MetaFilter posts tagged with spy

¡Atención!", "1234567890"

rongorongo — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:31:28 -0800

Find a short wave radio and before long you should be able to tune into The Lincolnshire Poacher - the station plays an introduction comprising part of the eponymous folk tune followed by a robotic female voice reading strings of numbers: listen! So called Numbers Stations have been a mysterious constant of short wave radio for several decades. The Conet Project [previously 1, 2, 3] has made a collection of the recordings available allowing you to listen to "Ready! Ready! 15728", "The Buzzer" (especially mysterious), "Gong Station Chimes", "Magnetic Fields" and many others.... Nobody will admit to owning or running these stations - but, since the 70s, a small community of followers has been gathering information on them in sites like Spynumbers, in books like Simon Mason's "Secret Signals" and as samples that have made their way into tracks like "Gyroscope" from the Boards of Canada. NPR recorded the spooky "Shortwave Numbers Mystery" and The Washington Post profiled Londoner Akin Fernandez who was behind the Conet CDs. The most credible theory is that the stations are for the benefit of spies (for MI6 in the case of the Lincolnshire Poacher) and that they are broadcasting messages for use with one time pads. In the UK, by the way, you are breaking the law by listening to these transmissions - and, as a spokesperson from the British ministry of defence said (quoted by Wired), "These [numbers stations] are what you suppose they are - people shouldn't be mystified by them. They're not, shall we say, for public consumption." That's OK then. Message ends.

Bad Company

msalt — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:26:25 -0800

The CIA's Odd Man Out: CIA station chief Bob Lady coordinated the secret kidnapping of Islamic militant Abu Omar in Milan and Omar's "extreme rendition" to Egypt where he was tortured. Italy indicted various CIA agents; Lady is on the run in Central America, abandoned by the agency. The twist: Lady opposed the mission all along. And Abu Omar will probably end up with Lady's home in the foothills of the Alps. Lady's boss -- Jeff Castelli, then head of intelligence operations in Italy -- simply received a reprimand and is being groomed for promotion, despite the arrest warrant out for him in Europe. (See "Backchannel Chatter" at end of this article. ) More on Lady's situation from the March, 2007 GQ; Omar's description of these events from the Chicago Tribune.

Storytelling with Google Maps

brain_drain — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:34:53 -0800

The 21 Steps is a spy thriller short story that is told using Google Maps. [via mefi projects]

Pink panther in Iran

specialk420 — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 23:01:27 -0800

Is now captured Robert A. Levinson a spy? a government agent?
Perhaps someone on non-official cover (NOC)? or just a guy doing some research for a book in Iran. The WaPo cuts through the mumbo jumbo here.

Canadian Espionage?

beta male — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 13:46:52 -0800

Canadian spy monies?! The Defense Department has issued a warning to its American contractor employees. Apparently, Canadian coins have been outfitted with embedded RFID transmitters. Not the first instance of RFIDs in monies either. Explosive consequences. Elsewhere, whats the point? RFID previously on Metafilter.

Radioactive Isotopes for sale

mattbucher — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 10:38:13 -0800

"If you really wanted to poison someone, you would of course have to come up with a way to remove the invisible amount of material from the exempt sources - which is just about physically impossible and combine them together. Of course you would also need that 15,000 exempt sources." You can buy the radioactive material, Polonium-210, that killed a former Russian spy for only $69--but you'd need a lot of it to take down an enemy or two.

The real James Bond

cenoxo — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 17:16:43 -0800

The real James Bond — Sidney George Reilly, the shadowy 'Ace of Spies' and inspiration for Ian Fleming's 007, was born Shlomo/Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum in Ukraine/Poland in 1874. Perhaps illegitimate, dapper Sidney was a tireless self-promoter, patent-medicine chemist, world traveller, and high-stakes gambler (not only at the tables: he married four women but divorced none.) A Czarist Okhrana informer as a Parisian student, he was hired as an undercover agent in the late 1890s by M of Scotland Yard. Reilly worked both sides of the Russo-Japanese War, influenced British oil interests in Iran, brokered World War I arms sales, and volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps in Canada. Sent to Russia by C of Britain's SIS in 1918, he joined a plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks: it failed, but he escaped to London. Returning to Russia in 1919 to help the White Army, he was later awarded the British Military Cross. A staunch anti-Communist, Reilly schemed against them throughout his career. Lured back to Russia by agents of the 'Trust' — an anti-Bolshevik trap set by the Soviet OGPU — Sidney was arrested, interrogated, and shot in 1925.

You can read this but then I'll have to kill you

scalefree — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 11:41:18 -0800

The NSA Bibliographies The NSA internally publishes thousands of papers every year, on every topic from spycraft to cryptography to physics & aliens (no, really!). Each year the titles of these papers gets indexed & those indexes are also published internally. The Memory Hole has made a successful FOIA request for a large number of these, spanning almost 50 years. We don't get to see the actual papers, but just the titles are fascinating - including such page turners as "Computer Virus Infections: Is NSA Vulnerable?", "KAL 007 Shootdown: A View from [redacted]", "NSA in the Cyberpunk Future", "Telephone Codes and Safe Combinations: A Deadly Duo", "Coupon Collecting and Cryptology", "Cranks, Nuts, and Screwballs" & my personal favorite, "Key to the Extraterrestrial Messages". When you're done browsing the titles, there's a sample form you can use to request some of the documents yourself!

"Let the game begin..." - Tomlinson v. MI6

jack_mo — Wed, 24 May 2006 08:11:47 -0800

Richard Tomlinson is a former spy. Jailed under the Official Secrets Act in 1995 for publishing his memoirs, famed for claiming there's a cover up surrounding Princess Diana's death and allegedly leaking a list of active MI6 agents, he is still fuming about his dismissal from the Secret Intelligence Service. So he started a weblog, complete with posts containing sensitive information. The British authorities are displeased.

Secret James Bond Rock cost Millions

jfrancis — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 17:04:55 -0800

A fake stone packed with sophisticated British spy devices sparks a UK / Russian controversy. More articles via Google News