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So, basically the answer is "expensively monitor all outgoing international mail and hope for someone as stupid as to sign his spy letters".
In 1970s USSR there wasn't much outgoing international mail, so the monitoring wasn't really that expensive.
The way you catch the spy is apparently by monitoring sent mail and comparing handwriting. Very little of this is specific to numbers stations.
So, basically the answer is "expensively monitor all outgoing international mail and hope for someone as stupid as to sign his spy letters".
The answer is that in 2020, when the median page weighs 2 MB and makes 70 requests over a dozen TCP connections, everything is a potential numbers station. I had been joking about www.duckdascism.gov in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458630 but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24526075 has people who've used that channel. (for the record, ~64kbps is more than most people had over dialup in the early days…
Unless you co-opt a page everyone "listens" to, such as facebook or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 1970s USSR there wasn't much outgoing international mail, so the monitoring wasn't really that expensive.
They weren't just quickly inspecting it, they found invisible ink on it.
These days, of course, our communications pass through various boxes that can automate inspections, so no need to involve wetware.
Keyword search in 1960s US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage
The way you catch the spy is apparently by monitoring sent mail and comparing handwriting. Very little of this is specific to numbers stations.
exactly my thoughts, its like articles about serious "hacks", when the critical steps turn out to be social engineering, definitely interesting, but not what the title suggests.
(Indeed, the story as written does have Hollywood MacGuffin floppy disk written all over it, in that I'd find it implausible that, even in a war zone, no one kept anything on-prem, or at least backups? At least performing a "kill -9" via Hellfire missile does upstage Stanford gangstas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4 .)
[1] Compare https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-why-wh... and remember that the case of TFA starts in 1974 with social engineering via "Nadia." I'm pretty sure the Arthashastra mentions social engineering via thirst trap, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Shi has a similar story. Then there's https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/12/all-you... 's account of deradicalisation via honey trap.
Q. How did Adam and Eve anticipate the twenty-first century?
A. They failed to read Apple's Terms & Conditions and got in trouble for misunderstanding the Privacy Policy.
Do you have any idea what they are talking about here? I'm imagining dispersing some invisible chemical (or isotope maybe?) in his house and then looking for increases in concetrations in areas where he might have been to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They weren't just quickly inspecting it, they found invisible ink on it.
Outgoing international mail sent by a nonlocal tourist might have been a quick triage signal for the local postmaster? These days, of course, our communications pass through various boxes that can automate inspections, so no need to involve wetware. Keyword search in 1960s US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage
They probably were inspecting all outgoing mail.
Today we're seeing number stations move off of ham radio and onto protocols like MQTT. Additionally a lot of "weather stations" around the world are simply number stations. They vary the numbers reported, and wherever they diverge from whatever is determined in advance as the "canonical" source is how information is communicated. This paragraph and the above are just my personal observations please note. Lastly good…
> Today we're seeing number stations move off of ham radio and onto protocols like MQTT. Wouldn't a MQTT station be lacking one of the major advantages of a radio number station - that it is very difficult to know who is listening to the broadcast. Using weather reports (or obituaries in newspapers etc) are not number stations, though they can be used as covert channels.