 Thank you all for not injuring each other and you know running out our insurance or anything and thank you all for coming to the first event We all worked really hard on it, and now I'm going to show you how hard it is to do a talk inside of that event so This is talking about numbers stations What they are I'll get to eventually but what I really need to introduce you to is mr. Belvedere This was my favorite sitcom growing up. I wanted to watch it every single day It's about a British Butler who moves in with the sportswriter family and you know hygiene similarity ensue But the problem is I lived in the Adirondacks during the summer as you can see the Adirondacks is not near any major Broadcasting pivot in upstate New York welcome to upstate New York by the way and But you could get WKTV with a video feed with the audio was terrible You could not hear any of the terrible sexual puns the kids are not supposed to get my dad had a shortwave radio I used that shortwave radio. I found out that CVS the local affiliate actually pushed their audio out Just the audio feed and you just listen to TV on the radio, which is a band And I can put the TV on listen the shortwave and you know get all the mr. Belvedere I needed I also lived during the rest of the year during an oldie station. I would get In between song chatter on my telephone and everything else in my house It was amazing to hear these secret signals that nobody else could hear and then the internet came along and I was able to indulge more of my kind of session with these things you're not supposed to hear and Broadcast frequencies that you know you aren't supposed to get and then I discovered something on the internet that was amazing It was the Lincolnshire poacher and then she'll keep doing that for a while. She'll read numbers for about 10 minutes The Lincolnshire poacher is a numbers station. It's also a traditional English folk song as a type of cheese The Lincolnshire poacher is run by MI6, which is the British version of the CIA basically They read out those numbers and you can hear them pretty much anywhere in the world This is approximately where the Lincolnshire poacher station once was we don't know if it's still broadcasting That's in Cyprus, Greece where you hide all your economic money It's there because it's central kind of a European location So the agents of MI6 around the world can receive these numbers broadcast But you can also get it all over the world to the ionosphere which bounces I'm not a radio guy, but it bounces low frequency stuff all around the world There's a whole thing I'm lost where they can hear a transmission from all the part of the world Basically number stations can be picked up almost anywhere with the right equipment This is what a number station is basically sending out in Cuba. This is what they sent out for one broadcast Basically, they introduce a group. They sometimes they'll read the numbers to see what they sound like They'll read text in four five or six number groups, and then they'll repeat it And then they'll say fiend or attention people who are spies have these little tiny pads These are called one-time pads They're basically a book full of numbers and you know that group number they announced at the beginning of the transmission Let's you know what page to turn to to decrypt the message Basically, it's it works better than anything else almost for certain things because if you have a whole bunch of broadcasting equipment in your apartment Your neighbors might start wondering like about your job that you claim is like selling you know vacuum cleaners or whatever With a one-time pad and a shortwave radio. You are pretty inconspicuous and you can get information from the home base It's actually kind of NSA proof In a way because even if they find your one-time pad it tells them nothing In unless you get software on your laptop that decrypted for you because the Cuban government thinks you can't do it yourself And then they find your laptop and they decrypt some of the messages about making friends of their forced people Don't be on a plane when we bomb it and congratulating the female comrades on the International Day of the Woman This actually happened. It was the Cuban five Miami case. This is another one of my favorite stations. This is called the buzzer It is a Russian station. All it does is buzz Kind of it sometimes it sends out in numbers which is freaks people out because the rest of the time is just doing this All day all night it buzzes and then occasionally it'll say something people This is a shop from inside the buzzer when it was abandoned. It's still operating from a different location now What's funny is that you know people didn't think that it did anything people thought it was a science experiment some kind of Nuclear thing the day that Boris Yeltsin they attempted a coup on him the hardliners tried to throw him out of office It just read the number five all day long peat peat peat peat peat peat. Nobody knows what that means But someone asked the British government to confirm whether there were number stations where the MI six were actually using them They gave him this quote these are what you suppose they are people shouldn't be mystified by them They are not for shall we say public consumption and that is as close as we have ever gotten to anyone recognizing The number stations actually exist You should Google number stations You should look at a co-net project where you can actually listen to hundred like dozens at least of number stations and look up a really great article on The web called shortwave espionage for way more about number stations than I could jam into five minutes. So thank you