The spirit of Black August moves through centuries of Black, Indian, and multicultural resistance.
It is an emblem of the spirit of freedom.
It is a long, smoldering spark of the fire in the hearts of a people, hearts burning and yearning for freedom.
These commentaries are produced by Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
You've been listening to Free Speech Radio News from KPFK in L.A., I'm Marta Bogado.
And this is radio station WBAI New York, where the time is 7 o'clock, and that means it's time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Fundidly bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Fundidly boo!
Fundidly boo!
And good evening to everybody, the program is Off the Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening.
Joined tonight by Mike.
Hi.
Redbird.
Evening.
Jim.
Nabaz Tag.
Oh, wait a minute, why is your mic not working?
Testing, testing.
Okay, hold on, you're not up loud enough, go ahead.
Testing, testing.
All right.
That's horrible.
Nabaz Tag, as I said.
And we're joined by Notkevin.
Hello.
That's the name you're going to go by, huh, Notkevin?
Sure, why not?
All right, well, you know, we don't want to confuse people thinking that you're the other Kevin, the real Kevin.
So you could be, you could be Notkevin.
The imaginary Kevin.
I'm more confused than ever.
Yeah, well, I think that's the point.
And of course, Bernie S. joins us down there in Philadelphia.
My microphone is working better than usual.
You do sound better, you sound like you're talking to us in the 1980s, why is that?
I'm on an analog phone.
An analog phone, is that the newest thing?
An analog wired phone.
Isn't it amazing how much better we sound with old technology?
Now, wait a minute.
I want in on this.
How do I sign up for something that's analog and wired?
That's what I want.
It's hard these days, but if you really search and beat the bushes, you can actually find a company that will connect a wire to a telephone.
What do you mean, beat the bushes?
What kind of political remark is that?
This is not, for the Secret Service agents who I'm sure are listening again, this is not a threat against the president.
Didn't some guy wind up in prison for saying he was going to go bush-burning or something?
I do recall something like that.
Yeah, so you have to be careful.
I should, you're right.
Beating bushes.
Well, okay, fine.
So, apart from all that, you're talking to us on a wired line.
Yes.
And it does sound so much better.
I'm sure.
Wow.
Compared to a Sprint or whatever other wireless carrier I'm normally on.
But if somebody wanted to sign up, it would be difficult, wouldn't it?
It would be, but you'd have to wait.
There's a waiting period, and there's physical issues involved.
But it can be less expensive than a cellular phone, and it has certain advantages.
How long can the wire be?
It can be kilometers.
Wow.
But you can actually reach out to any number on the public switch telephone network on the planet, which is pretty amazing.
It is.
It really is.
And both wired and wireless phones you can reach with this technology.
The fact of the matter is that calls from Zimbabwe sound better now than calls from New York if one is on a wired line and one is on a wireless line.
It's true.
But enough about this.
We have some important news to cover.
In fact, a breaking story, which I'm sure of all listeners are concerned about.
And as a radio station, we have a public service message to sort of a responsibility to get you all the information as it comes in, as we are, in fact, a source of information.
God help you.
Yes, a 60-year-old woman was successfully restrained on an airline coming over to the United States and tied up by fellow passengers.
And apparently she had boarded the airplane with facial cream and was fortunately stopped.
The plane was accompanied by fighter jets that made it land in Boston instead of, I think, it was going to New York or Washington, D.C.
And, yeah, she was taken off the plane.
We got another terrorist.
Wait, wait, wait.
Please tell me you're exaggerating.
No, this is actually what happened.
This really did happen.
Wait a minute.
I can believe that they were very upset with the facial cream.
I can believe the fighter jets.
But please don't tell me she was tied up because of this.
The passengers didn't want to take any chances.
You're kidding me.
No.
Look, this is a time of war, Jim.
We have to be careful.
Better to err on the side of safety than on the side of danger.
You know, aside from the fact that I would never do that.
Aside from the fact that I would expect to be locked up by the time I got home, I would say it's time for armed insurrection.
Well, maybe it's that kind of sentiment that's making people get tied up because maybe she was calling for that, too, on the airplane there with her facial cream.
You never know.
Now, I heard a vicious rumor earlier that she may have also had a screwdriver.
No, but I didn't hear that one.
She did.
She paid for the screwdriver and drank it all down in one gulp, I'm sure.
What I heard, though, was from the Boston authorities, the Boston airport authorities, was that there was a link to Al-Qaeda, and they later retracted that statement.
Crisis.
Al-Qaeda and her husband named Al?
Maybe.
There could have been something like that, but I don't know.
But, Bernie, this brings to mind the other case.
Oh, by the way, I saw somebody walking into this building with a bottle of water.
I just wanted to point that out.
It was you.
It's a sports drink.
You've got a sports drink on you.
No, it's just a sports drink bottle.
Oh, yeah, right.
I know that technically it's banned from the cockpit here, the radio station here, the studio.
But I'll drink from it to prove that it's not...
Well, it's still...
No, I heard that the actual ingredients of the sports drink were somehow volatile mixed with the right chemicals.
Well, that's true.
Oxygen is an oxidizing agent.
You can rust the plane.
Years ago...
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Years ago, there was a guy, I can't remember his name, I think his last name was Perdue, just like the Indiana engineering school.
And there were videos on the net.
I was going to say the chicken guy, but that's me.
Classic videos of him pouring liquid oxygen on a grill that had been off for 12 hours and it just goes into nothingness.
Well, anyway, oxygen is, by definition, an oxidizing agent.
And, of course, hydrogen, the other component of water, is highly explosive.
So, obviously, water, H2O, hydrogen dioxide, deadly.
And aren't we made up mostly of water?
The entities that are speaking right now, we're comprised of a lot of water.
I think we're the dangers.
Keep us off the planes and everything will be all right.
But why is it?
Why is it that only airplanes are the ones that are subjected to this?
I could walk into a bus with a bottle of water, no one's going to say anything.
And I can use an iPod too, and a cell phone.
But you could only kill 30 or 60 people on a bus.
Well, what if it's passing another bus?
I don't know.
Anyway, Bernie, the story about the cell phones.
Why don't you give us a brief summation of what that was all about?
The college students with 1,000 cell phones in their van?
I think there were two different cases, weren't there?
It's getting hard to keep track of all these.
But that's my favorite one.
There were some college students in the town of Caro, Michigan, C-A-R-O,
that went to one of these big box stores and just bought a whole bunch of cell phones.
They were on a special sale.
You could only buy a few of them at a time,
but they just kept going back in line and buying more and more of them.
And they didn't buy that many there.
They bought, I don't know, a few dozen there.
And somebody got suspicious, thinking, oh, that's suspicious.
And they called the police, and the police intercepted them in their van,
and they were arrested on terrorism charges
because the police chief there said cell phones can be used as detonators.
Absolutely.
Well, I just want to look back at the story as it came out.
This was only on the 13th, a few days ago.
They were arraigned on Saturday,
and the statement that the Tuscola County prosecutor said at the time,
I believe these are the same people,
he said that the targeted issue in this case was the Mackinac Bridge.
That is what we have information on.
The bridge is five miles long, connects Michigan's upper and lower peninsulas.
And apparently a photograph was found of the bridge on their cell phone or something like that.
Now, I was reading this story back then, and I was looking for the evidence.
Where was the actual evidence that, yeah, they had a lot of cell phones,
and they took a picture of a bridge, and they're Palestinian-American, but is that it?
Yes.
That's Mackinac Bridge, actually.
It's a beautiful bridge. I've driven across it myself.
And it's tempting to, you know, you almost can't not take a picture of it.
It's just an amazing sight.
So that's not surprising in and of itself.
But having a thousand cell phones, clearly, you know, they were going to blow it up.
Well, what was most interesting that I found about this is that
some law enforcement agents in the early stages of this
mentioned that not only could the cell phones be used as timing devices for improvised explosives,
but the batteries could be made into methamphetamines,
so they could make more money for terrorist purposes.
Oh, my God.
Well, whatever happened to the good old days where you just blew things up, you know?
You didn't need cell phones.
You didn't need detonators with remote timers and things like that.
You didn't need all this fancy-schmancy stuff.
The best part about this story, though, is that the two brothers arrested in this case,
their last name is Othman, spelled O-T-H-M-A-N,
and, of course, the initials for Off the Hook are O-T-H.
I just thought that was kind of neat.
But they've been released now, right?
Yes, they've been released.
The police couldn't, had to save face somehow and leave some charge standing,
which was that they gave false information.
They allegedly didn't fully identify themselves when they were apprehended.
But according to all reports, they were very cooperative in the investigation
and continued to say that these were phones they were purchasing on sale for resale in another state.
I think they were going to Texas or somewhere.
Yeah.
Where these prepaid cell phones can be sold for, say, $30.
So, you know, these are college students on their summer break trying to be enterprising
and buy something in one market.
It's a classic business situation called arbitrage,
where you can find the difference in pricing between two markets and capitalize on it.
And I think these kids are pretty smart.
But apparently the smart police detective in Carroll, Michigan,
by the way, his telephone number is David Matlin, he's a police chief.
It's area code 989-673-2402.
It would be interesting to find out exactly how cell phones can be used as a detonator.
And if you happen to have a cell phone, you might want to turn yourself in for having something that dangerous.
Likewise, the prosecutor, Mark Green, who claimed that cell phones can be used to make methamphetamine,
Mark Green can be reached at area code 989-672-3900,
because that would be a really interesting story to find out from him
how cell phones can be used to make methamphetamine.
Well, I don't know if he'll give you a how-to, but maybe he will have some interesting answers to questions.
Here's the thing.
If you were going to blow up the bridge and you were going to use a cell phone,
I think you would need like one cell phone, maybe two cell phones, one as a backup,
maybe a few extra to actually communicate with.
I'm sure it wouldn't add up to a dozen cell phones.
Oh, no.
A thousand cell phones.
Five-mile-long bridge.
You want an explosion every couple of feet to make sure that baby comes down.
Yeah, but wouldn't one explosion detonate?
That's how it works on the cartoons.
You learn all your explosives technology from cartoons.
Of course.
That's why your stuff doesn't work.
Not all my stuff doesn't work, but we won't get into that on the air.
Yeah, so, okay, I guess they're off the hook.
But I think the point is you'd have to have more explosives than cell phones to blow up a bridge.
Yeah, probably.
And a thousand cell phones, are they targeting a thousand bridges?
That's the question on everybody's mind.
A thousand points of light.
Okay.
Speaking of Palestinians,
calls made to the Palestinian territories will now carry their own designation
rather than appearing on AT&T's bills as calls to Israel.
AT&T is putting its official stamp on the West Bank and Gaza by changing its phone bills,
a move driven more by economics than politics.
Long-distance charges for dialing the Palestinian-run lands will carry their own designation
rather than appearing as calls to Israel.
The company, didn't I just say that?
The company is also raising the rates sharply for calling the West Bank and Gaza,
citing the rising fees AT&T needs to pay other carriers in that region to connect calls.
That comes from the Palestine Press Agency.
Here's what I don't understand.
Palestine has its own country code.
Why was it ever printed as Israel?
Well, apparently it was.
I think the country code may not matter all that much,
might just have been an extension.
It's very strange.
It is weird.
We had a listener write in to tell us how to listen to the so-called banned television station called Al Manar.
And I'd like to see if there's any real evidence that this is in fact banned in the United States.
We said that last week.
We read that from a story.
I'll get you the evidence.
Yeah, I'd like to.
It's in the list of foreign terrorist organizations.
So that means we can't watch their TV shows?
I guess. It's very strange.
And so if I connect to the URL I'm about to give you,
would I be breaking the law if I was in the United States when I did it?
Well, you're not allowed to support them is the law,
and it's unclear to me if watching their television show counts as supporting them.
Well, our listeners support us by listening.
Yes.
No, if you don't send them a check,
and you don't pay subscriber fees to them,
and you don't buy anything from any of their advertisers...
What if I click on one of their ads?
That's what I was just about to say.
If you don't buy anything from their advertisers...
I was doing that a lot before.
Whoops.
Anyway, Julius writes in with this information.
http://www.itv.com/.television/.117.htm
The 50K1 works at the time of writing this email,
and I tested it today, and sure enough, it does.
And I was watching it for a little while,
and I couldn't, of course, understand anything they were saying.
There was a lot of Hezbollah, the word they were saying,
and they seemed kind of angry and agitated.
Other than that, I really couldn't make out most of it,
but it was interesting.
Okay, so that's the update there.
And of course, you can write to us,
http://oth.2600.com/.
If you have any particular tips or information like that.
Bernie, do you have anything else down there
before we switch to another feature?
Yeah, I just wanted to mention for our listeners
that the country code, the international dialing code
for the Palestinian Authority is 970.
And their own internet domain, too,
top-level domain is .ps.
Okay.
Did you guys have anything to say
about the crazy security threat alert condition levels
that took place about a week ago?
We were at the absolute highest.
We were at red, but only,
and I didn't know you could do this,
only for certain vehicles in the air,
ones coming from the UK to the US.
I had no idea that you could have different color.
I wonder if this room could be classified as green, maybe,
because we feel totally safe here.
I was thinking about that,
and I was thinking that if you flew from London,
you would start out red,
you'd get to New York City, which would be orange,
you'd get to JFK and walk out.
You're in New York City, it's orange.
And if you quickly got to, say, Nassau County,
which is literally borders part of JFK Airport,
you would be down to what's below orange.
We've never been there.
Oh, it's yellow, right?
Yellow.
Okay, we've been there.
So in the space of a few minutes, technically,
you would go through three different color levels.
It's like going through three states in a couple of minutes
or standing in three states at the same time.
Which isn't as much fun as you make it out to be.
Standing is much more fun.
It's like flying through a rainbow.
Flying through a rainbow.
And we can't have this room green or whatever
because Jim still has his Gatorade bottle out.
Yeah, well, the thing is, England went,
they just started this new categorization
about a week ago,
and sure enough, they got to use it immediately.
And they were at severe, which is the highest,
and I think the whole country was at severe.
And what that means is a terrorist act is imminent.
Not a possibility, but definite.
It's going to happen soon.
And it didn't.
And a lot of people feel really cheated now.
No, it's really bizarre.
A lot of people are questioning the timing
and what exactly it means.
And in light of this whole crazy cell phone thing
and the facial cream scandal and all that,
you got to wonder just how much of this is put on for show.
I guess we'll find out
when they finally charge these guys or something.
Okay, we have a special feature tonight
with some special guests.
And to give you kind of a hint
as to what it is we're going to be talking about.
Yes, it's our old friends,
the speaking numbers.
And we've played messages like this many times.
This is excerpts from one of them.
And basically, it took place
when parties unknown put together a strange recording.
And what was on that strange recording?
Nobody really knew.
Just a bunch of numbers being repeated over and over again.
Numbers would show up in Craigslist
with a particular coded phrase.
And it was driving everybody insane, including us.
Well, the people who actually did this,
who were responsible for this,
came forward at DEF CON a couple of weeks ago.
And it was all a big experiment.
Joining us on the line now from Los Angeles,
I believe we have three people.
We have Vidyut. Are you there?
Hi, Emmanuel. How are you doing?
Good.
I'm afraid the other two haven't joined me yet.
Oh, okay.
I was having a problem with his phone
and Datagram apparently forgot to charge his.
So it looks like it's just me for the moment.
Oh, you guys really are geeks, aren't you?
Yeah, you can tell how organized we are.
Wow, that's great.
Okay, well, why don't you just give us an outline
as to how did this all come about?
One day you were just sitting around
looking for ways to drive people like us crazy or what?
Oh, yeah, basically.
Actually, the way it started,
we were having a talk at LA 2600
about the history of number stations.
Datagram gave it.
And afterwards, we all wandered outside
and the conversation turned to the Asterix PBX.
And Strom and Datagram had their heads together
and suddenly they turned to us and said,
hey, I wonder if we could do a number station by phone.
And that's pretty much where the idea came from.
Then we decided at that moment
we were going to do a number station by phone.
We just then had to come up with a good reason why.
Uh-huh.
Now, had you listened to number stations on Shortwave before?
Oh, yes.
We were all big, big fans of the Conet Project and whatnot.
Uh-huh.
Wow.
So the first thing you did was you...
Well, who came up with the idea to put an ad in Craigslist?
Well, actually, if you read our website,
you'll get a lot of history
and you can see that we weren't terribly organized at the beginning.
The very first message was mostly put together by Strom.
He's the one, I believe, who had the idea to put things up on Craigslist.
He also coined the term Mindfrowline.
And he also picked the text to put inside the message
as well as the text that was posted on Craigslist.
Uh-huh.
Yeah, and that Mindfrowline thing,
that convinced many people
that we're dealing with some kind of international espionage here,
some kind of secret message being passed between double agents.
And it just added so much intrigue.
And every couple of weeks,
another message would appear in a different edition of Craigslist.
Like the first one appeared where?
Was it New York?
Yes, I believe New York was the first one.
And then after that, it appeared in San Francisco.
Yeah, it popped around all over the country
and people were scanning, looking for these things.
And, wow, so what was the idea?
What did you want people to do?
Well, the original idea, what we wanted to happen,
was we were hoping we could get enough interest into these
that people would start to try to attack them in new and different ways.
There's been a lot of crypto challenges online,
things like alternative real-life games, etc., etc.
What we hope to do is we hope to encourage someone
to try to crack these from the point of view of cracking a one-time pad,
which is what they were encrypted with.
And the classic way of attacking a one-time pad is to look for a repeated key.
So we were going to repeat the key on two very short messages,
on the very first and on the very last.
We were hoping that someone would look for a key intersection or a key collision
and would be able to crack the messages that way.
As it turned out, that wasn't practical.
Okay, now for the benefit of the many grandmothers who listen to us
who might not have any idea what a one-time pad is,
can you give a very, I guess, simple explanation
as to how a message would be encoded in that fashion?
Well, okay, what you would use,
you would have some kind of relationship between your plain text and a one-time pad.
The one-time pad being, say, a list of randomly generated numbers and letters.
In this case, if someone wants to go to our website,
they can get a BitTorrent to download their own Mind Frowling kit,
and in that, it has the code that generates these one-time pads.
So they can actually take a look and see how this is done.
What it does, each letter, when it's represented in ASCII, in binary,
it consists of eight bits.
You would take the eight bits for the letter that you want to encode,
and then you would take the eight bits for the corresponding letter in the one-time pad,
and you would perform a XOR on them,
and that's an exclusive OR operator in binary.
And basically, that's just a fancy way of saying that if the bits are the same in both,
like if you have a zero up above and a zero down below, it's still a zero.
If they're different, like a one and a zero becomes a one,
and that becomes your ciphertext.
So you would convert that binary back into ASCII,
and that's what would be read out, in this case, in decimal form by our number station.
Okay, now, the one-time pad, if this were a message between spies, say,
the other person would have to have a copy of that, right?
Yes, yes. In fact, one-time pads are considered mathematically unbreakable,
but the problem with them is the key distribution problem,
meaning that you would have to somehow securely move a pad from one place
to the person that you were going to talk to before you actually had the conversation.
This is why they're not normally used in practice.
And you're referring to literally a pad of paper with numbers on them?
It could be a pad of paper.
That's where the term originally came from, isn't it?
Yes, that's correct. That's where it originally came up.
And the idea was that intelligence agencies around the world
would broadcast groups of encoded numbers over a shortwave broadcast,
which field operatives in distant lands could covertly monitor
on an innocuous shortwave receiver, which are common in most parts of the world,
and nobody else could make sense of these messages except the intended target,
and using the one-time pad, the field operative or secret agent could decode the messages.
So that's where this all started decades and decades ago.
Of course, it's a big difference when you have to call a phone number to get the message,
because you're no longer passive then. You're actually taking part in that.
But I believe you guys demonstrated how that wouldn't even be necessary, right?
Yes. Actually, that came about almost accidentally.
When we were talking to the folks who run DEF CON about getting a position there to talk,
we had to come up with a smokescreen.
And our original experiment was mostly just to map the size and the organizational abilities
of the cryptographic community.
So we decided to come up with this smokescreen story
that really we were looking for a way to pass messages back and forth
without having to create a channel, without having other people pass your message for you.
And in retrospect, it turns out it actually did work that way,
even though it wasn't really what we intended to do.
I know one thing that really frustrated me.
The first message when it was posted, somebody made a mistake on one of the numbers,
and it just kept getting reposted everywhere.
So any chance of figuring it out would have been completely blown by that.
It's very interesting that you bring that up.
That was one of the things we brought up during our talk.
We made some observations about how the cryptographic community works,
and one of them was that in this case, in this instance dealing with us,
there was quite a bit of misinformation that was caused by simple accidents.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay, so you put out the first number, and then what, a couple of weeks later,
a second number came out?
Yes.
We had planned to release them maybe two weeks to a month in between,
and we were going to release the final one just prior to DEF CON.
That was our original plan.
Now, I understand we had something to do with messing that up a bit,
and we apologize for that, but keep in mind we had no idea what was going on.
Actually, I wanted to say something about that.
I will admit we were a little bit out of shape at the time.
However, after we thought about it for a while, something occurred to us,
and that was from your perspective as an outsider,
there was really only two things you could have thought about these messages,
the first being that it was spook stuff,
and you would never find out what the answer was anyway.
The second being is that maybe it was somebody's viral marketing campaign,
and who really cares if you screw that up?
Yes, everybody thought it was Google or something.
Exactly.
And so, you know, no hard feelings whatsoever.
Yes, it was fun.
But what were your feelings, though, before you knew it was us,
when another number came out and it wasn't you?
Pretty much we were stunned.
We had a few little copycats,
basically people creating mine frown line listings on Craigslist,
you know, posting their boss's phone number or something as a joke
so he'd get a million calls.
But when an actual number station popped up, we were stunned.
We never thought that would actually happen.
Now, Mike here is, of course, the brains behind that.
Mike, how hard was it for you to put that together?
It's not that hard.
As I'm sure you guys know, once you have the idea to construct these,
and especially since I was able to steal the audio from you,
I didn't have to go out and record it,
the actual construction of the number station,
if you know asterisk, really doesn't take that long.
Is that how you guys put it together each time?
Yeah, actually, Strom put it together using asterisk,
running a very simple script.
It's a Perl script, actually,
that uses the Perl Crypt OTP package to handle the encryption.
And I think the whole thing is about 15 lines of code.
It's actually quite simple.
Wow.
Well, we're speaking with Vidyut from Los Angeles,
who's part of Project Evil,
the people behind the strange number stations
we've been reporting on since spring.
You can go to their website, www.projectevil.org,
and there's all kinds of information there,
as well as information on how you can do this yourself.
I'd like to just play a little bit of audio
from the way the station sounded.
Not station, but the phone number.
When you would call the number, you would hear opening music,
and that music, of course, would close it as well.
And in between, you would hear various digits.
And what this is, what we put together here,
is just basically all the digits in a row, 0 through 9,
just so you can hear what the voices sound like.
And then we're going to talk about how those voices were obtained.
🎵
Group zero.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.
Okay.
Those are basically the voices that we were being driven mad with for a few months. I
got to tell you I
Think most people would have come up with the idea to just simply use a computer-generated voice synthesizer or something like that
The voices that you found you actually found in a way, I guess none of us expected, but they sounded so
Creepy and disembodied and it really it was like watching an episode of lost
Yeah, this is one of my favorite parts of the whole project actually was getting these voices
That's actually the beauty that is Strom Carlson and his very weird mind
Strom realized that you call random people on the phone and you just say something to them
For example, you just repeat the number one over and over again one one one
Eventually, they'll say it back to you to get you to say something different. And so this is exactly what he did
He called people on on Craigslist who were offering certain
Let's just say intimate personal services in their ads
And he would just repeat numbers to them over and over again
Until they repeated the number back to him and most people would do that. They wouldn't just hang up
Apparently he had I think he said he had a 60% success rate
Well now there's we're gonna actually play you guys you guys were kind enough to actually dig up the the audio
Yes, this is driving me crazy because a lot of people are into the cryptology and all that
I was into how you actually got the numbers together and and what that phone call was like
So, uh-oh
Do we lose anybody? Oh, we lost somebody Bernie. Are you still there?
Okay, we're gonna have to call him right back. Why don't you guys confer for a minute?
Yeah, nice Jim anything else
Yeah, there's a there's one site focusing on death. Not that that's news
but this is
by the founder of monster.com eons.com
Eons
Among other features. It has a database of obituaries to which you can add photos and comments
It has interactive games to build your brain strength news on entertainment and hobbies for older people a longevity
Calculator and most interesting a function that will send out alerts to your friends when you die
Eons
Eons.com that's a handy thing for all of us in the future. I hope and
Emanuel is punching away numbers frantically. I have a press release here from the New York Civil Liberties Union. This is from last week
They are suing the New York City Police Department over their treatment of photographers and filmmakers. And this is a
Something we've talked about in the past on this show
Where the police department really likes to harass people who take pictures of bridges and all kinds of other things and
So now the New York Civil Liberties Union is suing the city over that. So hopefully that lawsuit will turn out well
We have them back. Yeah, we got him back. There was a momentary glitch. Apparently we said something sensitive and the government
Okay, you guys are back yes screws joined us now screw
Okay, I'm actually somewhere where I'm not in my car with no air conditioning in the middle of the desert right now
So hopefully I can actually do that. Oh good good. And just just for the benefit of our listeners who might be offended by the name
It's not spelled
SK, you know the bad way. It's spelled skr. Oh, so don't be offended
Okay, so we were talking about
The the actual numbers we're about to play the audio from the from the phone calls now video you were telling us
What I just wanted to mention so that your audience will understand when they hear this
Asterix records incoming and outgoing audio streams separately and what they're going to hear here is just the incoming audio
Due to a hard drive crash. We lost the outgoing audio, unfortunately
So they're going to have to imagine in their own minds listening in and hearing
Strom repeat the numbers over and over again to these people
Okay, and I've got a couple of questions about about a couple of conversations, too
So let's listen to the way the numbers were actually recorded with the exception of zero and a little bit of history here
Oh
Do you want me here you
Wish tree. I
Don't know
Hi there, you've reached three six four
I'm not around to take your call right now. But if you leave me a message, I'll get back to you as soon as possible
Hello five five what
Hello, okay
How's it going, huh
Six
Hello, yes. Hello. How you doing?
This is Kevin
Seven
Hello
Hello
Hey
What nine
Okay. Oh
That's awesome as something else what we were just listening to is how these guys got the actual numbers to use on their secret
number recording a couple of questions
Well, first of all in the analysis that was going on in the months before we figured or you told us what was going on
We never would have figured it out. Otherwise
People said there was somebody talking while someone said the one and of course that turned out to be a TV set in the background
Which is I thought pretty funny and I don't know if you could hear this
There was dialogue being played in the background one of that one of the pieces of one of the phrases was the computers are down
You want to listen to that carefully? It's really it's funny
The person who said three though. It really sounded like he was saying P didn't it? Yes, I think it did
Yeah, you know, it does a little bit
I think what it comes down to is the guy has a pretty heavy Asian accent and he to me to my ear
It sounds more like a tree TRE
But I can see how it could be P as well, which is far more amusing anyway
I was very happy to to hear the guy say six and realize it wasn't my voice because some people thought it was including me
For a little bit, but that was kind of spooky. That was scary when I thought it might be my voice used there
But he seemed to be having a conversation. Were you actually talking to him?
No, all Strom did was repeat numbers to them over and over again, but he was saying hi. How you doing? What's up?
Yeah, yeah
I think it has more to do with the nature of the personal services the guy was attempting to sell on
Saying yeah, it kind of sounded like we caught him in the middle of shall we say brokering another deal?
They're all sorts of
conclusions you can make based on this how people react when you just speak numbers to them over the phone what people do when
They come up come across something crazy like this and how the community reacts. Yes, Bernie
I just want to mention that the background noise is a is
Reminiscent of some of the clues that
That number stations enthusiasts try to pick up on
oftentimes these occasionally these are these shortwave broadcasts of
Covert number stations will have some other audio in the background which is unintended by the broadcaster
sometimes it's a faint audio of
Radio Havana for instance on the Cuban number station sometimes they get their audio mixed up in the studios
Sometimes there's other little sounds going on in the background and and number stations and do you see these on these little clues to try?
to figure out where these broadcasts are originating from so this is the same sort of
Clues that were even unintentional
With this experiment or reminiscent of what what real number stations enthusiasts do with their with actual numbers broadcast except
We got absolutely nowhere trying to figure that out trying to see where these background noises were anything like that Jim
Did you guys ever think of calling these people back and explaining what their voices are used for
To be honest with you. I don't think we actually kept records of the numbers
Be amusing to see if they if any of them actually knew about what was going on. Well
You said they were all offering
sexually oriented services, right
You could probably post in Craigslist in the sexually oriented column saying hi
If you got a strange phone call where we just repeated numbers because you really want to maintain contact with those people
No, no, I think it's just fair. You've you've used them for your own purposes. You should at least explain to them. Why I
Don't think they're staying up nights worrying about
I repeat numbers, but I don't care what they say. No, so, okay
As far as apart from us almost messing up the whole thing were there any other
Milestones where something happened that was either a very positive thing or a very negative thing owned by Anson Crusher. Oh, yes
Yeah, we that was that was probably one of our favorite moments of the whole thing we the
Originally the group numbers that were read at the beginning were supposed to be the area code where the next message was going to appear
And we didn't think anyone would catch on to that until at least the third message
But the day the second message came out will Wheaton figured it out and we had to scramble to come up with new a new
set of group numbers
Well, I mean, yeah, actually I hate people something unslashed of it
I think a number of other people were saying the same thing because the first number showed up where in
In four one five right if we give will Wheaton credit because his was actually the first post we saw that said that right, right
No, but the first number was where it was in two and two. Yeah
Okay, and that one said group four one five and the second number was in four one five and yeah
I think at that point especially when dealing with phone freaks
They would say yeah, there's got to be a connection there and then that one was group six one seven
So we all thought the next one would be in six one seven
But I think it turned out to be in six seven eight or something, right?
Um, yeah from that point we actually moved it to the NSA
it wasn't Albuquerque it was Atlanta and
It was interesting because we did have a copycat going on at the time who actually posted a copycat station in six one seven in
Boston anticipating us. The only problem was when you actually called the number it went to the Federal Reserve Bank
Yeah, I remember that one. Yeah, that wasn't really it was just a copycat message not a copycat number station. Yeah
Yeah, we were the only copycats, right? There was nobody else that actually went to the trouble of piecing it all together and
You know, you were the only ones that really completely copycatted it except a lot of people said this sounds different
There's something different about this. We weren't able to completely replicate it
Well, I I think what that may have been down to excite
I talked to a couple people at DEF CON about this throughout the same theory and
What they said it was was you could tell the the audio quality was
At least a generation down. They said in some way it sounded inferior to the previous ones
Mm-hmm, and that you could tell that it had been somehow audited that it wasn't taken from the original samples
You hear that Mike? You've got a bit more work to do before you become a true spy
Well, you know, I did say on the air that the yeah, the recording that we had was a bit over modulated
So the play out sounded the same couldn't get access to the masters. Yeah, we should have called them up. Yeah
So any other any other milestones?
Really?
The biggest milestone probably for us was when homeland stupidity picked up the story and started running with it
Yeah, that was exciting for us because we really wanted to see how the community would organize and try to try to crack these codes
that was the sort of the purpose we put behind all of this and
Watching the thought and the care and just the sheer
Gargantuan amount of effort people put into trying to crack. It was
Phenomenal and he'll homeland stupidity becoming the hub for that just sort of organically growing was
fascinating to watch and you're referring to the site homeland stupidity dot us run by Michael Hampton one of our listeners and
Yeah, that's a great discussion going on there and now since you guys revealed everything at DEF CON and and in the weeks afterwards
Where all the messages were finally?
given out
What has been the reaction?
Overwhelmingly positive. I think we've only I think we've only had one person that's been extrude extremely bitter with us
And I think that guy's kind of quieted down now that he's realized that you know
Nobody forced you to participate in this and we're not going to take his death threat. Seriously
Yeah, well, he felt he was wasting a lot of time just trying to figure something out. That was actually I guess I don't know
I haven't paid a lot of attention to him
It's just he's been the one loud voice screaming at us ever since we we came came into the light
Wow, so but over overall that the reaction has been very positive
We've had a lot of people asking questions. We've had a lot of interest in the website sold a lot of t-shirts, you know
Yeah
Wow
So it's too bad. We don't have strong here. He's he's unreachable by phone today, right? He's yeah, unfortunately
He's out in the middle of nowhere camping with his family. Well, maybe not unfortunately, but unfortunately we can't talk to him, right?
Yeah, okay. Well, let's that's perfectly. Okay any other comments you want to leave us with I
Think I've covered just about everything. I wanted to say any advice for people that want to participate in
Things like this. Well, actually we can give you a little advice if anyone does whatever decide to run their own crypto challenge, which
We learned quite a bit from from our mistakes and we could pass this on. It's actually
something that we
talked about in our DEF CON talk
First off and this is the most important thing if anyone out there wants to run a challenge like this, please be organized
Don't don't do what we did and just make stuff up at the last second off the cuff
It yeah it and and then to put that sorry not to interrupt but put some perspective on that
You have to realize that when all of this started off
This really was sort of a thank you to the spooks list for basically, you know, it's basically our way of saying hey
You know, we're glad you guys are here. We were in the number stations to hear something fun
You know to go screw around with for a while and we never actually counted on the six degrees of bacon effect
membership of that list
Yeah
Well, that's the thing you guys you made the initial post to that list, right?
Yes, we did and then then Bernie brought it to our attention on off the hook and then just guess it went crazy from there
Mark I should point out that that post that one email is the only thing though that we did to promote this
We didn't make a single post in any online forms or anything else. It grew completely organically following that single email
Do you think if you hadn't done that that attention would have been given to it?
Probably not
Yeah
Yeah, I think it's highly unlikely and I mean unless
Unless a lot of number stations people troll the Craigslist personals
Yeah, which apparently a lot of people do because this was found very quickly each time and and also taken off very quickly each time
Yeah, just about there was a few that stayed up quite a long time and some that were gone the first day
It was really hard for us to gauge exactly why that happened
Emanuel yes
Go ahead Bernie
It might be worth mentioning that to our listeners who were interested in joining the spooks mailing list
just do a web search for spooks mailing list and
You'll find a really what I think is an intriguing
mailing list of individuals who
Who have great pleasure in in listening to shortwave numbers broadcasts and trying to figure out what they mean where they're from?
Traffic analysis patterns that sort of thing. It's a it's a bizarre hobby, but it's one that I enjoy
Yeah
Well, actually one one thing one thing in relation to that too is if you do search for it
They also have they sanitize the email addresses first, but they have all the old postings to the list archived publicly
So you can actually go back through and look at a couple years of the sort of stuff they've been covering
It's really interesting
cool
Okay, we've been speaking with video and screw from
Project evil org is there a way for people to get in touch with you?
It might have some questions about the employment with the NSA or something
Yeah, they can reach us through our website
There's a link on the contact page or they just send an email to mine frow line at project evil org and that'll come to us
I suppose you want to spell that
Me I n fr a u le I n at project evil org
Okay, guys, I want to thank you for for being on the show and also first for providing us with endless hours of fun
Okay, and hopefully you'll keep being imaginative and creative and call something even better
All right. Thanks guys and
Wow, you know, I'm glad it worked out this way
Imagine that we never found out what it was all about that would have that would really kind of
Kind of frustrated me for the rest of my my years. I'd still be losing sleep over it. Yeah. Yeah me too
Most of these stations the stations that are actually out there never get solved because they're
One-time pads and if you if you're not the person that the message is meant for it's not very likely you're gonna figure it out
Okay, we can take phone calls two one two two zero nine two nine hundred a couple of pieces of email with Mike
You have something. I just have this study that Human Rights Watch did
which is a bit more systematic than stuff we've done in the past where they went into these Chinese search engines and the
American search engines where both the Chinese and the American ones are owned by the same people
Yahoo China and google.cn and MSN China and they actually very systematically typed in all these
Phrases in Chinese for human rights lawyers and Tibet independence and they saw you know
Results that were in in the American version, but not the Chinese version and they you know, the special message
For example on Google it says in Chinese, of course
according to local laws regulations and policies a portion of the search results do not appear and
It's really shows how
this Chinese Internet censorship
Is done with the complicity and even help of these large American corporations
And one thing that they note in their report is that Yahoo China
does sort of much more censoring than Google and MSN and
Also that Yahoo has the most business dealings in China and they help to imprison people to and they help to imprison people
They're the only one of the group to actually have offices in China where they offer
email to residents, you know email specifically targeted for residents of China, so they
Get subpoenaed for you know political
Things that are crimes in China, but nowhere else that message that that you read from Google that says some of this has been
Isn't available. Is that something that anybody in China who is searching will see if they're searching
For a term, you know, they have three controls Microsoft
Dylon, which is a city in Paris and so the message doesn't appear on those three searches
But on all the other, you know human rights democracy torture that message
I'm just wondering if the Chinese authorities would be a little peeved that that message even shows up saying that they're not getting everything
I don't know on the they also did these searches on Baidu
Which is a completely Chinese search engine with no American owners that I know about and there's no message there
It's just things are missing. Okay, let's get to the phones because we have a bunch of phone calls and
Good evening. You're on the radio
Speak up, please. Yes
everyone
Program today. Well, we try yeah
well
you're succeeding because there's so many important things going on and not to say this is an important in a
Certain area, but I don't know where the area is, but you know, I'm a little concerned
I think I brought it up once before
Because as a goer to the LSB the WBA I local okay. We're not getting into station politics. I'm sorry
This happens every time that guy calls him. We have it wants to on the subject here. Good evening. You're on the radio
Hey, I'm just wondering. Is there any news on that August meeting?
What August meeting?
The one that they arrested the guy. Okay, we're we're trying to get a space for Steve Rambam
Who was arrested at before he gave his talk at Hope?
And we're trying to work something out for I believe next month Jody. Do you have something on this?
Hopefully we're gonna have a space at Stevens Institute after that
If I could talk I could explain Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken
We're working on that right now with one of the professors that works there
And if we get something going that that'll be the space and we're shooting for sometime in September. Okay, we'll see
If that's if that's doable, but the idea is to present the panel that was not able to be presented in full
and
Do it for free get video presentations out there just as a message that you can't shut us up
All right, and good evening. You're on the radio
Yes, speak up, please. Yes. What's on your mind? I
Want to ask about two things? Okay, make it fast
Okay
Ten years ago just repeating numbers over and over and over and over again
Okay, I don't know about that double CD that came out. Do you know what it's called?
I think the guy who used to do a show
Pretty much focused on
Substance it was a cure for drug addiction
Okay, played it and it was just something it wasn't as complicated as the thing you guys were just talking about
It was you know, someone saying two
Three
eight
Five and that cured drug addiction. No. Oh, but that's what I normally talked about
okay, and someone put out a double CD and
And it came from somewhere in Europe and no one knew what it was
Interesting. Well, okay, that's one thing. The second thing. Yeah, it's something I've called you years ago
Uh-huh back when your sidekick was a different guy who stopped being your sidekick for a while
Okay, we've had we've had many incarnations of the show. Yes, right and I asked you this question and you and your
Sidekick. Well, I would take two whole shows
Okay. Well with five minutes left. Hopefully you're not gonna ask us the same question, but go ahead
Well, I will ask you the same question and hope you will devote at least one show to it. Okay, what's the subject?
And here's the question and I'm not the only person I know who worries or wonders about okay, but you got to say it
When you get a website
Who gets the money
Who decides how much it costs to register that website?
Where does that money go?
Okay, you're talking about domain registration
Right who decides how much it costs who decides?
That the in-between people the go-betweens will be to collect that money
Where does it go? Where does it? What is it used for? Right? How is the price determined?
Well, of course, please get on this
Okay, I'm not sure how much how much interest we can maintain for a whole show
But we can tell you briefly that I can is the organization that oversees it much too many people should grin
There's a very complicated structure of registrars and
resellers and
The actual people that operate the databases and they all get you know
They're few dollars and it's really kind of a corrupt system
And it's it's it's something that I don't know if we'd be privy to all the information as far as where the money goes and how
Much I mean if you register something with GoDaddy for like, you know, five dollars or something like that
Obviously, it's being split differently than going through network solutions for $34.99
Well network solutions keeps like 30 of those
$34.99 it's not clear exactly what they do with it. That costs good, you know, GoDaddy can do it for $3
But it's weird and I'll give the caller credit for finding something. That is very weird and and kind of
Mysterious and probably bad
I guess if listeners out there have information on this that they'd like to share with us
They can write to us OTH at 2600 calm. Of course, you can snail mail us to off the hook care of WBA
I
120 Wall Street
10th floor Walter. He's gone. Okay, New York, New York
1005 you have one New York not both. I I still have the state. I'm sorry. I overstepped my bounds. Yeah. Yeah you did
All right. Let's take another phone call. Good evening. You're on the air
Speak up, please. Yes. Why aren't there any women's voices on this station? All right enough enough enough good evening
We need more lines so we can have less of the same people go ahead
Yes
Yes
She was claustrophobic, okay
Oh boy
But it just goes to show you how bad the security is if she walked out with the freaking hand cream
Well also today I heard a 12 year old in London was able to get past security without a passport
I don't think that's the biggest deal in the world
He went through security and was checked for all the usual stuff
But got on a plane international plane to Portugal and didn't have a passport because nobody checked
He was running away ran right past security everything. He ran. Well, he went through security though, didn't he?
Yeah, he walked right past everybody. Hey, I've been listening your show for years
Upstate and I'm usually driving out of town. I love your show. It's fantastic. Thank you, and it's totally cool
It's I think I know you guys use the word geeks. It's amazing to hear geeks make this stuff. So freakin cool
So, uh, thanks a lot. Thanks. Thanks for listening. You know, I like those sentences. I don't have a butt in them
I thought there was a butt coming in that sentence
But hopefully it's interesting to the non geeks as well the people out there the grandmothers who listen because we want to make this stuff
Accessible we want people to understand what it's all about and that's what we've been trying to do here
Taking a phone call. Good evening. You're on the radio
Go ahead. Yes
Turn your mind. Hi, man
All the guys in the off-the-hook IRC say hi, okay. Hello IRC. All right. Um, I just wanted to
say something about that
those
Palestinian Americans that were arrested in Michigan in Michigan. Yes. Um, they live about an hour away
so it was on the local news where I was and
Apparently it wasn't just a thousand cell phones. They found they also found I think
$11,000 cash
Records of
Passenger lists and
Information about security checkpoints. That was a different group of people that was different group of people. There are two different instances. So
that means
That's what was reported but it's always interesting to follow these stories afterwards and make sure that what's reported initially is
Actually true or is at least followed up on because many times it's not I'm reading it off
Okay, can you send us the link to the article and we'll go over it next week during the show
There's a thing these media sites often get stuff wrong. I mean this woman they reported it
She had a note about al-qaeda and then it turned out that she didn't have any
People people panic people say all kinds of weird things. It's just the nature of humanity
I guess I don't know
Anyway, I want to thank everybody for for calling in for writing in and just for doing the things they do talks mentioning people tonight
Our address again OTH at 2600 comm
And we'll be back again next week with another exciting edition of off the hook until then
keep thinking as freely as the authorities will allow you to and
Let us know if you see anything strange if you see something
Email OTH good night
Oh
Oh
Oh
Oh
WBA I will soon choose members for the