Sweet. Back when I had a shortwave, this was the coolest thing to find. It was always a treat to listen to things like military airstrips and stuff, but numbers stations are the coolest.

Oddly enough, I never heard them in Uzbekistan even though I listened to much more shortwave there than here. I don't think I fiddled around with the radio there though (only when I tried to get the Voice of the Islamic Republic Iran's English broadcasts for a laugh).

Those German BND recording are freaky.

Ace,

Good one.

May I suggest that you dig a bit deeper here.

You may be surprised by what you find.

I could get in a lot of trouble for this so kind of try to keep it quiet, but here's a sample of one of the pre-encryption documents.

I CAN NOT EVEN BELIEVE YURI TOLD NATASHA ABOUT ME AND IVAN STOP NOW NATASHA THINKS I AM A SLUT AND I AM SO NOT STOP I CRIED FOR TWO HOURS LAST NIGHT STOP AND WORST OF ALL SHE TURNED AROUND AND TOLD HER SPAZ BROTHER ABOUT IT SO NOW HE IS GIVING ME THESE COME ON LOOKS THAT ARE JUST SO PATHETIC STOP

More on the one time pad--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_time_pad

Wow.

Twelve years in DoD and around the intel guys, and I never heard of this until now.

Which leads me to speculate that if these are codes (they have to be, unless they're radical prog rock), they're diplomatic codes, embassy kinds of stuff.

It's an easy way to communicate that the whole world must like to use.

As for your samples, you're missing the obvious explanations Ace: 5-6-8 is without a doubt the voice of Mother, the computer in the movie Alien, preparing a countdown.

The tones? Extraterrestrials behind Devil's Tower.

And that final file, swedmusic.ra? Hell's Ice Cream Truck.

I don't recommend ordering the Rocket Pop.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

...I tried to get the Voice of the Islamic Republic Iran's English broadcasts for a laugh...

What kind of stuff did they broadcast, Nathan? The standard "We will bury the infidels" type boilerplate? I bet it was good for a larf.

Dude, stop posting those samples.

I'm alone, it's dark in my house, and I'm listening to a ghostly voice of a child counting down numbers like they're the seconds left in my life.

I'm really freaking out now.

Not so cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

When I was in the Army I was a voice intercept operator and this is the kind of stuff we listened to for hours on end (except in Vietnamese!). These are encrypted messages being passed, however, 99.9% of this stuff is simple, routine traffic. I haven't looked at all the links but simple triangulation would locate the transmitter so I doubt this is anything too 'spooky' (pun intended)

I think it's a bunch of left-behind ham radio guys who won't just get a blog. That's what I plan to do with my blog when the next big thing hits -- just eff with people.

Great stuff, Ace. I've always been fascinated by this.

BTW, on a related question, I've sometimes run across posts on Usenet that are obviously some kind of code. The posts are English words, so its not any kind of binary encoding. Rather it seems to be a meaningless concatenation of seemingly random English words. I have had them show up sometimes in Google searches, and they appeared to be nonsense. They seem to occur most often in extremist discussion groups or hate groups.

Has anyone else run across this, or know what it means?
I'll see if I can find an example.

Weird, wild stuff.

YES! Ha, ha, ha.

I had never even heard of these transmissions.

How eerie, and curious.

And, the 'tone' station sounds very 'Close Encounters'.

Cynical Nation, " . . . a meaningless concatenation of seemingly random English words.", ". . . occur most often in extremist discussion groups or hate groups".

I'm guessing that's DU or Andrew Sullivan.

This isn't a conspiracy, it's electroacoustic music. Tune in http://wkcr.org/ any Wednesday afternoon when Tony Coulter is the DJ; he plays this kind of stuff all the time. Admittedly it can be kind of creepy.

The origin of the gibberish in the newsgroups is well-known, and probably not steganographic. In the mid-90s, a malcontent created a program called, IIRC, "Newsagent," which would automatically flood newsgroups with completely random text ( think monkey-banging-on-keyboard). News admins developed filters for this stuff, and since then there's been an arms race between flooders and filterers, so the flood posts have gradually been getting closer to actual written text.

Don't get me wrong, guys, it's great that we're finally getting airplay again after all these years. But there's some loose shit going on here. Who transposed the digits in three fucking code groups in the lead-in to "XXQQ PACKAGE DELIVERED BEIRUT 200501071245UTC GGDD"? I'm on a data-integrity kick here. You get value for your paychecks; I expect value for my cryptography. There's only one important person on the 40-meter band, and that person is Mr. Paul Anka.

The guys get trenchcoats. That's just the fucking way it is.

Where's Boris?

That last one sounds like an ice-cream man in Hell.

Mr. Paul Anka,

I'm sorry I missed the cut-off on "READY READY FOXTROT TANGO SIX SIX THREE ONE OH SIX SIX FOUR."

That one's on me.

But I have an idea of how to fix it.

William Poundstone had a section on this stuff in one of his 'Big Secrets' books about fifteen years ago. Still worth reading if you've never seen them before, although a lot of places have copycatted his material.

That Irdial "Conet" album is probably best known for being sampled by Wilco on their album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" (the album itself is named after the sample). Irdial sued them for copyright infringement and Wilco paid up rather than getting into a legal battle (here's a Wired article). The woman in the sample is said to be a Mossad agent, although she has a British accent... who knows.

I recall Chalabi was in hot water because he and/or his men may have alerted Iran that the CIA had broken Iran's code (and they could listen in). I am wondering if this is related to shortwave codes.

See Washington Post:

http://www.washingtionpost.com/ wp-dyn/articles/A14020-2004Jun3.html

I doubt it. I think short wave is set up to communicate with agents placed in an enemy country.

I think the Iran thing involved its diplomatic codes or the codes sent from government to embassies.

It's pretty interesting what you can turn the most innocent things into if you have a "conspiracy" mindset. Not to burst anyone's bubble, if you knew a disc jockey or radio station engineer in Mexico or most any Latin American country they would explain to you that this how they communicate inside their networks to affiliaites, the messages are usually informing the affilates when they are able to cue local commercials and programming and when the syndicated programming will be come out of "black". Since many of those countries don't have reliable phone or mail service and they are using obsolete equipment they rely on this to keep things running. Without this system they'd lack the ability to make special announcements (like weather warnings) and change programming schedules without a great deal of lead time. Phones are about as reliable as Kerry campaign promises down here so they use the equipment and technonolgy they have in place to keep things running on time. Pretty simple when you think about it.

I'm with Chris H on this one. My e-mail spam often has the same sort of hidden text to get it through my filters. It fools the dumb computer i to thinking it's a real post and not spam when in fact it's randomly generated, if borderline grammatical, gibberish. So if someone wanted to overrun a hate site with spam, the gibberish probably works to get it around the filters.
____

Bullwinkle, that makes some sense, but why would the Latino radio personnel count in English?
___

Finally, has anyone seen The Longest Day, starring Mr. Paul Anka? There is a shortwave announcer in England who monotonously reads gibberish over and over again into the air, day in, day out, until one day she gives out the code word that tells the Resistance D-Day is on. Ah yes, imdb tells me the trigger phrase was "Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor".

They are English speaking third world countries too. Belize comes to mind. There's no reason to think that there aren't some stations here that still use it also. Several countries in Africa have large English speaking populations too. I hear this mostly at night here in Mexico, when what they used to call "skip" on the old CB radios works best. As far as the German, I'm guessing that a lot of the stations in the old East Germany still use it too.

The mention of racist (or white supremicist) groups sparked a memory of mine. The "Turner Diaries", a book detailing how neo-Nazis should and would take over the U.S. (using a fictional narrative as a cover), talked about using shortwave radio to allow the neo-Nazi terrorist cells to communicate and collaborate with each other.

It also talked about attacking the Pentagon by flying an explosive-filled plane into it.

I'm going to hide under my bed now.

ACE,

Like Bullwinkle, I don't want to burst your bubble, but the "heavily modulated child's voice" is probably an adult voice, just mistuned. It sounds like Single Side Band (a modulation that utilizes only half the sine wave either Upper or Lower to conserve bandwith.) If you tune into the wrong side of a freq, you get just the sort of ghost voice you hear on that track.

Still creepy, though...

While listening to these, especially the "ice cream truck and little kid one," I keep getting this vision of a huge, white bouncing ball and have a feeling that I'm a "prisoner" in my town... ;)

Kadine,

I think I put "child voice" in quotes, yes? I didn't think it was a child's voice, and neither did the site it came from. I think they said "child voice" because that's what it sort of sounds like.

Whoa -

Much later, I revisit this thread and discover that Ace has called me out.

He's absolutely right that I misread his original post. I was too focused on trying to describe my experience with strange-sounding single side band transmissions. "Child voice" is an extremely accurate description.

Sorry Ace.

Never heard of this kinda thing before...guess its a little weird but as far as being spooked by it, get over it lol. The last one sounds like music from the Magic Roundabout, For those who don't know it was an animated childrens show back in the 70's

These are Emergency Action Messages:

From a shortwave utility hobbyist's standpoint what are they? Park
your HF receiver (set to upper side band mode) on 15016.0 KHz, 13200.0 KHz,
11175.0 KHz (the most productive for day to day monitoring of the U.S.
military on HF), 8992.0 KHz (ideal for monitoring during North American
nights), 6739.0 Khz , 6712.0 KHz or 4724.0 Khz. Eventually you'll hear
ground stations of the USAF's HF-GCS (led by ANDREWS or OFFUTT or
MCCLELLAN, identified in the clear since 1992) broadcast one or more EAMs -
a six-character alpha-numeric string (known as the "preamble") read
phonetically, repeated three times, then followed by the same 6-character
string either by itself (as the entire message) or concatenated with
additional alpha-numeric characters to produce alpha-numeric strings that
total 28 characters (the most common length; 30-characters prior to 01 Oct
2000; 26-characters prior to 01 Oct 1998) or 22 characters (20 character
prior to 01 Oct 2000) or strings with character-counts that can extend into
the hundreds of characters (with the available character set universe
consisting of all 26-characters of the English alphabet plus the numerals
two, three, four, five, six and seven - with extremely rare exceptions there
are no zeros, ones, eights or nines heard in these strings). [Eventually
you might discover that this HF EAM activity is also heard on a group of HF
frequencies that are known as the ZULU frequencies utilized by communication
assets (both airborne and ground based) of the JCS and U.S. Strategic
Command (see the "Military Lists Area" column in any recent WUN
newsletter for the known frequencies) and on HF frequencies utilized by the
U.S. Navy during apparent exercises. However, since FY 2000 the ZULU
frequencies have become much less active with daily connectivity
communications to the point of silence.]

The above activity is heard daily, 7 days a week, 365 days a year,
year after year.