81–90 of 128 posts
For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer Is Sipher really his name. Nominative determinism strikes again. Sifr is also a valid word both in Farsi, I think. An Ironic and cruel pun.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/cipher
(Al Jabr, the translator of Indian Mathematical texts was a Persian IIRC)
I wonder why they keep using a dedicated numbers station instead of embedding the code in a regular radio broadcast on a traditional channel? I'm sure that even before LLMs one could find a way to create a story where certain numbers / code words would be embedded without altering the underlying story too much. And they could probably get BBC / whatever station to air it. It would be a bit less inconspicuous to liste…
It's called steganography, and it's a centuries if not millennia old technique.
I wonder why they keep using a dedicated numbers station instead of embedding the code in a regular radio broadcast on a traditional channel? I'm sure that even before LLMs one could find a way to create a story where certain numbers / code words would be embedded without altering the underlying story too much. And they could probably get BBC / whatever station to air it. It would be a bit less inconspicuous to liste…
Shortwave propagates better and also its just a one time pad being distributed so embedding doesn't matter as much as long as the one time pad is longer than the intended message to send. There is no way to decrypt it because once you encrypt a message using a one time pad it is impossible to decrypt without the exact one time pad that it was encrypted with.
For intelligence agencies, it is important to communicate with their spies to gather intelligence,” says John Sipher, a former US intelligence officer Is Sipher really his name. Nominative determinism strikes again. Sifr is also a valid word both in Farsi, I think. An Ironic and cruel pun.
More so if you know the etymology, https://www.etymonline.com/word/cipher (Al Jabr, the translator of Indian Mathematical texts was a Persian IIRC)
The location of this transmitter is a shortwave transmission facility within a US military base in Böblingen, 15 km southwest of Stuttgart, Germany. The coordinates: 48°41'26"N 9°05'12"E https://www.google.com/maps/place/48%C2%B041'26.0%22N+9%C2%B...
So...
If its being broadcast by the US military or the CIA, why Persian?
Because they're issueing activation orders to their network of ani-regime operatives inside Iran? Who, mysteriously for spies, only know that language?
Or because they want the Iranian government to think that? And a numbers station broadcasting in - unusually - Persian, is an easy way to get the attention of the Iranians?
I'm thinking the latter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but that would be a benefit, I would think. Most old cars come with an AM/FM radio, most cheap phones now have FM (? I don't know about AM, don't think so) and so on. So it would be more inconspicuous to listen to a regular radio than to a special station on special hardware. You don't even have to broadcast from EU, you could probably purchase some Radio Quatar Classical Rock or something :)
Radios capable of receiving shortwave bands aren't exactly rare among normal people. They're not really "special hardware". Just owning one would not be inherently suspicious. What would be suspicious is being in possession of the one-time pad needed to decode the messages, regardless of which media those messages are transmitted through. For the record, "numbers stations" can be found in nearly every communication m…
Would it though?
All you need is something with sufficient entropy. I reckon you could do a "good enough" job with any plausible-looking data you have lying around on your hard disk right now. Say for example if you took a couple of sha256s of any random image you might post on social media, you'd have quite a lot of key right there.
The Conet Project is an interesting listen -- very analogue, Cold War-ish, and a bit sinister. Seems to be available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project
Better source: https://www.rferl.org/a/mystery-numbers-station-persian-sign...
I wonder why they keep using a dedicated numbers station instead of embedding the code in a regular radio broadcast on a traditional channel? I'm sure that even before LLMs one could find a way to create a story where certain numbers / code words would be embedded without altering the underlying story too much. And they could probably get BBC / whatever station to air it. It would be a bit less inconspicuous to liste…
I wonder why they keep using a dedicated numbers station instead of embedding the code in a regular radio broadcast on a traditional channel? I'm sure that even before LLMs one could find a way to create a story where certain numbers / code words would be embedded without altering the underlying story too much. And they could probably get BBC / whatever station to air it. It would be a bit less inconspicuous to liste…
Shortwave propagates better and also its just a one time pad being distributed so embedding doesn't matter as much as long as the one time pad is longer than the intended message to send. There is no way to decrypt it because once you encrypt a message using a one time pad it is impossible to decrypt without the exact one time pad that it was encrypted with.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/wall-street-tries-shortwave-radio-...