WWII, but received in the late 80's sometime.

I know I have heard a signal I sent, bounce right around the earth and come back to our receiver a few mins later. I also remember picking up a signal on Military frequences in Northern Ontario (I was in the Canadian Military) that originated down in Florida, evidently on a Taxi transmitter, judging by the conversation I had with the guy when I asked him to leave our channel.

Radio is fascinating stuff, its a shame its losing its popularity to the Internet and computers, because its still a very neat and geeky technology.

Get Lost

>: 4 8 15 16 23 42

The fate of the world depends on you posting these numbers to slashdot every 108 minutes.

Thanks,
Hanso

8675309

codename: Jenny. Passphrase: Tommy Tutone

Yosemite Sam station in the US

Lest you think all these secret stations are foreign, here's the story of Yosemite Sam [southgatearc.org], a station that transmitted "I'm a gonna get you, you varmint!" followed by a quick digital BRAP sound, and how it was traced by enterprising hams to a US military-industrial facility.

Cuban spy station uses Morse Code (cut-numbers)

The Cuban station mentioned in the article sounds like the cut-numbers station [ominous-valve.com], which sends 5-letter groups that are morse code numbers, but shortened.
So instead of 1 (*----) they send A (*-), and instead of 2 (**---) they send U (**-), and 3 (***--) becomes V (***-), etc.

Not code but keys?

OK, what if the sequences are one time pad keys or other crypto keys? Then there would be nothing to crack, there is no message. The end user and the transmitter agree on a protocol, e.g., only use the sequence generated at 1620 UTC. Then after each day that sequence is discarded.

The info is then sent by email, ground mail, radio, etc. encrypted with that key.

So not only would there be nothing to crack, but the vast majority of the numbers would just be noise.

Why would the feds broadcast in the US?

Why would the American spooks broadcast such things in American territory? Why are they going to spy on in their own territory?

The primary tactical advantage of broadcasting is that it does not reveal who is receiving the message - on a large scale you cannot find the few people who are listening to the broadcasts. This worked well for the saboteurs in Vichy France.

What benefit would you get on friendly territory?

Melissa

Creepy?

Not as creepy as an MD5 checksum.

4815162342

4815162342 what?

Our *new* overlords...

I for one welcome our new Dharma Initiative/Hanso Foundation overlords.

So many posts, no one has any idea, eh?

No one has any idea what these number stations are for. There was only one post that mentioned that they keep the channels occupied in this way.

A real mystery on our hands...why hasn't any journalist try to interview personnel from these stations? they can not be found?

The Moscow Radiotelephone Station

Years ago, some friends of mine used to find sport listening to "Numbers Stations". One in particular, during the Soviet era, used to identify itself as "The Moscow Radiotelephone Station." They would get on the air and proclaim "This data is for Testing Purposes Only, from the Moscow Radio Telephone Station, Book xx, Page yy, Group zz..." and then proceed with five letter cipher groups in perfect english phonetics. (Substitute xx, yy, and zz with whatever numbers of book, page and group they were sending at the time).

They were once reputed to have closed their broadcast on New Year's Eve with "and greetings to our friends in the CIA." Who says spies have no sense of humor?

OH my God

its horrible i just figured it out .....

the number stations are linked to the mayan calendar !!

they are broadcasting number sequences in a coutdown fashion or maybe trying to predict the exact time

of the great cataclysm !!!

these broadcasts are intended for the aliens so they know when its time to launch their take over of the world !!!!!

whoda thunk it the aliens number stations and the mayans are all intrinsically linked TO OUR DEMISE !!!!!

any chance this is mostly bogus?

OK, it is easy to imagine this being done in the past, before TOR and irc.... but there are so many more, less trackable methods, and the hobbyists make me wonder if this is now mostly fake, like crop circles.

Re:locating

For those few still using actual radio, rather than just the broadcaster metaphor, sure. But, if you don't mind my asking, to what end? What good would it do you to know the site of origin?

Re:locating

shouldn't it be fairly straightforward to locate the origin of these transmissions?

Yes. Automatic radio direction finding is common and was often used in the cold war. The spectrum is constantly monitored and when a new broadcast pops up, it is automaticaly DF'ed and logged. When several DF sites pickup the same broadcast, triangulation to the source is a simple task.

Here is what a typical DF site looks like. Both the US and Russia have them.

http://www1.shore.net/~mfoster/FLA_Wullen.htm [shore.net]

Re:Why not just use spam

Perhaps they do use spam. I've received a number of cryptic junk e-mails recently — not selling anything, just (mis)quoting Shakespeare or some random numbers. Though I figure it's more likely related to criminality than covert intelligence.

Re:Interesting but moot

The big boys can afford one time pads.

Er, afford a one-time pad? All you need to do is cat /dev/random, or if you're without a computer, spend an hour or two rolling polyhedral dice. Make two copies of your set of random numbers.

Re:How to be an effective spy.

the number one thing you need to keep in mind all day, every day, is "How does this look?" For example, right now, I am trolling slashdot

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAaahaha! BEST. TROLL. EVER.

Re:4 8 15 16 23 42

36 24 36
http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Violent-Femmes/36 -24-36.html [seeklyrics.com]

Re:Interesting but moot

Does the laptops and sat phones come with a t-shirt that says "American Spy" on it? I guess not, as just carrying a laptop and sat phone around in many parts of the world is equivalent to a t-shirt which says "American Spy" on it in big, orange letters.

Re:How to be an effective sociopath

So basically. . . you are talking about pretending as a way of life in order to manipulate people into serving you more and better. How charming. I find it interesting to note that this is the mode of behavior used by sociopaths and psychopaths, except they do it because they don't have any other way to function within the human race. They wear the, "mask of sanity".

As long as you're trolling. . , here's another freebie you might want to include in your dossier: If you deliberately disconnect yourself from the human race, you will not be connected when it comes time to share your thoughts as a writer. Being a writer means getting on the same wavelength as your audience and you cannot do this from the sociopath's perspective.

To say that in another way; If you want to be a writer, you will need to have decent communication skills. Your post was difficult to understand, and that's not because the ideas themselves are particularly complex. Humans are very good at connecting dis-connected ideas, but only when they are dis-connected in a way Humans are good at connecting; that is, some types of random taste better than others. You can only know which is which by going native.

Yes, there is an advantage to stepping outside the automatia of the average human head-space. Heck, everybody should strive to step beyond the automatic behavior they run around using 95% of the time. But to do this simply by becoming another type of machine is, in my opinion, A Bad Idea. Pretend to be something long enough and that's what you become. Be careful. Love is the key, not coldness.

-FL