[Spooks] Spooks Digest, Vol 78, Issue 26

[J. Random Entity]

On 7/27/10 11:35 AM, Gene Marlin wrote:

> I don't know how radio transmissions are supposed to "click", that sounds
> like 19th century telegraphy, but if it's Morse it makes me think that they
> were decoding either M08a.

Another possibility is that the messages were being transmitted using a 
fairly simple digital mode - something along the lines of x milliseconds 
of tone for a mark, and x milliseconds of carrier-only for a space. 
While I'm not aware of anyone actively doing this, it would go some way 
towards explaining the clicking noises.

Realistically, however, I don't see why this would necessarily be used: 
though it would open up the possibility of unattended reception and / or 
decryption, that would also bring with it a number of undesirable 
operational considerations.  Not to mention that reliably decoding 
digital transmissions pulled out of anything less than excellent 
reception and transmission conditions is typically more difficult than 
having the human ear do the same for voice - and if you can't grab the 
digital transmission off the air with 100% reliability, it can't be decoded.

> But shortwave doesn't seem to have been an important form of communications
> for them, the FBI complaint only mentions it in passing. Mostly they were
> using ad-hoc wireless networks between laptops and steganography--encoding
> text files in images on the Internet.

And even that was done with a sloppiness that, frankly, leaves me 
wondering what was really going on here.

My gut feeling with this whole incident was that it was a dry run for 
the GRU and that we may have been aware of this.  They were willing to 
sacrifice some lower-level agents (or agents-in-training) to see how we 
would respond; we knew that this was what they were doing, and 
pre-empted their exercise with early arrests and a swap (which they may 
have been expecting).  Nobody walks away with serious egg on their face, 
and they don't get to know the full extent of what our actual 
surveillance and interception capabilities are.

Of course, that's just a hypothesis, and only really worth the bits used 
to display it.

- J.