Tag Archives: Numbers Stations

Estonian engineer drags UVB-76 numbers station into the Internet era

It seems there’s no shortage of interest in numbers stations these days. This article, from Wired magazine, Inside The Russian Short Wave Radio Enigma:

From a lonely rusted tower in a forest north of Moscow, a mysterious shortwave radio station transmitted day and night. For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps; after that, it switched to buzzes, generally between 21 and 34 per minute, each lasting roughly a second—a nasally foghorn blaring through a crackly ether. The signal was said to emanate from the grounds of a voyenni gorodok (mini military city) near the village of Povarovo, and very rarely, perhaps once every few weeks, the monotony was broken by a male voice reciting brief sequences of numbers and words, often strings of Russian names: “Anna, Nikolai, Ivan, Tatyana, Roman.” But the balance of the airtime was filled by a steady, almost maddening, series of inexplicable tones.

[…][A]feed of UVB-76 had been made available online (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/ff_uvb76/), cobbled together by an Estonian tech entrepreneur named Andrus Aaslaid, who has been enthralled by shortwave radio since the first grade. “Shortwave was an early form of the Internet,” says Aaslaid, who goes by the nickname Laid. “You dial in, and you never know what you’re going to listen to.” During one 24-hour period at the height of the Buzzer’s freak-out in August 2010, more than 41,000 people listened to Aaslaid’s feed; within months, tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, were visiting from the US, Russia, Britain, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Japan, Croatia, and elsewhere. By opening up UVB-76 to an online audience, Aaslaid had managed to take shortwave radio—one of the most niche hobbies imaginable—and rejuvenate it for the 21st century.

Today, the Buzzer’s fan base includes Kremlinologists, anarchists, hackers, installation artists, people who believe in extraterrestrials, a former Lithuanian minister of communications, and someone in Virginia who goes by the moniker Room641A, a reference to the alleged nerve center of a National Security Agency intercept facility at an AT&T office in San Francisco. (“I am interested in ‘listening,’” Room641A tells me by email. “All forms of it.”) All of them are mesmerized by this bewildering signal—now mostly buzzing, once again. They can’t help but ponder the significance of it, wondering about the purpose behind the pattern. No one knows for sure, which is both the worst and the best part of it.

Read the full 3 page article at Wired.com.

New to numbers stations? Check out our previous posts on the subject.

Also, check out UVB-76.net and listen to its live feed.

Archived BBC 4 documentary on Lincolnshire Poacher

Russian Numbers Changing?

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(Source: Gizmodo)

The bizarre, constant audio output of one particular mysterious Russian “Numbers Station” has changed, for the first time in 20 years. This might mean something bad is about to happen, or simply that someone finally remembered to switch tapes.

Click here to read the full Gizmodo post.

NPR Explores Numbers Stations

Slate Magazine explores how Russian spies used shortwave radio

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Slate:

It may seem like the digital era of spy technology has passed the Russians by. In the Washington Post, columnist Jeff Stein tittered that “the FBI must have been clapping its collective hands when it discovered the primitive radio techniques the Russians were using.” But they aren’t the only ones using short-wave radio for espionage. Great Britain has publicly admitted that its foreign intelligence agency, MI6, still uses “numbers” stations. And scientists have tracked numbers broadcasts to transmitters at government sites in Israel and (until they went silent in the late ’90s) the United States…

…The reason this dusty method is still ideal for espionage is that, even if you locate a spy station’s transmitter, you have no idea who’s tuning in across the hemisphere. Unlike telephone or Internet connections, receiving a radio signal leaves no fingerprint, no traceable phone connection, no IP address, and no other hint as to where the recipient might be.

Read the full article on Slate Magazine’s website and my previous post about the Russian spies who were recently headline news in the US.

Russian Agents Used Shortwave Radio to Receive Coded Messages

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Courtroom drawing of the suspects. Source: NY Times

Many of you may have noticed in the news yesterday that shortwave radio was used by the 11 Russian agents who were carrying out espionage within the United States. An article in the New York Times noted that one of the methods they used to communicate with the S.V.R. headquarters in Russia was via shortwave radio. The article mentioned that the agents would send “coded bursts of data” via shortwave transmitter.

The NY Times article failed to mention that the agents no doubt received messages from Russia via shortwave numbers stations.

So why is shortwave radio–a rather “low-tech” communications medium–used in modern espionage? The primary reason is it’s almost impossible to trace, thus messages leave little to no breadcrumbs for one to follow back to the source.

For decades, radio listeners have been trying to figure out from where numbers station broadcasts originate. They’ve had very little success. Indeed, the only breaks we’ve had have been when the broadcasting station makes a mistake. This has happened once with a numbers station message originating from Radio Havana Cuba. Listeners heard the faint sound of an RHC broadcast in the background–they were obviously hearing noise from across the studio hall.

Of course, another reason shortwave radio is used to relay secret messages is because it’s almost impossible to block. I wrote an article called “When shortwave radio is better than the Internet” that describes why this characteristic alone is an important reason to keep shortwave stations on the air around the world. No government or local authority can prevent you from listening to shortwave broadcasts–whether you’re a spy (like this lot) or simply living in a country where the folks in charge like to control your access to the news and information.

One small shortwave radio can break through all of that red tape.

UPDATE: For more information on how radio was used by these agents, check out the US Department of Justice’s website. In particular, check out pages 11-12 in this document. (Thanks to David Goren for this tip.)

For more information:

Read our previous post on numbers stations
Read our popular post: When shortwave radio is better than the Internet
Read Slate Mag’s article: 7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio. The shortwave radio signals that the alleged Russian spies were using are still surprisingly effective.
Read the Christian Science Monitor’s article: Russian spies: Top 5 old-school espionage technologies that still work

David Goren Explores Numbers Stations

September, 22 2011: Out of SWLing Post archives–David Goren Explores Numbers Stations:

David Goren, independent radio producer and shortwave enthusiast, has produced a radio documentary about numbers stations for The Lost and Found Sound Series. It has been recently picked up by L.A. Theatre Works.

towers What are numbers stations? I wish I knew–but if you’ve been listening to shortwave radio for long, you’ve undoubtedly stumbled upon these mysterious broadcasts of strings of supposedly meaningless numbers, too.

When I tune to a numbers station, I stop and listen for several minutes. Why? I’m not sure. Is it that I imagine a spy in some foreign country, huddled up to a radio with pen in hand, ready to decode a secret message on the back of an envelope? Or is it that I think I’m actually hearing the pulse of the shortwave bands over the ether? I’m not exactly sure, but I now know they’ve been part of the SWLing experience since the Cold War (or longer), and that I’m not alone in my curiosity about them.

David also produces and mixes his own fascinating brand of “sonic, aesthetic, and cultural resonances of the shortwave radio spectrum” at his site, Shortwaveology.

Listen to “Atencion: Seis Siete Tres Siete Cero: The Shortwave Numbers Mystery” by visiting Shortwaveology.