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Spooks in the Wire
Salon is running a cool article about numbers stations - shortwave radio stations that broadcast encrypted messages to spies worldwide. I hadn't known about this, though it makes sense if you think about it - the U.S. government uses a similar scheme to communicate with nuclear subs at sea. The article includes links to a site which has .mp3 recordings of some of the transmissions. Spooky. They've even transcribed some messages for a possible crack attempt, though if the men in black are truly using one-time pads this seems (ahem) unlikely to succeed.
Numbers stations on shortwave have been active
for decades now. A lot of speculation has always
gone around regarding where they are coming from.
Years ago, the prevailing opinion was that they
were North-Korean spy stations broadcasting data
to field agents.
Shortwave listeners have always been very
interested in these spooky stations. There is
an organisation called World Utilitity Network
(WUN for short) and they publish a newletter every
week with this kind of information. It can be
found at http://www.wunclub.com/. For the
un-initiated: with the term utility station we
mean shortwave radio (30 MHz) users that are not
amateur radio operators.
There are many more resources out there on the
web. Without any doubt, they are rather exciting
to listen to. Sadly, the current tendency is that
shortwave communication is phases out by a lot of
these organisations in favor of satellite communications.