Posted: 3/16/2010 5:34:49 PM EDT
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Anyone heard of these?
Numbers stations (or number stations) are shortwave radio stations of uncertain origin. They generally broadcast artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters (sometimes using a spelling alphabet), tunes or Morse code. They are in a wide variety of languages and the voices are usually female, though sometimes male or children's voices are used.
Evidence supports popular assumptions that the broadcasts are used to send messages to spies. This usage has not been publicly acknowledged by any government that may operate a numbers station, but in 2001, the United States tried the Cuban Five for spying for Cuba. The group had received and decoded messages that had been broadcast from a Cuban numbers station.[1] Also in 2001, Ana Belen Montes, a senior US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was arrested and charged with espionage. The federal prosecutors stated: "Montes communicated with the Cuban Intelligence Service through encrypted messages and received her instructions through encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba”. In 2006, Carlos Alvarez and his wife Elsa Alvarez were arrested and charged with espionage. The U.S. District Court Florida stated: "defendants would receive assignments via shortwave radio transmissions”. In June 2009, the United States similarly charged Walter Kendall Myers with conspiracy to spy for Cuba and receiving and decoding messages broadcast from a numbers station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Service to further that conspiracy.[2] [3] It has been reported that the United States uses numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries.[1] Numbers stations appear and disappear over time (although some follow regular schedules), and their overall activity has increased slightly since the early 1990s. This increase suggests that, as spy-related phenomena, they were not unique to the Cold War. |
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They are indeed tools of intelligence agencies to communicate with covert agents. As stated it is a one way transmission, you can receive without being tracked, and as long as the programmer doesn't screw up and use a one time pad twice they can't be broken.
A shortwave radio in most of the world is a common possession, so owning and using one would generally not draw suspicion. These stations have caused problems for legitimate broadcasters, and even aviation control towers in the past. ETA: The US government has proven that the Cuban numbers station broadcasts coded messages to operatives within the US, their station manager is sloppy and has reused one time pads, when they do that breaking the code goes from impossible to trivial. |
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I have heard them over the years MANY times. I do a whole lot of short wave listening as well as ham radio.. and you would be amazed at some of the strange stuff there outside of the normal ham and broadcast bands.
A good site to read up and listen to a few of them via recording is http://spynumbers.com/ |
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Oh and a video of it..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nERNpV7bMQ |
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Wow. Very interesting.
The hotline between Moscow and Washington D.C., established in 1963 after the Cuban missile crisis, used teleprinters protected by a commercial one-time tape system. Each country prepared the keying tapes used to encode its messages and delivered them via their embassy in the other country. A unique advantage of the OTP in this case was that neither country had to reveal more sensitive encryption methods to the other.[13]
More recordings (pdf) Recording links are on this page |