A35.Inglish BCEnc. Blauwe Kaas Encyclopedie, Duaal Hermeneuties Kollegium.
Inglish Site.35.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
130.Bootstrap Paradox.
131.Numbers Station.
132.The First People.
*
130.Bootstrap Paradox.
The bootstrap paradox, or ontological paradox, is a paradox of time travel that refers to scenarios whereby items or information are passed from the future to the past, which in turn become the same items or information that are subsequently passed from the past to the future - this creates a circularity of cause-effect such that the items or information have no discernible origin. Thus, the paradox raises the ontological questions of where, when and by whom the items were created or the information derived.
After information or an object is sent back in time, it is recovered in the present and becomes the very object or information that was initially brought back in time in the first place. Numerous science fiction stories are based on this paradox, which has also been the subject of serious physics articles.
The term "bootstrap paradox" refers to the expression "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps"; the use of the term for the time-travel paradox was popularized by Robert A. Heinlein's story By His Bootstraps.
Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is to posit that these changes already are contained self-consistently in the past timeline. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his or her role in creating history, not changing it. The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can.
However, a scenario can occur where items or information are passed from the future to the past, which then become the same items or information that are subsequently passed back. This not only creates a loop, but a situation where these items have no discernible origin. Physical items are even more problematic than pieces of information, since they should ordinarily age and increase in entropy according to the Second law of thermodynamics. But if they age by any nonzero amount at each cycle, they cannot be the same item to be sent back in time, creating a contradiction.
Another problem is the "reverse grandfather paradox", where whatever is sent to the past allows the time travel in the first place (such as saving your past self's life, or sending vital information about the time travel mechanism).
The paradox raises the ontological questions of where, when and by whom the items were created or the information derived. Time loop logic operates on similar principles, sending the solutions to computation problems back in time to be checked for correctness without ever being computed "originally".
Whether or not a scenario described in this paradox would actually be possible, even if time travel itself were possible, is not presently known.
The bootstrap paradox is similar to, but distinct from, the predestination paradox, in which individuals or information travel back in time and ultimately trigger events they already experienced in their own present. In the latter case, information and objects involved have definite origins.
*
131.Numbers Station.
A numbers station is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by unusual broadcasts, reading out lists of numbers or incomprehensible morse code messages. The voices are often created by speech synthesis and are transmitted in a wide variety of languages. The voices are usually female, although sometimes men's or children's voices are used. Some voices are synthesized and created by machines; however, some stations used to have live readers.
In the 1960s, Time magazine reported that the numbers stations first appeared shortly after World War II and were imitating a format that had been used to send weather data during that war. It is widely assumed that these broadcasts transmit covert messages to spies. The Czech Ministry of Interior and the Swedish Security Service have both acknowledged the use of numbers stations by Czechoslovakia for espionage, with declassified documents proving the same. With a few exceptions, no QSL responses have been received from numbers stations by shortwave listeners who sent reception reports to said stations, which is the expected behavior of a non-clandestine station.
The best known of the numbers stations was the "Lincolnshire Poacher", which is thought to have been run by the British Secret Intelligence Service.
In 2001, the United States tried the Cuban Five on the charge of spying for Cuba. That group had received and decoded messages that had been broadcast from Cuban numbers stations. Also in 2001, Ana Belen Montes, a senior US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was arrested and charged with espionage. The federal prosecutors alleged that Montes was able to communicate with the Cuban Intelligence Directorate through encoded messages, with instructions being received through "encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba". In 2006, Carlos Alvarez and his wife, Elsa, were arrested and charged with espionage. The U.S. District Court Florida stated that "defendants would receive assignments via shortwave radio transmissions".
In June 2003, the United States similarly charged Walter Kendall Myers with conspiracy to spy for Cuba and receiving and decoding messages broadcast from a numbers station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Directorate to further that conspiracy.
It has been reported that the United States used numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries. There are also claims that State Department operated stations, such as KKN50 and KKN44, used to broadcast similar "numbers" messages or related traffic.
According to the notes of The Conet Project, which has compiled recordings of these transmissions, numbers stations have been reported since World War I. If accurate, this would count numbers stations among the earliest radio broadcasts.
It has long been speculated, and was argued in court in one case, that these stations operate as a simple and foolproof method for government agencies to communicate with spies working undercover. According to this theory, the messages are encrypted with a one-time pad, to avoid any risk of decryption by the enemy. As evidence, numbers stations have changed details of their broadcasts or produced special, nonscheduled broadcasts coincident with extraordinary political events, such as the August Coup of 1991 in the Soviet Union.
Numbers stations are also acknowledged for espionage purposes in Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton's Spycraft:
The one-way voice link (OWVL) described a covert communications system that transmitted messages to an agent's unmodified shortwave radio using the high-frequency shortwave bands between 3 and 30 MHz at a predetermined time, date, and frequency contained in their communications plan. The transmissions were contained in a series of repeated random number sequences and could only be deciphered using the agent's one-time pad. If proper tradecraft was practiced and instructions were precisely followed, an OWVL transmission was considered unbreakable. [...] As long as the agent's cover could justify possessing a shortwave radio and he was not under technical surveillance, high-frequency OWVL was a secure and preferred system for the CIA during the Cold War.
Others speculate that some of these stations may be related to illegal drug smuggling operations. Unlike government stations, smugglers' stations would need to be lower powered and irregularly operated, to avoid location by triangulated direction finding. However, numbers stations have transmitted with impunity for decades, so they are generally presumed to be operated or sponsored by governments. Additionally, numbers station transmissions in the international shortwave bands typically transmit at high power levels that might be unavailable to ranches, farms, or plantations in isolated drug-growing regions.
High frequency radio signals transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local RF noise levels, weather, season, and sunspots, and can then be received with a properly tuned antenna of adequate size, and a good receiver. However, spies often have to work only with available hand-held receivers, sometimes under difficult local conditions, and in all seasons and sunspot cycles. Only very large transmitters, perhaps up to 500,000 watts, are guaranteed to get through to nearly any basement-dwelling spy, nearly any place on earth, nearly all of the time. Some governments may not need a numbers station with global coverage if they only send spies to nearby countries.
A 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government department that, at that time, regulated radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, "These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption."
On some stations, tones can be heard in the background. In such cases, the voice may simply be an aid to tuning to the correct frequency, with the actual coded message being sent by modulating the tones, using a technology such as burst transmission.
The use of numbers stations as a method of espionage is discussed in Spycraft:
The only item Penkovsky used that could properly be called advanced tradecraft was his 'agent-receive' communications through a one-way voice-link. These encoded messages, known as OWVL, were broadcast over shortwave frequencies at predetermined times from a CIA-operated transmitter in Western Europe. Penkovsky listened to these messages on a Panasonic radio?strings of numbers read in a dispassionate voice?and then decoded them using a one-time pad.
Identifying and locating.
Numbers stations are often given nicknames by enthusiasts, often reflecting some distinctive element of the station such as their interval signal. For example, the "Lincolnshire Poacher", formerly one of the best known numbers stations (generally thought to be run by SIS, as its transmissions have been traced to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus), played the first two bars of the folk song "The Lincolnshire Poacher" before each string of numbers.
The "Atención" station was thought to be from Cuba, as a supposed error allowed Radio Havana Cuba to be carried on the frequency.
Several articles in the radio magazine Popular Communications published in the 1980s and early 1990s described hobbyists using portable radio direction-finding equipment to locate numbers stations in Florida and in the Warrenton, Virginia, areas of the United States. From the outside, they observed the station's antenna inside a military facility, the Warrenton Training Center. The station hunter speculated that the antenna's transmitter at the facility was connected by a telephone wire pair to a source of spoken numbers in the Washington, D.C., area. The author said the Federal Communications Commission would not comment on public inquiries about American territory numbers stations.
According to an internal Cold War era report of the Polish Ministry of Interior, numbers stations DCF37 (3370 kHz) and DFD21 (4010 kHz) transmitted from West Germany since the early 1950s.
The "Atención" station of Cuba became the world's first numbers station to be officially and publicly accused of transmitting to spies. It was the centerpiece of a United States federal court espionage trial following the arrest of the Wasp Network of Cuban spies in 1998. The U.S. prosecutors claimed the accused were writing down number codes received from Atención, using Sony hand-held shortwave receivers, and typing the numbers into laptop computers to decode spying instructions. The FBI testified that they had entered a spy's apartment in 1995, and copied the computer decryption program for the Atención numbers code. They used it to decode Atención spy messages, which the prosecutors unveiled in court.
United States government evidence included the following three examples of decoded Atención messages. (Not reported whether the original clear texts were in Spanish, although the phrasing of "Day of the Woman" would indicate so.):
"prioritize and continue to strengthen friendship with Joe and Dennis" [68 characters]
"Under no circumstances should [agents] German nor Castor fly with BTTR or another organization on days 24, 25, 26 and 27." [112 characters] (BTTR is the anti-Castro airborne group Brothers to the Rescue)
"Congratulate all the female comrades for International Day of the Woman." [71 characters] (Probably a simple greeting for International Women's Day on 8 March)
At the rate of one spoken number per character per second, each of these sentences takes more than a minute to transmit.
The moderator of an e-mail list for global numbers station hobbyists claimed, "Someone on the Spooks list had already cracked the code for a repeated transmission [from Havana to Miami] if it was received garbled." Such code-breaking is possible if a one-time pad decoding key is used more than once. If used properly, however, the code cannot be broken.
Generally, numbers stations follow a basic format, although there are many differences in details between stations. Transmissions usually begin on the hour or half-hour.
The prelude, introduction, or call-up of a transmission (from which stations' informal nicknames are often derived) includes some kind of identifier, either for the station itself and/or for the intended recipient. This can take the form of numeric or radio-alphabet "code names" (e.g. "Charlie India Oscar", "250 250 250", "Six-Niner-Zero-Oblique-Five-Four"), characteristic phrases (e.g. "¡Atención!", "Achtung!", "Ready? Ready?", "1234567890"), and sometimes musical or electronic sounds (e.g. "The Lincolnshire Poacher", "Magnetic Fields"). Sometimes, as in the case of the Israeli radio-alphabet stations, the prelude can also signify the nature or priority of the message to follow (e.g., [hypothetically] "Charlie India Oscar-2", indicating that no message follows). Often the prelude repeats for a period before the body of the message begins.
After the prelude, there is usually an announcement of the number of number-groups in the message, the page to be used from the one-time pad, or other pertinent information. The groups are then recited. Groups are usually either four or five digits or radio-alphabet letters. The groups are typically repeated, either by reading each group twice, or by repeating the entire message as a whole.
Some stations send more than one message during a transmission. In this case, some or all of the above process is repeated, with different contents.
Finally, after all the messages have been sent, the station will sign off in some characteristic fashion. Usually it will simply be some form of the word "end" in whatever language the station uses (e.g., "End of message; End of transmission", "Ende", "Fini", "Final", "?????"). Some stations, especially those thought to originate from the former Soviet Union, end with a series of zeros, e.g., "00000" "000 000"; others end with music or other sounds.
Because of the secretive nature of the messages, the cryptographic function employed by particular stations is not publicly known, except in one (or possibly two) cases. It is assumed that most stations use a one-time pad that would make the contents of these number groups indistinguishable from randomly generated numbers or digits. In one confirmed case, West Germany did use a one-time pad for numbers transmissions.
Although few numbers stations have been tracked down by location, the technology used to transmit the numbers has historically been clear?stock shortwave transmitters using powers from 10 kW to 100 kW.
Amplitude modulated (AM) transmitters with optionally?variable frequency, using class-C power output stages with plate modulation, are the workhorses of international shortwave broadcasting, including numbers stations.
Application of spectrum analysis to numbers station signals has revealed the presence of data bursts, RTTY-modulated subcarriers, phase-shifted carriers, and other unusual transmitter modulations like polytones. (RTTY-modulated subcarriers were also present on some U.S. commercial radio transmissions during the Cold War.
The frequently reported use of high tech modulations like data bursts, in combination or in sequence with spoken numbers, suggests varying transmissions for differing intelligence operations.
Speech/Morse generator.
For spies in the field, low-tech spoken number transmissions continue to have advantages in the 21st century. High-tech data receiving equipment is difficult to obtain, and being caught with just a shortwave radio has a degree of plausible deniability that no spying is being conducted whereas possessing equipment more advanced than a civilian shortwave news radio would raise more eyebrows and would more quickly be construed as evidence of spying than something as harmlessly commonplace as an AM radio. Yet governments' embassies, aircraft, and ships at sea are known to possess complex receiving equipment that could make regular use of encrypted data transmissions from the home country. These probably include charts and photos that require more transmitted data than can be sent efficiently using spoken numbers.
Although many numbers stations have various nicknames which usually describe some aspect of the station itself, these nicknames sometimes led to confusion among listeners, particularly when discussing stations with similar traits. M. Gauffman of the E.N.I.G.M.A. numbers stations monitoring group originally assigned a code to each known station. Portions of the original E.N.I.G.M.A. group moved on to other interest in 2000 and the classification of numbers stations was continued by the follow-on group ENIGMA 2000. The document containing the description of each station and its code designation is called the "ENIGMA Control List", currently in its 25th edition. This classification scheme takes the form of a letter followed by a number (or, in the case of some "X" stations, more numbers). The letter indicates the language used by the station in question:
E indicates a station broadcasting in English.
G indicates a station broadcasting in German.
S indicates a station broadcasting in a Slavic language.
V indicates all other languages.
M is a station broadcasting in Morse code.
X indicates all other transmissions such as polytones in addition to some unexplained broadcasts which may not actually be numbers stations.
There are also a few other stations with a specific classification:
SK ? Digital Mode
HM ? Hybrid Mode
DP ? Digital-Pseudo Polytone
For example, the well known, defunct Lincolnshire Poacher station has the designation E3 (or E03), the Cuban "Atención" station has designation V2 (or V02). The most recent station to be given a designation is the Vietnamese language station V30.
Some stations have also been stripped of their designation if they are discovered not to be a numbers station. This was the case for E22 which was discovered in 2005 to be test transmissions for All India Radio.
*
132.The First People.
The First People are a mythos introduced in the third season episode "6955 kHz". They describe what Walter and other characters on the show believe to be a race of intelligent beings that existed before the mass extinction event, responsible for the construction of the Machine.
An extinction (level) event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the amount of life on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life. It occurs when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation. Because the majority of diversity and biomass on Earth is microbial, and thus difficult to measure, recorded extinction events affect the easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere rather than the total diversity and abundance of life.
Although there are 10?14 million species of life currently on the Earth, more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct. Extinction occurs at an uneven rate. Based on the fossil record, the background rate of extinctions on Earth is about two to five taxonomic families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Marine fossils are mostly used to measure extinction rates because of their superior fossil record and stratigraphic range compared to land organisms.
Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent, the Cretaceous?Paleogene extinction event, which occurred approximately 66 million years ago (Ma), was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. Mass extinctions seem to be a Phanerozoic phenomenon, with extinction rates low before large complex organisms arose.
Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from the threshold chosen for describing an extinction event as "major", and the data chosen to measure past diversity. In the prime universe, an ancestor of Sam Weiss (played by Kevin Corrigan), Samuel Wise I, in the late 1800s discovered the manuscript which gave clues about the First People and the Machine, which he had published in several different languages under pseudonyms that were anagrams of his name, such as "Seamus Wiles". However, Samuel Wise I left out a key element of the manuscript, which gave more details of the machine, and included the location of an object known as the "Crowbar", which could be used to penetrate the machine's defenses once Peter entered it. William Bell had collected the five First People texts and recognized Sam Weiss as the descendant of the author, and requested Nina Sharp to treat him as a special adviser in these matters.
In "The Day We Died", it is revealed that the First People are nothing more than a future version of Walter and some others including Astrid and Ella, having sent the deconstructed Machine through a wormhole in New York City to the far-distant past. He further left sufficient clues?the coordinates of the Machine locations via the numbers stations, and the drawings of Peter and Olivia?for the Machine and its operation to be discovered in a bootstrap paradox. In "The Day We Died", the future Walter ensures that the Machine is loaded with a vision of their grim future that Peter in the past will experience, allowing Peter to make a different choice.
*
Inglish Site.35.
*
TO THE THRISE HO-
NOVRABLE AND EVER LY-
VING VERTVES OF SYR PHILLIP
SYDNEY KNIGHT, SYR JAMES JESUS SINGLETON, SYR CANARIS, SYR LAVRENTI BERIA ; AND TO THE
RIGHT HONORABLE AND OTHERS WHAT-
SOEVER, WHO LIVING LOVED THEM,
AND BEING DEAD GIVE THEM
THEIRE DVE.
***
In the beginning there is darkness. The screen erupts in blue, then a cascade of thick, white hexadecimal numbers and cracked language, ?UnusedStk? and ?AllocMem.? Black screen cedes to blue to white and a pair of scales appear, crossed by a sword, both images drawn in the jagged, bitmapped graphics of Windows 1.0-era clip-art?light grey and yellow on a background of light cyan. Blue text proclaims, ?God on tap!?
*
Introduction.
Yes i am getting a little Mobi-Literate(ML) by experimenting literary on my Mobile Phone. Peoplecall it Typographical Laziness(TL).
The first accidental entries for the this part of this encyclopedia.
*
This is TempleOS V2.17, the welcome screen explains, a ?Public Domain Operating System? produced by Trivial Solutions of Las Vegas, Nevada. It greets the user with a riot of 16-color, scrolling, blinking text; depending on your frame of reference, it might recall ?DESQview, the ?Commodore 64, or a host of early DOS-based graphical user interfaces. In style if not in specifics, it evokes a particular era, a time when the then-new concept of ?personal computing? necessarily meant programming and tinkering and breaking things.
*
Index.
130.Bootstrap Paradox.
131.Numbers Station.
132.The First People.
*
130.Bootstrap Paradox.
The bootstrap paradox, or ontological paradox, is a paradox of time travel that refers to scenarios whereby items or information are passed from the future to the past, which in turn become the same items or information that are subsequently passed from the past to the future - this creates a circularity of cause-effect such that the items or information have no discernible origin. Thus, the paradox raises the ontological questions of where, when and by whom the items were created or the information derived.
After information or an object is sent back in time, it is recovered in the present and becomes the very object or information that was initially brought back in time in the first place. Numerous science fiction stories are based on this paradox, which has also been the subject of serious physics articles.
The term "bootstrap paradox" refers to the expression "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps"; the use of the term for the time-travel paradox was popularized by Robert A. Heinlein's story By His Bootstraps.
Because of the possibility of influencing the past while time traveling, one way of explaining why history does not change is to posit that these changes already are contained self-consistently in the past timeline. A time traveler attempting to alter the past in this model, intentionally or not, would only be fulfilling his or her role in creating history, not changing it. The Novikov self-consistency principle proposes that contradictory causal loops cannot form, but that consistent ones can.
However, a scenario can occur where items or information are passed from the future to the past, which then become the same items or information that are subsequently passed back. This not only creates a loop, but a situation where these items have no discernible origin. Physical items are even more problematic than pieces of information, since they should ordinarily age and increase in entropy according to the Second law of thermodynamics. But if they age by any nonzero amount at each cycle, they cannot be the same item to be sent back in time, creating a contradiction.
Another problem is the "reverse grandfather paradox", where whatever is sent to the past allows the time travel in the first place (such as saving your past self's life, or sending vital information about the time travel mechanism).
The paradox raises the ontological questions of where, when and by whom the items were created or the information derived. Time loop logic operates on similar principles, sending the solutions to computation problems back in time to be checked for correctness without ever being computed "originally".
Whether or not a scenario described in this paradox would actually be possible, even if time travel itself were possible, is not presently known.
The bootstrap paradox is similar to, but distinct from, the predestination paradox, in which individuals or information travel back in time and ultimately trigger events they already experienced in their own present. In the latter case, information and objects involved have definite origins.
*
131.Numbers Station.
A numbers station is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by unusual broadcasts, reading out lists of numbers or incomprehensible morse code messages. The voices are often created by speech synthesis and are transmitted in a wide variety of languages. The voices are usually female, although sometimes men's or children's voices are used. Some voices are synthesized and created by machines; however, some stations used to have live readers.
In the 1960s, Time magazine reported that the numbers stations first appeared shortly after World War II and were imitating a format that had been used to send weather data during that war. It is widely assumed that these broadcasts transmit covert messages to spies. The Czech Ministry of Interior and the Swedish Security Service have both acknowledged the use of numbers stations by Czechoslovakia for espionage, with declassified documents proving the same. With a few exceptions, no QSL responses have been received from numbers stations by shortwave listeners who sent reception reports to said stations, which is the expected behavior of a non-clandestine station.
The best known of the numbers stations was the "Lincolnshire Poacher", which is thought to have been run by the British Secret Intelligence Service.
In 2001, the United States tried the Cuban Five on the charge of spying for Cuba. That group had received and decoded messages that had been broadcast from Cuban numbers stations. Also in 2001, Ana Belen Montes, a senior US Defense Intelligence Agency analyst, was arrested and charged with espionage. The federal prosecutors alleged that Montes was able to communicate with the Cuban Intelligence Directorate through encoded messages, with instructions being received through "encrypted shortwave transmissions from Cuba". In 2006, Carlos Alvarez and his wife, Elsa, were arrested and charged with espionage. The U.S. District Court Florida stated that "defendants would receive assignments via shortwave radio transmissions".
In June 2003, the United States similarly charged Walter Kendall Myers with conspiracy to spy for Cuba and receiving and decoding messages broadcast from a numbers station operated by the Cuban Intelligence Directorate to further that conspiracy.
It has been reported that the United States used numbers stations to communicate encoded information to persons in other countries. There are also claims that State Department operated stations, such as KKN50 and KKN44, used to broadcast similar "numbers" messages or related traffic.
According to the notes of The Conet Project, which has compiled recordings of these transmissions, numbers stations have been reported since World War I. If accurate, this would count numbers stations among the earliest radio broadcasts.
It has long been speculated, and was argued in court in one case, that these stations operate as a simple and foolproof method for government agencies to communicate with spies working undercover. According to this theory, the messages are encrypted with a one-time pad, to avoid any risk of decryption by the enemy. As evidence, numbers stations have changed details of their broadcasts or produced special, nonscheduled broadcasts coincident with extraordinary political events, such as the August Coup of 1991 in the Soviet Union.
Numbers stations are also acknowledged for espionage purposes in Robert Wallace and H. Keith Melton's Spycraft:
The one-way voice link (OWVL) described a covert communications system that transmitted messages to an agent's unmodified shortwave radio using the high-frequency shortwave bands between 3 and 30 MHz at a predetermined time, date, and frequency contained in their communications plan. The transmissions were contained in a series of repeated random number sequences and could only be deciphered using the agent's one-time pad. If proper tradecraft was practiced and instructions were precisely followed, an OWVL transmission was considered unbreakable. [...] As long as the agent's cover could justify possessing a shortwave radio and he was not under technical surveillance, high-frequency OWVL was a secure and preferred system for the CIA during the Cold War.
Others speculate that some of these stations may be related to illegal drug smuggling operations. Unlike government stations, smugglers' stations would need to be lower powered and irregularly operated, to avoid location by triangulated direction finding. However, numbers stations have transmitted with impunity for decades, so they are generally presumed to be operated or sponsored by governments. Additionally, numbers station transmissions in the international shortwave bands typically transmit at high power levels that might be unavailable to ranches, farms, or plantations in isolated drug-growing regions.
High frequency radio signals transmitted at relatively low power can travel around the world under ideal propagation conditions, which are affected by local RF noise levels, weather, season, and sunspots, and can then be received with a properly tuned antenna of adequate size, and a good receiver. However, spies often have to work only with available hand-held receivers, sometimes under difficult local conditions, and in all seasons and sunspot cycles. Only very large transmitters, perhaps up to 500,000 watts, are guaranteed to get through to nearly any basement-dwelling spy, nearly any place on earth, nearly all of the time. Some governments may not need a numbers station with global coverage if they only send spies to nearby countries.
A 1998 article in The Daily Telegraph quoted a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry (the government department that, at that time, regulated radio broadcasting in the United Kingdom) as saying, "These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are. People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption."
On some stations, tones can be heard in the background. In such cases, the voice may simply be an aid to tuning to the correct frequency, with the actual coded message being sent by modulating the tones, using a technology such as burst transmission.
The use of numbers stations as a method of espionage is discussed in Spycraft:
The only item Penkovsky used that could properly be called advanced tradecraft was his 'agent-receive' communications through a one-way voice-link. These encoded messages, known as OWVL, were broadcast over shortwave frequencies at predetermined times from a CIA-operated transmitter in Western Europe. Penkovsky listened to these messages on a Panasonic radio?strings of numbers read in a dispassionate voice?and then decoded them using a one-time pad.
Identifying and locating.
Numbers stations are often given nicknames by enthusiasts, often reflecting some distinctive element of the station such as their interval signal. For example, the "Lincolnshire Poacher", formerly one of the best known numbers stations (generally thought to be run by SIS, as its transmissions have been traced to RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus), played the first two bars of the folk song "The Lincolnshire Poacher" before each string of numbers.
The "Atención" station was thought to be from Cuba, as a supposed error allowed Radio Havana Cuba to be carried on the frequency.
Several articles in the radio magazine Popular Communications published in the 1980s and early 1990s described hobbyists using portable radio direction-finding equipment to locate numbers stations in Florida and in the Warrenton, Virginia, areas of the United States. From the outside, they observed the station's antenna inside a military facility, the Warrenton Training Center. The station hunter speculated that the antenna's transmitter at the facility was connected by a telephone wire pair to a source of spoken numbers in the Washington, D.C., area. The author said the Federal Communications Commission would not comment on public inquiries about American territory numbers stations.
According to an internal Cold War era report of the Polish Ministry of Interior, numbers stations DCF37 (3370 kHz) and DFD21 (4010 kHz) transmitted from West Germany since the early 1950s.
The "Atención" station of Cuba became the world's first numbers station to be officially and publicly accused of transmitting to spies. It was the centerpiece of a United States federal court espionage trial following the arrest of the Wasp Network of Cuban spies in 1998. The U.S. prosecutors claimed the accused were writing down number codes received from Atención, using Sony hand-held shortwave receivers, and typing the numbers into laptop computers to decode spying instructions. The FBI testified that they had entered a spy's apartment in 1995, and copied the computer decryption program for the Atención numbers code. They used it to decode Atención spy messages, which the prosecutors unveiled in court.
United States government evidence included the following three examples of decoded Atención messages. (Not reported whether the original clear texts were in Spanish, although the phrasing of "Day of the Woman" would indicate so.):
"prioritize and continue to strengthen friendship with Joe and Dennis" [68 characters]
"Under no circumstances should [agents] German nor Castor fly with BTTR or another organization on days 24, 25, 26 and 27." [112 characters] (BTTR is the anti-Castro airborne group Brothers to the Rescue)
"Congratulate all the female comrades for International Day of the Woman." [71 characters] (Probably a simple greeting for International Women's Day on 8 March)
At the rate of one spoken number per character per second, each of these sentences takes more than a minute to transmit.
The moderator of an e-mail list for global numbers station hobbyists claimed, "Someone on the Spooks list had already cracked the code for a repeated transmission [from Havana to Miami] if it was received garbled." Such code-breaking is possible if a one-time pad decoding key is used more than once. If used properly, however, the code cannot be broken.
Generally, numbers stations follow a basic format, although there are many differences in details between stations. Transmissions usually begin on the hour or half-hour.
The prelude, introduction, or call-up of a transmission (from which stations' informal nicknames are often derived) includes some kind of identifier, either for the station itself and/or for the intended recipient. This can take the form of numeric or radio-alphabet "code names" (e.g. "Charlie India Oscar", "250 250 250", "Six-Niner-Zero-Oblique-Five-Four"), characteristic phrases (e.g. "¡Atención!", "Achtung!", "Ready? Ready?", "1234567890"), and sometimes musical or electronic sounds (e.g. "The Lincolnshire Poacher", "Magnetic Fields"). Sometimes, as in the case of the Israeli radio-alphabet stations, the prelude can also signify the nature or priority of the message to follow (e.g., [hypothetically] "Charlie India Oscar-2", indicating that no message follows). Often the prelude repeats for a period before the body of the message begins.
After the prelude, there is usually an announcement of the number of number-groups in the message, the page to be used from the one-time pad, or other pertinent information. The groups are then recited. Groups are usually either four or five digits or radio-alphabet letters. The groups are typically repeated, either by reading each group twice, or by repeating the entire message as a whole.
Some stations send more than one message during a transmission. In this case, some or all of the above process is repeated, with different contents.
Finally, after all the messages have been sent, the station will sign off in some characteristic fashion. Usually it will simply be some form of the word "end" in whatever language the station uses (e.g., "End of message; End of transmission", "Ende", "Fini", "Final", "?????"). Some stations, especially those thought to originate from the former Soviet Union, end with a series of zeros, e.g., "00000" "000 000"; others end with music or other sounds.
Because of the secretive nature of the messages, the cryptographic function employed by particular stations is not publicly known, except in one (or possibly two) cases. It is assumed that most stations use a one-time pad that would make the contents of these number groups indistinguishable from randomly generated numbers or digits. In one confirmed case, West Germany did use a one-time pad for numbers transmissions.
Although few numbers stations have been tracked down by location, the technology used to transmit the numbers has historically been clear?stock shortwave transmitters using powers from 10 kW to 100 kW.
Amplitude modulated (AM) transmitters with optionally?variable frequency, using class-C power output stages with plate modulation, are the workhorses of international shortwave broadcasting, including numbers stations.
Application of spectrum analysis to numbers station signals has revealed the presence of data bursts, RTTY-modulated subcarriers, phase-shifted carriers, and other unusual transmitter modulations like polytones. (RTTY-modulated subcarriers were also present on some U.S. commercial radio transmissions during the Cold War.
The frequently reported use of high tech modulations like data bursts, in combination or in sequence with spoken numbers, suggests varying transmissions for differing intelligence operations.
Speech/Morse generator.
For spies in the field, low-tech spoken number transmissions continue to have advantages in the 21st century. High-tech data receiving equipment is difficult to obtain, and being caught with just a shortwave radio has a degree of plausible deniability that no spying is being conducted whereas possessing equipment more advanced than a civilian shortwave news radio would raise more eyebrows and would more quickly be construed as evidence of spying than something as harmlessly commonplace as an AM radio. Yet governments' embassies, aircraft, and ships at sea are known to possess complex receiving equipment that could make regular use of encrypted data transmissions from the home country. These probably include charts and photos that require more transmitted data than can be sent efficiently using spoken numbers.
Although many numbers stations have various nicknames which usually describe some aspect of the station itself, these nicknames sometimes led to confusion among listeners, particularly when discussing stations with similar traits. M. Gauffman of the E.N.I.G.M.A. numbers stations monitoring group originally assigned a code to each known station. Portions of the original E.N.I.G.M.A. group moved on to other interest in 2000 and the classification of numbers stations was continued by the follow-on group ENIGMA 2000. The document containing the description of each station and its code designation is called the "ENIGMA Control List", currently in its 25th edition. This classification scheme takes the form of a letter followed by a number (or, in the case of some "X" stations, more numbers). The letter indicates the language used by the station in question:
E indicates a station broadcasting in English.
G indicates a station broadcasting in German.
S indicates a station broadcasting in a Slavic language.
V indicates all other languages.
M is a station broadcasting in Morse code.
X indicates all other transmissions such as polytones in addition to some unexplained broadcasts which may not actually be numbers stations.
There are also a few other stations with a specific classification:
SK ? Digital Mode
HM ? Hybrid Mode
DP ? Digital-Pseudo Polytone
For example, the well known, defunct Lincolnshire Poacher station has the designation E3 (or E03), the Cuban "Atención" station has designation V2 (or V02). The most recent station to be given a designation is the Vietnamese language station V30.
Some stations have also been stripped of their designation if they are discovered not to be a numbers station. This was the case for E22 which was discovered in 2005 to be test transmissions for All India Radio.
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132.The First People.
The First People are a mythos introduced in the third season episode "6955 kHz". They describe what Walter and other characters on the show believe to be a race of intelligent beings that existed before the mass extinction event, responsible for the construction of the Machine.
An extinction (level) event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the amount of life on Earth. Such an event is identified by a sharp change in the diversity and abundance of macroscopic life. It occurs when the rate of extinction increases with respect to the rate of speciation. Because the majority of diversity and biomass on Earth is microbial, and thus difficult to measure, recorded extinction events affect the easily observed, biologically complex component of the biosphere rather than the total diversity and abundance of life.
Although there are 10?14 million species of life currently on the Earth, more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct. Extinction occurs at an uneven rate. Based on the fossil record, the background rate of extinctions on Earth is about two to five taxonomic families of marine invertebrates and vertebrates every million years. Marine fossils are mostly used to measure extinction rates because of their superior fossil record and stratigraphic range compared to land organisms.
Since life began on Earth, several major mass extinctions have significantly exceeded the background extinction rate. The most recent, the Cretaceous?Paleogene extinction event, which occurred approximately 66 million years ago (Ma), was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. In the past 540 million years there have been five major events when over 50% of animal species died. Mass extinctions seem to be a Phanerozoic phenomenon, with extinction rates low before large complex organisms arose.
Estimates of the number of major mass extinctions in the last 540 million years range from as few as five to more than twenty. These differences stem from the threshold chosen for describing an extinction event as "major", and the data chosen to measure past diversity. In the prime universe, an ancestor of Sam Weiss (played by Kevin Corrigan), Samuel Wise I, in the late 1800s discovered the manuscript which gave clues about the First People and the Machine, which he had published in several different languages under pseudonyms that were anagrams of his name, such as "Seamus Wiles". However, Samuel Wise I left out a key element of the manuscript, which gave more details of the machine, and included the location of an object known as the "Crowbar", which could be used to penetrate the machine's defenses once Peter entered it. William Bell had collected the five First People texts and recognized Sam Weiss as the descendant of the author, and requested Nina Sharp to treat him as a special adviser in these matters.
In "The Day We Died", it is revealed that the First People are nothing more than a future version of Walter and some others including Astrid and Ella, having sent the deconstructed Machine through a wormhole in New York City to the far-distant past. He further left sufficient clues?the coordinates of the Machine locations via the numbers stations, and the drawings of Peter and Olivia?for the Machine and its operation to be discovered in a bootstrap paradox. In "The Day We Died", the future Walter ensures that the Machine is loaded with a vision of their grim future that Peter in the past will experience, allowing Peter to make a different choice.
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