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Comment by joe_bleau | Hacker News Reader

After reading some of the speculation about it in the online forums, I thought "Wouldn't it be fun to set up something like this as a prank?" It almost sounds like something Woz would be into...

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Ha, I had the same thought - which makes me think that this is almost definitely a big prank that someone set up. Evidence:

- It was first posted on /b/

- Words like "TROOP" and "AGENT" are encoded in ASCII, and accessible by (nearly) any "passcode" that the user types in

and the dead giveaway in my mind:

- The "please stay on the line for the next available circuit" message played by the number was found to have been originally recorded by Time Warner Cable... No serious entity with any use for a numbers station would bother to steal a recorded message from a cable company.

So it's not real (duh :(). Part of me hopes it's an ARG, but in my heart of hearts, I know someone is just trolling /b/, albeit extremely masterfully.

also there is very little information given and that information isn't in a format that would be useful to its intended recipient. great, "AGENT" is at (x,y) and "AGENT" is at (a,b) and "AGENT" is at (c,d). but I want to talk to "AGENT SANDRA". !?!?!?! argh.

Could it be a multi-player Battleship-style game? A player enters his player ID ("agent number") to play. Once all of a player's assets have been destroyed it becomes "compromised".

It would be awesome and easy to set something like this up on twilio. I would have chosen a 702 area code though and when posting about it speculated that it had something to do with area 51. ;)

Just remember that there is a NSA location in Denver, Colorado.

Just about any major city will have an intelligence office of some kind.

I'm pretty sure the NSA has better ciphers for phones than poorly coded ASCII. Isn't there an art installation at the NSA that still hasn't been cracked after 20 years?

You're thinking of the Kryptos sculpture, which is at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos); "of the four messages, three have been solved"; it was installed in November 1990, so it's been almost 22 years.

Or better yet, a VOIP provider that pays you for incoming calls.

The number seems to be owned by Level3, so its likely that its a VOIP line unless Level3 does regular phone circuits in the Denver area. (Source: http://www.telcodata.us/search-area-code-exchange-detail?npa...)

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