The article is being a bit overly mysterious. The radio station exists as part of a Russian military communication network. Here's a website that documents the communication format and logs messages: https://priyom.org/military-stations/russia
Not because it doesn’t work but because it requires the end user to have access to specialist equipment which is quite unusual and hard to explain away and there are other ways to do the same thing that don’t have the same limitations.
But just to be clear for anyone not familiar with this, what you’re hearing is the a message that was encoded using a one time pad and the reason it’s delivered in this quirky format is that it has certain properties that are ideal for clandestine work in dangerous areas where you need to pass a message over an open channel but you need to make sure that if anyone intercepts the message there is no information in there that will give any clues to the contents of the message or the intended recipient (I.e this second property is why encrypted email for example isn’t a suitable replacement).
Beyond that there isn’t really anything that special about it. They are the two properties it provides and that’s the message it’s delivering.
By way of a final example another famous one might be taking an ad in the classifieds section of a newspaper back in the day.
The end user knows where to look and what message they are looking for but nobody beyond the sender and the recipient know that the ad is even a message with another meaning to begin with, unlike the numbers station example however, that wouldn’t be appropriate for sending key material or an OTP encoded message (it needs to be random data) or anything beyond a very simple and low bandwidth message (I.e the operation is ready to start).
They are very cumbersome to use in real life, encrypting and decrypting is done by hand, it’s error prone as a result and very slow. Nobody likes using them at all.
The part you mentioned about the keeping track of and not leaking it also isn’t really an issue so much in reality.
What you hear on the radio isn’t actually that sensitive on its own hence why it’s happily sent in the clear without the key material to decipher it.
The pads themselves are however highly guarded secrets, usually passed along via a dead drop, only ever exposed to the minimum of people and designed to be very easy to destroy quickly and are a bit flimsy as a result.
But destroying the pad is a part of the whole “how to receive a message securely” process that they go through so it never exists to be used as evidence beyond the time that it’s actually useful.
Also the people handling them are highly trained and trusted individuals who are extremely motivated to be very sensible while working with them as the entire reason you would use a method like this in particular is usually because you will be tortured and shot if discovered.
This is ironically also why it doesn’t make sense usually for that person to have access to and know how to use a shortwave radio. If you get caught with that equipment your fate might be the same either way.
Some fun trivia: the British as far back as the 50s I believe did have some success where they had developed a system that allowed them to essentially use direction finding techniques but for radios that were tuned to a specific frequency even if they weren’t transmitting. It was known as Operation Rafter and is on Wikipedia.
One more example I’ll throw out there if you want to read a cool story is an account of how the ANC (the political group associated with Nelson Mandela) developed their own covert communications system with a lot of similar properties when they were trying to overthrow the apartheid government in South Africa during the 80s and 90s.
It’s a great read https://omalley.nelsonmandela.org/index.php/site/q/03lv03445...
One other note here is that OTPs don’t have to be distributed in this manner. An OTP can use something already distributed and readily available to end users, such as a Gideon Bible or something (making sure to get the right edition, printing, etc) that everyone in a hotel room has access to. The key is having access to something, making sure it’s long enough for the series of messages to be encoded/decoded, and that no one else knows what it is.
I might be wrong, it’s not my area of expertise.
Good clarification.
Using a passage from a book directly as an OTP is not secure at all. It's similar to the result of reusing an OTP: it gives an attacker two messages in (e.g.) English whose sum (using a book as an OTP) or difference (reused OTP) is known. Since the entropy of English is around a bit per character (more or less), and the deltas reveal almost lg(26) ~ 4.7 bits per character, knowing the sum or difference can determine most of the contents of the message in either case.
Reading every n'th letter in the book is probably marginally harder to break, but I still wouldn't rely on it for anything serious.
There's no need for that to be true.
At some point the BBC were forced under FOIA to admit they'd never prosecuted anyone using evidence from detector vans.
If they used a technique which essentially was considered military secret not too long ago. (Compared to the time when the vans started to appear.)
That really amped up the fascination gene in me =D
I think you need to understand the context here. This isn’t a scenario where a friend casually asks you what’s with the radio.
This is where you are most likely going to have to have have a damn compelling reason why you have this while taking a beating from a team of very motivated counter intelligence professionals and your story needs to stand up to a huge amount of very detailed scrutiny under some pretty shitty circumstances.
Usually by the time they know you have the radio depending on where you are you probably aren’t going home at that point.
There’s a famous case of this called the TRIGON case when the US were doing this in the Cold War to communicate with a guy in the Soviet ministry of foreign affairs. There was no talking your way out of it once they knew the radio existed.
There’s some interesting interviews with the CIA officers who were running him in Moscow at the time where they go into a lot of the details. Marti Peterson is the name of the person you should go looking for if you want to know more.
For example, comments on Britney Spears' Instagram page: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/russi...
Crying shame that post-truth is the norm for major news outlets. UK is becoming the US.
This featured doctors (and medical staff) being directly linked to Syrian opposition groups[1] (with their voices being dubbed[2], originals still on BBC), actors unintentionally exposing themselves[3], Syrian opposition fighters claiming the attack never took place[4] and when all of this was reported to the BBC they decided to simply memory hole the event and take down the documentary from YouTube, as well as some effort in taking down YouTube videos uploaded by others that feature some of the content.
It's worth comparing the footage from the documentary to a historical napalm victim footage[5] from Egypt which shows the severity of napalm attacks in comparison to what we see in the documentary.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm far from being supportive of the Syrian government or unaware of their shocking actions during the conflict, but this entire production was a theatrical construction by the BBC.
[0] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/
[1] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/#Rola
[2] https://youtu.be/puaOvmiyunM?t=39
[3] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/#Dutch
[4] https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/#comma...