August 7, 2014 • 37 mins
If you think secretly coded messages sent via short wave radio is Cold War relic, think again. Chuck and Josh are here to dispel that myth, along with many others relating to numbers stations, including why they might still be operational.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this is oh
Jerry and this is sufficient eight. Can you say it
(00:22):
in German? You speak German? Don't even drive me? That's
why did I? Ah, Stephen? Now can you do that
in a little girl voice? No? You always make me
play st poly girl. I'm tired of it. Save Polly Girl. Now.
(00:44):
This is apparently even younger than the sat Polly Girl.
It's like a little girl and it was alive little
girl who in the Swedish rhapsody number station it was
a young a little girl reading out numbers and letters
in German, which makes it even creepier. This is a
very neat subject, so kudos to you for tossing this
(01:07):
one out there. Well, I've been waiting for it to publish.
I've seen it in the calendar coming up and coming up.
I'm like, come on and published. And I think it
published on Friday Tuesday, right out of the oven. And uh,
we're talking about it just as they are completing their decline,
so we are on top of this. Well, I think
(01:27):
that well, we'll get into it. I think that's what
makes it even more interesting is that it's still happening,
all right. Numbers stations. Numbers stations. Yeah, like you said,
number both words are a little clumsy, um, and number
of stations are. We should just come out and say
they're short wave radio transmissions or transmitters, making really weird
(01:55):
baffling is the best word for it. Transmissions and have
been doing so apparently since at least World War one.
Oh really, Yeah. Supposedly the first mention of a numbers station,
uh came from a German magazine. In World War One
and World War Two they were in full swing, sure,
(02:17):
but apparently they somehow popped up first round world War one,
which makes them some of the earliest short wave transmissions
in the world, because shortwave radio didn't come around, at
least into commercial use until about World War One. Was
a few years before that, if you'll remember correct. Yeah,
that's why I didn't even think that that was possible.
(02:38):
But like you said, world War two was when they
were full swing. They really peaked in the Cold War, um,
and they've been dying out slowly ever since. But I
think one of the neatest things is they are still
if you have a short wave radio, you can tune
into a frequency and here be one to seven eight.
(03:01):
You know, it's it's usually like some sort of tone
we should mention to Jerry of the future. Yeah, you're
supposed to leave that beep in because it's part of
the numbers stations. Yeah, we beat Jerry to signal when
we want something edited. But yeah, number station. It's not
always a beat, but will just have some sort of
Sometimes it's a bit of a song, yeah, like this
Swedish Rhapsody or the Lincolnshire Poacher of British English Ukish
(03:24):
folk song and uh. And the reason um that they
the transmission starts off with a tone or a beep
or a song is so you can it alerts like
here comes the transmission to in your station hone and
make sure you get some good reception because the secret
code is about to be revealed. And that's exactly what
(03:47):
everyone is pretty much in consensus on that what comes
after this and what is broadcast over these numbers stations
are secret codes. Yeah. Again for the Swedish Rhapsody station. Um,
it is a little girl in speaking in German, reading
(04:08):
numbers and letters random seemingly random numbers and letters, and
then the transmission is over and that happens like or
it used to happen. That's a defunct numbers station now,
but it happened on a fairly regular schedule. There's other ones.
The atension station is a woman saying attension and then
(04:29):
reading Spanish numbers and then repeating them over and over
again and then going on to the next set. And everybody.
No one can say for certain, but virtually everyone in
the world, from Cecil Adams that's straight dope to the
head of the UK's Trade and Industry Agency say these
(04:50):
are secret transmissions for spies. The whole basis of them
was for espionage. Yeah. And the reason why everyone is
speculating that that is absolutely the case, which almost certainly
it's like we said, is because no government to this
day has come forward and admitted this or own this.
(05:13):
It is all still technically speculation because you cannot point
to a factual statement. The closest we've ever come is
they finally got someone from the United Kingdom of spokesperson.
That was the dude from the Trade Agency the exact
quotas people should not be mystified by them they're not,
(05:36):
shall we say, for public consumption. Yeah, and that's the
only thing on record that any government has ever spoke
about what these transmissions are. Right, So, the the idea
that they are government transitions are the reason we have
to speculate, because the government has never claimed them. On
the flip side, the reason everyone thinks that they are
(05:56):
government backed claimed Stein transmissions is because these are pirate
radio frequencies, pirate radio transmitters. Yeah. My first thing was like,
just find one of these and look it up and
find out what the deal is. Yeah, you would think.
So they're totally unlicensed. Um, nobody knows exactly where they
are illegal. Technically, yes, they're very illegal because they transmit
(06:20):
over air traffic control frequencies. Um, well that's a big one.
And no one investigates them. There's no investigation into these
number stations whatsoever. So the fact that the government won't
say anything about them, and the fact that the government
isn't investigating these very blatantly out in the open um
(06:42):
weird baffling transmissions suggests that yeah, everybody's right that these
are government backed transmissions used to communicate anonymously and in
one direction. Two spies embedded in foreign countries. Yeah. I
was about to call it a conversation, but it's really not.
It's a it's um. I think on the BBC documents
(07:03):
all they called it a monologue. You're just sending a
one way message. Um, all right, Right after this break,
we're gonna talk a little bit about short wave radio technology.
The secret key to sending these messages after this break,
(07:28):
all right, The key to this whole thing is sending
a short way Like you might think in this day
and age, why not just send a telefax? No, that's
send an email or you know, there's surely, surely there
are safer ways to send espionage, this information, highly classified
(07:49):
instructions to go kill the leader of a country, perhaps, right,
like if you want to activate Reggie Jackson to kill
Queen Elizabeth kill Norberg. Yeah, that's that's how would you
do it in this day and age? You think an
email would do it? No, And you want to know
who proves definitively that that is not safe for secure? Um? Who?
(08:11):
J Edward Snowden? Yeah there there. Um. If you use
a computer, you leave a trace. It's virtually impossible to
erase anything on a computer. If you think you have,
then you haven't. Plus, if you are, say emailing somebody,
you're transmitting what's supposed to be highly sensitive even encrypted
(08:34):
information over a network. That stuff can be captured, Like
go listen to ours an employer. Is your employer spying
on new episode? You? You can't do it like you
You can communicate like that, but you're leaving digital traces everywhere.
The beauty of the short wave radio transmission is that again,
it's anonymous and it's one directional. But if you get
(08:56):
caught with a short wave radio at least say back
in the sixties or the M and D s or something, yeah,
it wasn't weird. It didn't prove that you were a spy.
Yeah you've done. Just tune an into my too, my stories.
Just listening to the BBC World Service. Uh, short wave
energy radio energy. It's all determined by the power of
your transmitter. So if you've got a humongous transmitter, you
(09:18):
can send and it didn't need to be that big,
but you can send a message when we message to
the other side of the world. And the reason it
can travel across the planet is because it's bouncing off
of it literally is bouncing off the ionosphere of the
Earth or of well, yeah, of the Earth, uh, fifty
to three seventy five miles up above our surface. It's
(09:40):
in the upper atmosphere, and solar ionization creates an electrical
charge and that charge reflects that signal right back down
to Earth. It's called skywave or skip and skywave. And
that's why you can with a seemingly pretty simple piece
of equipment, I can send a message to of the
(10:00):
South Pacific. Yeah, from my bedroom. Well, I don't know
if i'd have one big enough for my my bedrooms
pretty big. I wanted to see how big these things
were actually, you know, like if they say a really
big ones to send them further and further, Like how
big do they get? They get very huge. They can
cover scores of acres a big shortwave antenna um, which
(10:23):
is why I can get very expensive So that's bigger
than my bedroom. You can also use ones that are
the size of your bedroom. And it depends not only
like you said, on the size of the transmitter, it
depends on the atmospheric conditions to Supposually, shortwave transmissions are
received best at sunrise and sunset, and no one's sure,
(10:43):
but it has to do with the ion sphere, and
because that's where the northern lights are happening, that's where
solar rays hit the hit the Earth's atmosphere and they
the atoms loose their electrons I believe, so they become
ions forming the ionosphere. And because this is constantly changing, UM,
(11:04):
you can't predict exactly how a short wave radio wave
will act, but you can kind of guess, well, this
time the Sun's least active or most active, whatever, it
has some impact on that sky. What's it called the sky?
What the skywave effect? So you can communicate with somebody
(11:27):
in a foreign country, right, and not only can it
not be tracked, it's very difficult to trace who sent that,
where that transmission is coming from, it's impossible to trace
who's receiving it. So you have no idea who in
your country is getting this, which means that you're broadcasting
(11:47):
to anybody and everybody who feels like listening to this.
UM a secret code, but the fact is, if you
use the right kind of secret code, no one can
crack it all. Right. That brings up an important point
because you would think also you can hack into the
most secure computer system on the planet if you're good
(12:08):
enough as a hacker, So how in the world could
sending a coded key like it's nineteen fifty five and
you're trying to get your Dakota ring you know from
the Red was Red Rider? No, No, that's way off. No,
what was it? It was fy No? No, no, I'm
(12:29):
talking about it in the Christmas Story. Yeah, it was
a little orphan that was the show. Yeah, I didn't
think it was. He didn't. He didn't care about pirates
and all that jazz pirates and smugglers and all that.
He listened to a little or Fanny and little I'll
take a word for it. I remember, now do you know?
But I'll take your word for it. Dude, I'm telling
you it's a little or Fanny was my hat. I
(12:51):
don't have a hat on right now, but I would
eat it if I if I were wrong. At any rate,
you're not a little Ralphie decoding the message from Little
or Fananny. But it is actually the most secure way
that you can send a secret message is by creating
a unique code that you know and have written down
(13:11):
on a piece of paper, and your buddy knows who
has it written down on a piece of paper. You
only use it once. That's the kind of the key here,
and then you destroy it afterward. That is still the
most it's unbreakable. So what it's called is a one
time pad, the old one time because you only use
it once, and it is old. It's from the nineteenth century. Yeah,
and it's still uncrackable. It is. And the reason why
(13:32):
it's uncrackable it is because you each have, like you said,
you each have a copy of this this code. But
it's randomly generated. Right, So let's say, um, you have
the sheet of paper and the other person has a
sheet of paper, and the sheet of paper says, it's
just like strings of random numbers, like four or five
numbers long, and it's just totally random and it just covers,
(13:54):
you know, several sheets of paper. Well, you guys start
at the same place, and when person transmitting the message
wants to encrypt it, they run their message. So say
you guys have agreed like zero is a, B is one,
C is two, etcetera. So you'd take that and you'd you,
(14:17):
I know, dude, is mind boggling. Like this is about
as simple as cryptology gets. And it makes me bleed
for my ears because all you have to do is
agree on what's what. You know, it could be anything, right,
So you're agreeing on what's what, But um, you also
have this randomly generated code key, right. So um, let's
say I want to say, what up, chuck. Let's W
(14:40):
H A T U P C h U c K.
So that's eleven letters, right. So if you have your
your key and you're encoding it, you would use these first,
the first eleven numbers to encode what's already encoded. So
the W who is say, says it's the number twenty two, right,
(15:08):
and then so on. So like there's a number assigned
to each letter, so you have that, and then you
run it through this code, this randomly generated code. So
you add that and then so you have, um, what
I say, twenty two and then um say, the first
letter or the first number of this code is seven,
(15:28):
so you have twenty nine. So that's what the little
German girl reads on the air two eighteen. It means
nothing to anyone else in the entire world except for
you and the person who has the other copy of
this code, since there's only two copies and you're only
(15:51):
using it once and you're gonna eat it afterwards. Yeah,
and the key is that it's randomly generated numbers. Then
it'll it's theoretically it will never be broken. Yeah, but
I mean that's just one example. You could You could
have five pre code rules to confuse someone trying to
(16:13):
crack this code. Yeah, and they don't even It's not
like the simplest code is this letter represents this number,
this number represents this letter. It gets more complex than that.
You could both have agreed upon a book you have
to kill a mockingbird. I've got to kill a mockingbird
for eight twelve thirteen four means go to page fourteen
(16:36):
means now you're really going to page thirteen, Ignore four,
then look at the twelfth line. Then look at the
eighth word on that page. Right. What a what a
one time pad would do is take that already agreed
upon code and encrypt it even further. Yeah. But the
point is it doesn't have to represent letters. It can
represent full words in a text that you've agreed upon.
(16:59):
And it's basically like thumbing through this book picking out
all these various words to make a sentence. Right. The
problem is that's its vulnerability as well, like to to
get a copy of the randomly generated key that's used
to encrypt this message. Right, Um, you have to have
some sort of contact with somebody, So that's one vulnerability
(17:21):
of it. The thing is is like, depending on how
long this is, as many numbers as there are, um
is as long as as many transmissions as you can transmit.
Does that make any sense? So so I said, what up, chuck,
that's eleven. That uses the first eleven numbers on this key.
(17:42):
But say there's fifty thou numbers on the key, Well,
we have a lot more messages we I can send
to you that that we're going through the pad. Eventually though,
we're going to use up this pad and we need
to meet again, so I can give you another randomly
generated key. That's the vulnerability of it. Well, the other
(18:02):
well and not a fail safe. But the thing it
makes it even safer is a lot of times they
would send and presumably are still sending dummy messages, so
you don't even know if it's real to begin with.
And there are only so many person hours you can
dedicate as a government to code crackers, and they might
be working on a code that's not even real. You
(18:22):
don't know what transmissions are are legit and that that
is a proposal by a group called ENIGMA. And we'll
talk about Enigma right after this message because they're pretty awesome.
So Chuck Um, we were talking about Enigma. I mentioned Enigma,
and ENIGMA is this group that of basically amateur radio people,
(18:46):
shortwave radio enthusiast. They really get into this. UM it's
a thing and they started This is pre pre internet days.
I think it was in the eighties, the late eighties
early nineties that ENIGMA first came around and kind of
coalesced an. ENIGMA stands for European Numbers Information Gathering and
Monitoring Association, and basically it was just a group of
(19:08):
these people who had all the spell enigma, yeah right,
who had all and I think they reverse engineer UM.
But they had all kind of started to talk or
find each other and say have you heard this weird
transmission and they're like, yes, I've heard that one, and
you should. You should check out this frequency on Tuesday
nights at eight pm because it transmits this. And there
(19:32):
they suddenly realized there's this whole community of people out there.
So they set up a newsletter, they started in a
naming convention, and they started assigning, collecting, and assigning names
to these different things. So like uh E designated a
an English speaking trans numbers station, um S was Slavic
(19:52):
v is various, which incumbani encapsulates everything from like French
to Spanish. And Enigma really took this thing and put
it into understandable terms. And they are basically eavesdropping where
they were eavesdropping on the spy community. Are they not
doing that anymore? So? Enigma disbanded I think in two
(20:14):
thousand and then almost immediately another group came and said, well,
we're Enigma two thousand. We're going to carry this on.
And that's pretty fortunate because they were around to um
put all this on the internet. Before it was like
you had to like subscribe to newsletters and have a
short wave radio. Now it's like you can just go
on the internet and and um listen to all sorts
of archives of these defunct UM number stations as well. Yeah,
(20:38):
I mean they're creepy sounding. I don't like it's kind
of cool. I've got one for you. We've talked about
it before. Do you remember the Yosemite SAM transmission. Yeah,
I'm convinced that that's just a person having fun. Well,
let's play it. I like that one. I think it's
(21:00):
full of info. It's cool. It's coming from somewhere out
in Albuquerque in the desert in New Mexico, and it's
been going since what like two thousand four and um
what makes this one interesting is that it's not a code.
It's just Yosemite Sam saying that thing. Well, then it's
(21:22):
followed by that data burst, which they think is some
sort of compressed information. Yeah. See, I don't believe it.
I think this is a short wave enthusiast having a
good time. Well, he's been doing it like, it's pretty sophisticated.
It does it like over and over again, I think
for forty seconds and switches to the next frequency and
it just goes through the band on a then he's
(21:43):
got a computer doing it for him. Maybe if it
is just some dude, But either way, I like the
use of you, Samity Sam. It's cool, but it's pretty
it's exemplar of um of it's a numbers station, of
a numbers transmission. There's something that indicates that this is
about to happen, and then there's the happening, the transmission
(22:03):
of the secret code. Whether it's digital in nature, or
whether it's spoken um, and then there it is ended
by you know, yossemity sam again or something like that.
It's saying, here's the beginning, here's the information, here's the end.
Now go kill Northburg. One of the other cool things
about this is and um, you know when we were
(22:26):
talking about truly there's better ways. And the government could
theoretically shut down the Internet, they could zapp satellite transmissions,
they could shut everything down. This is almost unstoppable. You
can't shut down short wave radio. I mean, I guess
you cut power maybe yeah, well no, suppose you know,
(22:46):
I mean yeah, and then I guess if people have
batteries though in their shortwave radio. Good point. The one
way to combat it is called jamming frequency jamming, and
basically it's just broadcasting on the same frequency that these
these other transmitters, the numbers stations are transmitting on. And
so if you're broadcasting within your country, you're probably going
(23:08):
to reach those. Shortwave radio is better than somebody on
the other side of the planet's transmission well, and so
apparently Russia spent billions or the Soviets spent billions of
dollars during the Cold War jamming frequencies from all sorts
of different transmissions, um, and they play things like the
sound of seagulls or random beeps or whatever. And it
(23:30):
was just to prevent people from transmitting into Russia. But
even with all of that money and technology mustard or
marshaled against it, they still weren't entirely successful. Like shortwave
radio transmissions get through. It's just too big to fight. Yeah,
you can't jam the entire frequency of all short waves,
(23:52):
like every single frequency. Um. If you have ever heard
the the Wilco remember Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that album that
was on the album at some point, I can't remember
which song it Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in a woman's voice
and that is a famous uh code. Was that from
(24:13):
the Content project? No, I don't think so, but we
should talk about that. For sure. That was a project.
And it was also I guess and the the wild
West days where you're talking about pre internet. If people
wanted to hear the stuff, some people got together and
put together a greatest it's sort of on CD with
(24:34):
a lot of accompanying material about what you're listening to,
and um, none of them obviously you can't break these codes.
That's the thing I find interesting is people sit around
listen to this stuff, but with no aim of cracking
the code. I think some people do attempt to crack
the code and it's impossible. Well, it's not impossible, and
we should say that with the reason why it's not
impossible is because if you're using a computer generated random number,
(24:58):
computer is not capable of truly of generating a truly
random number because computers run on algorithms, and algorithms are
designed to follow patterns, so they're just incapable of it.
So you could, especially today, a hacker could conceivably crack
one of these, especially old transmissions. But but you still
(25:18):
don't know what those numbers stand for. Even if you
find a pattern of numbers, right, there's still an agreed
upon thing that you would have to figure out, but
it would it makes it possible if you could crack
that one time pad key, then you have a real
chance at the deciphering the message itself. Well, yeah, if
(25:39):
you know what they stand for. But I still maintain
if only you and I know what those numbers represent,
to kill a mockingbird pages, Yeah exactly. Uh, well, you
were saying the Content Project thing. So it's a four
CD compilation and apparently I read an article from the
time when it came out, which is the nineties, and
(26:01):
it was like perfect timing because there was why two
K going on, there was Millennium angst, there was the
X Files, and this thing came out and Salon wrote
an article on it, and this guy who wrote it
was like a music concrete aficionada. So people appreciated it,
not just for the fact that it's like recordings of
(26:22):
real live um spy transmissions, but some people like the
kind of avant garde noise that it had going on
to And the Flaming Lips are currently planning an album
composed if nothing but Messages from Number Stations Number eight. Uh,
(26:44):
there's a movie that exists that I had never heard of,
called The Number Station. I hadn't heard of it either. Yeah,
I don't think it was released really. It said of
from two thousand thirteen, and like I know, most movies
that are released, it's it's it probably went straight to
video or some Then I watched the trailer to day
it's John cusack and uh Melin Ackerman, and you know
(27:07):
they work at a number station and he's to protect
the number station, but something bad happens and they're compromised,
and is who who he says he is? And is
she who she says she is? Who knows? You'll have
to that turkey to find out. Didn't look bad? Yeah,
sure it looked pretty bad. Sorry, John Cusack, Sorry John Cusack.
(27:31):
So the I think one of the most interesting things
about UM numbers stations is that, like you said, they
peaked during the Cold War right when the Berlin Wall fell,
and then in a few years after that the number
of transmissions supposedly just dropped off dramatically, although I did
see in at least one place that supposedly they increased,
(27:53):
but I didn't see that supported anywhere else. But the
idea that they're still around it all in two thousand fourteen,
that there are still numbers stations transmitting gibberish really says
a lot. So it says a couple of things, and
you've already mentioned one. It's possible they are just transmitting
gibberish to throw off anybody listening, UM, to basically just
(28:15):
kind of sap their resources, like keep them Ruski is busy. Um.
Another one is that they're keeping them going in case
they need to use them again. I think that's totally
the reason, in which case that's pretty smart, because that's
just you're not showing your hand, like where all of
(28:35):
a sudden u uh an inactive radio station suddenly starts
up again ind case activity and it's been doing the
same thing for ten years, and on year seven it
actually transmitted a real secret message, but it seemed just
like the everything else in those ten years. You're doing
some pretty good spycraft there, yeah, Or just to keep
(28:57):
that UM like you may not be actively using it,
but just to keep that um A method relevant. Like
you know, if you quit doing something, it's gonna die off.
No one's gonna know how to do it anymore. So
that you know, just keep those people working. And you
know they may may not even know if they're transmitting
real messages or not. I would guess if you're just
(29:19):
saying oh yeah, yeah, if you're just saying a a
sheet of paper and it's just yeah, in fact, that
maybe a pretty safe way to do things. It's like
the person with the nuclear key just a test. Who
knows gas we'll find out in UM. There are also
other theories that they are and I think some of
(29:39):
this does go on. Um, maybe drug runners using stuff
like this because some of them are less than professional.
Apparently the ones from Cuba or Cuba sorry Jerry, are
a little um uh comical. Well, they were renowned for
just having really bad slip ups, especially during the whole war,
like you'd hear people talking and laughing in the background,
(30:02):
or an accidental transmission of a radio station radio Havan
all right, Yeah, so they were kind of known for
for not being too skilled at it. But I imagine
the drug runners are the same. Yeah, it's virtually the
same thing. And I mean there's absolutely no reason why
drug runners couldn't have also couldn't also use this, Yeah,
(30:22):
alongside the espionage community too. Yeah, there's might be a
IS one, b IS two and they get the message
says chipment of Kilo's coming in Miami Beach tomorrow night. Right,
let's go get them kill one. I'm one, uh, But
I do think there may be a little bit of that.
(30:42):
I think it's a mixed bag of why they're still
being broadcast. I think there are enthusiasts that are probably
just doing their own thing for fun. Yeah, that'd be fun. Man,
if I was in in Guam and I could send
you a private message to be a short wave Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I thought you meant people who are just doing it,
just a mess with like the Enigma community or something.
(31:03):
I think that probably happens to I bet you it's
all kinds of things. Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Um,
there's one guy out there. And trust me, there have
been some some actual spies who have been busted in
this century, long after the Cold War, who had shortwave
radios and one time pads in their apartments or houses. Apparently,
(31:25):
in two thousand eleven in Germany, a couple who lived
there since and we're spying for the Russians were caught
in the act of receiving a numbers transmission in their
home when they were apprehended and busted for spying. I
can see that scene. He's got like one headphone up
and he's holding out with his hand and he's writing
(31:47):
something down in pencil and his wife's trying to eat
it really quick spit out. And in two thousand one
and A. Mantz worked for the U. S Civil Defension
Intelligence Agency and she was convicted of spying for Cuba.
And when they searched her home they found a short
wave radio and a code sheet and um, so yeah,
(32:08):
I mean that's it's still going on. Man, I think
it's pretty neat. Yeah, I do too, Like it's old
school but almost fool proof. Yeah. The big vulnerabilities getting
the random randomly generated key to the spy. Yeah. And
they also point out in the article who wrote this one?
By the way, uh Nathan Chandler. Um. Nathan points out
(32:32):
that these days, you're likely um, you're one timer might
be sent to you, maybe digitally somehow, but it's not
It doesn't like tip anyone off necessarily. Yeah, but not
quite sure how. Yeah, I would think if you're being watched,
then an email with a lot of random numbers might differ. Well,
it used to be they print them on that the
(32:54):
kind of paper that like dissolved quickly or burned and
left no ash or whatever. They were on such tiny
paper you had to use a really good magnifying like
lens to read it, and you could hide them in
like a walnut shell or something like that. Wow. Who
knows what they're doing now? Yeah, but they are doing something. Yeah,
I'd like to Uh. I thought about getting a short
(33:16):
I was a little bit inspired but then I thought,
oh man, I've got so many other things to do.
I don't know if I could do fall into that
rabbit hole. So that's numbers stations. If that piqued your interest,
just type in numbers stations into your favorite search engine
and it will lead you down the rabbit hole of
shortwave radio. Did you say rabbit holes? That where I
got that from? I said rabbit hole, But I didn't
(33:38):
invent it, no, I know, but it just popped up
in my head and it wasn't my own invention. And
I think if you have a short wave radio, you
probably tune into these anyway because you're just into that lifestyle.
But I think there's a website called spy numbers where
you can actually find the frequencies and just go right
there and you don't want to search for them. And
if you want to read this article, you can type
the words numbers station in the search part How stuff
(34:02):
works dot com. And since I said search parts, time
for listener mayo. I'm gonna call this a bit on
sushi um from someone in Japan. Hey, guys, and Jerry.
He expelled Jerry right as well. Man, it's Jerry's day.
I enjoyed the sushi episode quite a bit and have
something to add. As a result of modern food production
(34:22):
following World War Two in Japan and of course the
U S and elsewhere, the quality and traditional methods of
making Show You Miso and other Japanese food items sadly plummeted.
For example, miso can be fermented an aged a matter
of weeks with the use of temperature control tanks, where
traditional dark miso would age up to two years. Same
goes with other fermented products like Show You Mirren. No
(34:46):
longer at sweet rice cooking wine is practically sugar water.
Speaking of sugar, modern Japanese food wouldn't exist without it.
Uh Bumi boshi, the sour salty pickled plum is lousy
with artificial color, sugar and refined salt. They're still good.
As much as I loved I love Japanese food and culture,
it's quite heartbreaking to see these centuries of traditional food
(35:06):
processing supplanted by the Japanese version of a Twinkie chemically
made in process as an alternative. There are good quality
Japanese products to be had, particularly those imported from eating foods,
just high quality, organic and widely distributed Is this the
president of Eating Food? I don't know. Are they based
in Alameda, California? It sounds like yeah, uh, that is
(35:29):
from Lear in Alameda, California. UM. I meant to mention
that you. I had the worst sushi I've had in
my life the other day. I'm not gonna say it,
but I'm not going back. I'll tell you off air.
I don't think you wouldn't go there anyway, but um,
it was. The rice was gummy and really gummy to
(35:50):
the point where I ate it just because I was starving,
and I ate it really fast, and I was like, oh,
this kind of gummy. And then afterward I was like, man,
that was terrible. Yeah, did you say that to yourself?
And like you smiled in there? Your whole mouth was
coated and it was gross. Man, I was. I was
ticked off afterward after I paid the bill, uh and
complained the whole way home to Emily. I was like,
(36:10):
I really should have said something because that was like
they should have known, they shouldn't have served that rice. Well,
why didn't you say something? Because, like I said, I
just shoved it in my face hole and left and
complained afterwards, which is that's how I do things. Usually,
I don't like to make a scene. I just like
to play the martyr afterwards. I've talked about that gummy
(36:32):
sushi for two days. Yeah it was. Yeah, the fish
and stuff was good, but that rice was just very subar.
The should have known better. Well, tell me where it
is afterwards. Uh. If you want to, um, I guess
inadvertently or quietly clandestinely promote your business like Leard did
(36:55):
with his eating foods. Yeah. Um. You can tweet to
us at s y s K podcast. You can join
us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com, and as always, joined us
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
(37:22):
is it how stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you should know from house Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and this is oh
Jerry and this is sufficient eight. Can you say it
(00:22):
in German? You speak German? Don't even drive me? That's
why did I? Ah, Stephen? Now can you do that
in a little girl voice? No? You always make me
play st poly girl. I'm tired of it. Save Polly Girl. Now.
(00:44):
This is apparently even younger than the sat Polly Girl.
It's like a little girl and it was alive little
girl who in the Swedish rhapsody number station it was
a young a little girl reading out numbers and letters
in German, which makes it even creepier. This is a
very neat subject, so kudos to you for tossing this
(01:07):
one out there. Well, I've been waiting for it to publish.
I've seen it in the calendar coming up and coming up.
I'm like, come on and published. And I think it
published on Friday Tuesday, right out of the oven. And uh,
we're talking about it just as they are completing their decline,
so we are on top of this. Well, I think
(01:27):
that well, we'll get into it. I think that's what
makes it even more interesting is that it's still happening,
all right. Numbers stations. Numbers stations. Yeah, like you said,
number both words are a little clumsy, um, and number
of stations are. We should just come out and say
they're short wave radio transmissions or transmitters, making really weird
(01:55):
baffling is the best word for it. Transmissions and have
been doing so apparently since at least World War one.
Oh really, Yeah. Supposedly the first mention of a numbers station,
uh came from a German magazine. In World War One
and World War Two they were in full swing, sure,
(02:17):
but apparently they somehow popped up first round world War one,
which makes them some of the earliest short wave transmissions
in the world, because shortwave radio didn't come around, at
least into commercial use until about World War One. Was
a few years before that, if you'll remember correct. Yeah,
that's why I didn't even think that that was possible.
(02:38):
But like you said, world War two was when they
were full swing. They really peaked in the Cold War, um,
and they've been dying out slowly ever since. But I
think one of the neatest things is they are still
if you have a short wave radio, you can tune
into a frequency and here be one to seven eight.
(03:01):
You know, it's it's usually like some sort of tone
we should mention to Jerry of the future. Yeah, you're
supposed to leave that beep in because it's part of
the numbers stations. Yeah, we beat Jerry to signal when
we want something edited. But yeah, number station. It's not
always a beat, but will just have some sort of
Sometimes it's a bit of a song, yeah, like this
Swedish Rhapsody or the Lincolnshire Poacher of British English Ukish
(03:24):
folk song and uh. And the reason um that they
the transmission starts off with a tone or a beep
or a song is so you can it alerts like
here comes the transmission to in your station hone and
make sure you get some good reception because the secret
code is about to be revealed. And that's exactly what
(03:47):
everyone is pretty much in consensus on that what comes
after this and what is broadcast over these numbers stations
are secret codes. Yeah. Again for the Swedish Rhapsody station. Um,
it is a little girl in speaking in German, reading
(04:08):
numbers and letters random seemingly random numbers and letters, and
then the transmission is over and that happens like or
it used to happen. That's a defunct numbers station now,
but it happened on a fairly regular schedule. There's other ones.
The atension station is a woman saying attension and then
(04:29):
reading Spanish numbers and then repeating them over and over
again and then going on to the next set. And everybody.
No one can say for certain, but virtually everyone in
the world, from Cecil Adams that's straight dope to the
head of the UK's Trade and Industry Agency say these
(04:50):
are secret transmissions for spies. The whole basis of them
was for espionage. Yeah. And the reason why everyone is
speculating that that is absolutely the case, which almost certainly
it's like we said, is because no government to this
day has come forward and admitted this or own this.
(05:13):
It is all still technically speculation because you cannot point
to a factual statement. The closest we've ever come is
they finally got someone from the United Kingdom of spokesperson.
That was the dude from the Trade Agency the exact
quotas people should not be mystified by them they're not,
(05:36):
shall we say, for public consumption. Yeah, and that's the
only thing on record that any government has ever spoke
about what these transmissions are. Right, So, the the idea
that they are government transitions are the reason we have
to speculate, because the government has never claimed them. On
the flip side, the reason everyone thinks that they are
(05:56):
government backed claimed Stein transmissions is because these are pirate
radio frequencies, pirate radio transmitters. Yeah. My first thing was like,
just find one of these and look it up and
find out what the deal is. Yeah, you would think.
So they're totally unlicensed. Um, nobody knows exactly where they
are illegal. Technically, yes, they're very illegal because they transmit
(06:20):
over air traffic control frequencies. Um, well that's a big one.
And no one investigates them. There's no investigation into these
number stations whatsoever. So the fact that the government won't
say anything about them, and the fact that the government
isn't investigating these very blatantly out in the open um
(06:42):
weird baffling transmissions suggests that yeah, everybody's right that these
are government backed transmissions used to communicate anonymously and in
one direction. Two spies embedded in foreign countries. Yeah. I
was about to call it a conversation, but it's really not.
It's a it's um. I think on the BBC documents
(07:03):
all they called it a monologue. You're just sending a
one way message. Um, all right, Right after this break,
we're gonna talk a little bit about short wave radio technology.
The secret key to sending these messages after this break,
(07:28):
all right, The key to this whole thing is sending
a short way Like you might think in this day
and age, why not just send a telefax? No, that's
send an email or you know, there's surely, surely there
are safer ways to send espionage, this information, highly classified
(07:49):
instructions to go kill the leader of a country, perhaps, right,
like if you want to activate Reggie Jackson to kill
Queen Elizabeth kill Norberg. Yeah, that's that's how would you
do it in this day and age? You think an
email would do it? No, And you want to know
who proves definitively that that is not safe for secure? Um? Who?
(08:11):
J Edward Snowden? Yeah there there. Um. If you use
a computer, you leave a trace. It's virtually impossible to
erase anything on a computer. If you think you have,
then you haven't. Plus, if you are, say emailing somebody,
you're transmitting what's supposed to be highly sensitive even encrypted
(08:34):
information over a network. That stuff can be captured, Like
go listen to ours an employer. Is your employer spying
on new episode? You? You can't do it like you
You can communicate like that, but you're leaving digital traces everywhere.
The beauty of the short wave radio transmission is that again,
it's anonymous and it's one directional. But if you get
(08:56):
caught with a short wave radio at least say back
in the sixties or the M and D s or something, yeah,
it wasn't weird. It didn't prove that you were a spy.
Yeah you've done. Just tune an into my too, my stories.
Just listening to the BBC World Service. Uh, short wave
energy radio energy. It's all determined by the power of
your transmitter. So if you've got a humongous transmitter, you
(09:18):
can send and it didn't need to be that big,
but you can send a message when we message to
the other side of the world. And the reason it
can travel across the planet is because it's bouncing off
of it literally is bouncing off the ionosphere of the
Earth or of well, yeah, of the Earth, uh, fifty
to three seventy five miles up above our surface. It's
(09:40):
in the upper atmosphere, and solar ionization creates an electrical
charge and that charge reflects that signal right back down
to Earth. It's called skywave or skip and skywave. And
that's why you can with a seemingly pretty simple piece
of equipment, I can send a message to of the
(10:00):
South Pacific. Yeah, from my bedroom. Well, I don't know
if i'd have one big enough for my my bedrooms
pretty big. I wanted to see how big these things
were actually, you know, like if they say a really
big ones to send them further and further, Like how
big do they get? They get very huge. They can
cover scores of acres a big shortwave antenna um, which
(10:23):
is why I can get very expensive So that's bigger
than my bedroom. You can also use ones that are
the size of your bedroom. And it depends not only
like you said, on the size of the transmitter, it
depends on the atmospheric conditions to Supposually, shortwave transmissions are
received best at sunrise and sunset, and no one's sure,
(10:43):
but it has to do with the ion sphere, and
because that's where the northern lights are happening, that's where
solar rays hit the hit the Earth's atmosphere and they
the atoms loose their electrons I believe, so they become
ions forming the ionosphere. And because this is constantly changing, UM,
(11:04):
you can't predict exactly how a short wave radio wave
will act, but you can kind of guess, well, this
time the Sun's least active or most active, whatever, it
has some impact on that sky. What's it called the sky?
What the skywave effect? So you can communicate with somebody
(11:27):
in a foreign country, right, and not only can it
not be tracked, it's very difficult to trace who sent that,
where that transmission is coming from, it's impossible to trace
who's receiving it. So you have no idea who in
your country is getting this, which means that you're broadcasting
(11:47):
to anybody and everybody who feels like listening to this.
UM a secret code, but the fact is, if you
use the right kind of secret code, no one can
crack it all. Right. That brings up an important point
because you would think also you can hack into the
most secure computer system on the planet if you're good
(12:08):
enough as a hacker, So how in the world could
sending a coded key like it's nineteen fifty five and
you're trying to get your Dakota ring you know from
the Red was Red Rider? No, No, that's way off. No,
what was it? It was fy No? No, no, I'm
(12:29):
talking about it in the Christmas Story. Yeah, it was
a little orphan that was the show. Yeah, I didn't
think it was. He didn't. He didn't care about pirates
and all that jazz pirates and smugglers and all that.
He listened to a little or Fanny and little I'll
take a word for it. I remember, now do you know?
But I'll take your word for it. Dude, I'm telling
you it's a little or Fanny was my hat. I
(12:51):
don't have a hat on right now, but I would
eat it if I if I were wrong. At any rate,
you're not a little Ralphie decoding the message from Little
or Fananny. But it is actually the most secure way
that you can send a secret message is by creating
a unique code that you know and have written down
(13:11):
on a piece of paper, and your buddy knows who
has it written down on a piece of paper. You
only use it once. That's the kind of the key here,
and then you destroy it afterward. That is still the
most it's unbreakable. So what it's called is a one
time pad, the old one time because you only use
it once, and it is old. It's from the nineteenth century. Yeah,
and it's still uncrackable. It is. And the reason why
(13:32):
it's uncrackable it is because you each have, like you said,
you each have a copy of this this code. But
it's randomly generated. Right, So let's say, um, you have
the sheet of paper and the other person has a
sheet of paper, and the sheet of paper says, it's
just like strings of random numbers, like four or five
numbers long, and it's just totally random and it just covers,
(13:54):
you know, several sheets of paper. Well, you guys start
at the same place, and when person transmitting the message
wants to encrypt it, they run their message. So say
you guys have agreed like zero is a, B is one,
C is two, etcetera. So you'd take that and you'd you,
(14:17):
I know, dude, is mind boggling. Like this is about
as simple as cryptology gets. And it makes me bleed
for my ears because all you have to do is
agree on what's what. You know, it could be anything, right,
So you're agreeing on what's what, But um, you also
have this randomly generated code key, right. So um, let's
say I want to say, what up, chuck. Let's W
(14:40):
H A T U P C h U c K.
So that's eleven letters, right. So if you have your
your key and you're encoding it, you would use these first,
the first eleven numbers to encode what's already encoded. So
the W who is say, says it's the number twenty two, right,
(15:08):
and then so on. So like there's a number assigned
to each letter, so you have that, and then you
run it through this code, this randomly generated code. So
you add that and then so you have, um, what
I say, twenty two and then um say, the first
letter or the first number of this code is seven,
(15:28):
so you have twenty nine. So that's what the little
German girl reads on the air two eighteen. It means
nothing to anyone else in the entire world except for
you and the person who has the other copy of
this code, since there's only two copies and you're only
(15:51):
using it once and you're gonna eat it afterwards. Yeah,
and the key is that it's randomly generated numbers. Then
it'll it's theoretically it will never be broken. Yeah, but
I mean that's just one example. You could You could
have five pre code rules to confuse someone trying to
(16:13):
crack this code. Yeah, and they don't even It's not
like the simplest code is this letter represents this number,
this number represents this letter. It gets more complex than that.
You could both have agreed upon a book you have
to kill a mockingbird. I've got to kill a mockingbird
for eight twelve thirteen four means go to page fourteen
(16:36):
means now you're really going to page thirteen, Ignore four,
then look at the twelfth line. Then look at the
eighth word on that page. Right. What a what a
one time pad would do is take that already agreed
upon code and encrypt it even further. Yeah. But the
point is it doesn't have to represent letters. It can
represent full words in a text that you've agreed upon.
(16:59):
And it's basically like thumbing through this book picking out
all these various words to make a sentence. Right. The
problem is that's its vulnerability as well, like to to
get a copy of the randomly generated key that's used
to encrypt this message. Right, Um, you have to have
some sort of contact with somebody, So that's one vulnerability
(17:21):
of it. The thing is is like, depending on how
long this is, as many numbers as there are, um
is as long as as many transmissions as you can transmit.
Does that make any sense? So so I said, what up, chuck,
that's eleven. That uses the first eleven numbers on this key.
(17:42):
But say there's fifty thou numbers on the key, Well,
we have a lot more messages we I can send
to you that that we're going through the pad. Eventually though,
we're going to use up this pad and we need
to meet again, so I can give you another randomly
generated key. That's the vulnerability of it. Well, the other
(18:02):
well and not a fail safe. But the thing it
makes it even safer is a lot of times they
would send and presumably are still sending dummy messages, so
you don't even know if it's real to begin with.
And there are only so many person hours you can
dedicate as a government to code crackers, and they might
be working on a code that's not even real. You
(18:22):
don't know what transmissions are are legit and that that
is a proposal by a group called ENIGMA. And we'll
talk about Enigma right after this message because they're pretty awesome.
So Chuck Um, we were talking about Enigma. I mentioned Enigma,
and ENIGMA is this group that of basically amateur radio people,
(18:46):
shortwave radio enthusiast. They really get into this. UM it's
a thing and they started This is pre pre internet days.
I think it was in the eighties, the late eighties
early nineties that ENIGMA first came around and kind of
coalesced an. ENIGMA stands for European Numbers Information Gathering and
Monitoring Association, and basically it was just a group of
(19:08):
these people who had all the spell enigma, yeah right,
who had all and I think they reverse engineer UM.
But they had all kind of started to talk or
find each other and say have you heard this weird
transmission and they're like, yes, I've heard that one, and
you should. You should check out this frequency on Tuesday
nights at eight pm because it transmits this. And there
(19:32):
they suddenly realized there's this whole community of people out there.
So they set up a newsletter, they started in a
naming convention, and they started assigning, collecting, and assigning names
to these different things. So like uh E designated a
an English speaking trans numbers station, um S was Slavic
(19:52):
v is various, which incumbani encapsulates everything from like French
to Spanish. And Enigma really took this thing and put
it into understandable terms. And they are basically eavesdropping where
they were eavesdropping on the spy community. Are they not
doing that anymore? So? Enigma disbanded I think in two
(20:14):
thousand and then almost immediately another group came and said, well,
we're Enigma two thousand. We're going to carry this on.
And that's pretty fortunate because they were around to um
put all this on the internet. Before it was like
you had to like subscribe to newsletters and have a
short wave radio. Now it's like you can just go
on the internet and and um listen to all sorts
of archives of these defunct UM number stations as well. Yeah,
(20:38):
I mean they're creepy sounding. I don't like it's kind
of cool. I've got one for you. We've talked about
it before. Do you remember the Yosemite SAM transmission. Yeah,
I'm convinced that that's just a person having fun. Well,
let's play it. I like that one. I think it's
(21:00):
full of info. It's cool. It's coming from somewhere out
in Albuquerque in the desert in New Mexico, and it's
been going since what like two thousand four and um
what makes this one interesting is that it's not a code.
It's just Yosemite Sam saying that thing. Well, then it's
(21:22):
followed by that data burst, which they think is some
sort of compressed information. Yeah. See, I don't believe it.
I think this is a short wave enthusiast having a
good time. Well, he's been doing it like, it's pretty sophisticated.
It does it like over and over again, I think
for forty seconds and switches to the next frequency and
it just goes through the band on a then he's
(21:43):
got a computer doing it for him. Maybe if it
is just some dude, But either way, I like the
use of you, Samity Sam. It's cool, but it's pretty
it's exemplar of um of it's a numbers station, of
a numbers transmission. There's something that indicates that this is
about to happen, and then there's the happening, the transmission
(22:03):
of the secret code. Whether it's digital in nature, or
whether it's spoken um, and then there it is ended
by you know, yossemity sam again or something like that.
It's saying, here's the beginning, here's the information, here's the end.
Now go kill Northburg. One of the other cool things
about this is and um, you know when we were
(22:26):
talking about truly there's better ways. And the government could
theoretically shut down the Internet, they could zapp satellite transmissions,
they could shut everything down. This is almost unstoppable. You
can't shut down short wave radio. I mean, I guess
you cut power maybe yeah, well no, suppose you know,
(22:46):
I mean yeah, and then I guess if people have
batteries though in their shortwave radio. Good point. The one
way to combat it is called jamming frequency jamming, and
basically it's just broadcasting on the same frequency that these
these other transmitters, the numbers stations are transmitting on. And
so if you're broadcasting within your country, you're probably going
(23:08):
to reach those. Shortwave radio is better than somebody on
the other side of the planet's transmission well, and so
apparently Russia spent billions or the Soviets spent billions of
dollars during the Cold War jamming frequencies from all sorts
of different transmissions, um, and they play things like the
sound of seagulls or random beeps or whatever. And it
(23:30):
was just to prevent people from transmitting into Russia. But
even with all of that money and technology mustard or
marshaled against it, they still weren't entirely successful. Like shortwave
radio transmissions get through. It's just too big to fight. Yeah,
you can't jam the entire frequency of all short waves,
(23:52):
like every single frequency. Um. If you have ever heard
the the Wilco remember Yankee Hotel Foxtrot that album that
was on the album at some point, I can't remember
which song it Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in a woman's voice
and that is a famous uh code. Was that from
(24:13):
the Content project? No, I don't think so, but we
should talk about that. For sure. That was a project.
And it was also I guess and the the wild
West days where you're talking about pre internet. If people
wanted to hear the stuff, some people got together and
put together a greatest it's sort of on CD with
(24:34):
a lot of accompanying material about what you're listening to,
and um, none of them obviously you can't break these codes.
That's the thing I find interesting is people sit around
listen to this stuff, but with no aim of cracking
the code. I think some people do attempt to crack
the code and it's impossible. Well, it's not impossible, and
we should say that with the reason why it's not
impossible is because if you're using a computer generated random number,
(24:58):
computer is not capable of truly of generating a truly
random number because computers run on algorithms, and algorithms are
designed to follow patterns, so they're just incapable of it.
So you could, especially today, a hacker could conceivably crack
one of these, especially old transmissions. But but you still
(25:18):
don't know what those numbers stand for. Even if you
find a pattern of numbers, right, there's still an agreed
upon thing that you would have to figure out, but
it would it makes it possible if you could crack
that one time pad key, then you have a real
chance at the deciphering the message itself. Well, yeah, if
(25:39):
you know what they stand for. But I still maintain
if only you and I know what those numbers represent,
to kill a mockingbird pages, Yeah exactly. Uh, well, you
were saying the Content Project thing. So it's a four
CD compilation and apparently I read an article from the
time when it came out, which is the nineties, and
(26:01):
it was like perfect timing because there was why two
K going on, there was Millennium angst, there was the
X Files, and this thing came out and Salon wrote
an article on it, and this guy who wrote it
was like a music concrete aficionada. So people appreciated it,
not just for the fact that it's like recordings of
(26:22):
real live um spy transmissions, but some people like the
kind of avant garde noise that it had going on
to And the Flaming Lips are currently planning an album
composed if nothing but Messages from Number Stations Number eight. Uh,
(26:44):
there's a movie that exists that I had never heard of,
called The Number Station. I hadn't heard of it either. Yeah,
I don't think it was released really. It said of
from two thousand thirteen, and like I know, most movies
that are released, it's it's it probably went straight to
video or some Then I watched the trailer to day
it's John cusack and uh Melin Ackerman, and you know
(27:07):
they work at a number station and he's to protect
the number station, but something bad happens and they're compromised,
and is who who he says he is? And is
she who she says she is? Who knows? You'll have
to that turkey to find out. Didn't look bad? Yeah,
sure it looked pretty bad. Sorry, John Cusack, Sorry John Cusack.
(27:31):
So the I think one of the most interesting things
about UM numbers stations is that, like you said, they
peaked during the Cold War right when the Berlin Wall fell,
and then in a few years after that the number
of transmissions supposedly just dropped off dramatically, although I did
see in at least one place that supposedly they increased,
(27:53):
but I didn't see that supported anywhere else. But the
idea that they're still around it all in two thousand fourteen,
that there are still numbers stations transmitting gibberish really says
a lot. So it says a couple of things, and
you've already mentioned one. It's possible they are just transmitting
gibberish to throw off anybody listening, UM, to basically just
(28:15):
kind of sap their resources, like keep them Ruski is busy. Um.
Another one is that they're keeping them going in case
they need to use them again. I think that's totally
the reason, in which case that's pretty smart, because that's
just you're not showing your hand, like where all of
(28:35):
a sudden u uh an inactive radio station suddenly starts
up again ind case activity and it's been doing the
same thing for ten years, and on year seven it
actually transmitted a real secret message, but it seemed just
like the everything else in those ten years. You're doing
some pretty good spycraft there, yeah, Or just to keep
(28:57):
that UM like you may not be actively using it,
but just to keep that um A method relevant. Like
you know, if you quit doing something, it's gonna die off.
No one's gonna know how to do it anymore. So
that you know, just keep those people working. And you
know they may may not even know if they're transmitting
real messages or not. I would guess if you're just
(29:19):
saying oh yeah, yeah, if you're just saying a a
sheet of paper and it's just yeah, in fact, that
maybe a pretty safe way to do things. It's like
the person with the nuclear key just a test. Who
knows gas we'll find out in UM. There are also
other theories that they are and I think some of
(29:39):
this does go on. Um, maybe drug runners using stuff
like this because some of them are less than professional.
Apparently the ones from Cuba or Cuba sorry Jerry, are
a little um uh comical. Well, they were renowned for
just having really bad slip ups, especially during the whole war,
like you'd hear people talking and laughing in the background,
(30:02):
or an accidental transmission of a radio station radio Havan
all right, Yeah, so they were kind of known for
for not being too skilled at it. But I imagine
the drug runners are the same. Yeah, it's virtually the
same thing. And I mean there's absolutely no reason why
drug runners couldn't have also couldn't also use this, Yeah,
(30:22):
alongside the espionage community too. Yeah, there's might be a
IS one, b IS two and they get the message
says chipment of Kilo's coming in Miami Beach tomorrow night. Right,
let's go get them kill one. I'm one, uh, But
I do think there may be a little bit of that.
(30:42):
I think it's a mixed bag of why they're still
being broadcast. I think there are enthusiasts that are probably
just doing their own thing for fun. Yeah, that'd be fun. Man,
if I was in in Guam and I could send
you a private message to be a short wave Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
I thought you meant people who are just doing it,
just a mess with like the Enigma community or something.
(31:03):
I think that probably happens to I bet you it's
all kinds of things. Yeah, I'm sure you're right. Um,
there's one guy out there. And trust me, there have
been some some actual spies who have been busted in
this century, long after the Cold War, who had shortwave
radios and one time pads in their apartments or houses. Apparently,
(31:25):
in two thousand eleven in Germany, a couple who lived
there since and we're spying for the Russians were caught
in the act of receiving a numbers transmission in their
home when they were apprehended and busted for spying. I
can see that scene. He's got like one headphone up
and he's holding out with his hand and he's writing
(31:47):
something down in pencil and his wife's trying to eat
it really quick spit out. And in two thousand one
and A. Mantz worked for the U. S Civil Defension
Intelligence Agency and she was convicted of spying for Cuba.
And when they searched her home they found a short
wave radio and a code sheet and um, so yeah,
(32:08):
I mean that's it's still going on. Man, I think
it's pretty neat. Yeah, I do too, Like it's old
school but almost fool proof. Yeah. The big vulnerabilities getting
the random randomly generated key to the spy. Yeah. And
they also point out in the article who wrote this one?
By the way, uh Nathan Chandler. Um. Nathan points out
(32:32):
that these days, you're likely um, you're one timer might
be sent to you, maybe digitally somehow, but it's not
It doesn't like tip anyone off necessarily. Yeah, but not
quite sure how. Yeah, I would think if you're being watched,
then an email with a lot of random numbers might differ. Well,
it used to be they print them on that the
(32:54):
kind of paper that like dissolved quickly or burned and
left no ash or whatever. They were on such tiny
paper you had to use a really good magnifying like
lens to read it, and you could hide them in
like a walnut shell or something like that. Wow. Who
knows what they're doing now? Yeah, but they are doing something. Yeah,
I'd like to Uh. I thought about getting a short
(33:16):
I was a little bit inspired but then I thought,
oh man, I've got so many other things to do.
I don't know if I could do fall into that
rabbit hole. So that's numbers stations. If that piqued your interest,
just type in numbers stations into your favorite search engine
and it will lead you down the rabbit hole of
shortwave radio. Did you say rabbit holes? That where I
got that from? I said rabbit hole, But I didn't
(33:38):
invent it, no, I know, but it just popped up
in my head and it wasn't my own invention. And
I think if you have a short wave radio, you
probably tune into these anyway because you're just into that lifestyle.
But I think there's a website called spy numbers where
you can actually find the frequencies and just go right
there and you don't want to search for them. And
if you want to read this article, you can type
the words numbers station in the search part How stuff
(34:02):
works dot com. And since I said search parts, time
for listener mayo. I'm gonna call this a bit on
sushi um from someone in Japan. Hey, guys, and Jerry.
He expelled Jerry right as well. Man, it's Jerry's day.
I enjoyed the sushi episode quite a bit and have
something to add. As a result of modern food production
(34:22):
following World War Two in Japan and of course the
U S and elsewhere, the quality and traditional methods of
making Show You Miso and other Japanese food items sadly plummeted.
For example, miso can be fermented an aged a matter
of weeks with the use of temperature control tanks, where
traditional dark miso would age up to two years. Same
goes with other fermented products like Show You Mirren. No
(34:46):
longer at sweet rice cooking wine is practically sugar water.
Speaking of sugar, modern Japanese food wouldn't exist without it.
Uh Bumi boshi, the sour salty pickled plum is lousy
with artificial color, sugar and refined salt. They're still good.
As much as I loved I love Japanese food and culture,
it's quite heartbreaking to see these centuries of traditional food
(35:06):
processing supplanted by the Japanese version of a Twinkie chemically
made in process as an alternative. There are good quality
Japanese products to be had, particularly those imported from eating foods,
just high quality, organic and widely distributed Is this the
president of Eating Food? I don't know. Are they based
in Alameda, California? It sounds like yeah, uh, that is
(35:29):
from Lear in Alameda, California. UM. I meant to mention
that you. I had the worst sushi I've had in
my life the other day. I'm not gonna say it,
but I'm not going back. I'll tell you off air.
I don't think you wouldn't go there anyway, but um,
it was. The rice was gummy and really gummy to
(35:50):
the point where I ate it just because I was starving,
and I ate it really fast, and I was like, oh,
this kind of gummy. And then afterward I was like, man,
that was terrible. Yeah, did you say that to yourself?
And like you smiled in there? Your whole mouth was
coated and it was gross. Man, I was. I was
ticked off afterward after I paid the bill, uh and
complained the whole way home to Emily. I was like,
(36:10):
I really should have said something because that was like
they should have known, they shouldn't have served that rice. Well,
why didn't you say something? Because, like I said, I
just shoved it in my face hole and left and
complained afterwards, which is that's how I do things. Usually,
I don't like to make a scene. I just like
to play the martyr afterwards. I've talked about that gummy
(36:32):
sushi for two days. Yeah it was. Yeah, the fish
and stuff was good, but that rice was just very subar.
The should have known better. Well, tell me where it
is afterwards. Uh. If you want to, um, I guess
inadvertently or quietly clandestinely promote your business like Leard did
(36:55):
with his eating foods. Yeah. Um. You can tweet to
us at s y s K podcast. You can join
us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com, and as always, joined us
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
(37:22):
is it how stuff Works dot com
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