It turns out that the Feds have been tapping the phones of the Portland Antifa crowd. Well, not exactly tapping. They cloned the SIM cards of protesters that they came in contact with, and then were able to intercept calls made to that device.
Now I know what you are thinking- “Who cares? They are just the pantifa crowd.” Well, you SHOULD care, because the Feds are not constrained to only use this sort of attack on just one group of people. As I posted back in 2017, the people who were plotting to have Trump impeached were careful not to use most means of communication, preferring instead to use 2 meter HAM radio.
There are many technical reasons why spying on HAM radio would be a nearly impossible task. Just by using the frequencies and methods permitted to a person with a Technician license, there are thousands of available channels. Toss in the various modes like Digital, SSB, USB, AM, FM, CW, etc., and then consider that the higher frequencies are short range and would require hundreds of listening stations in every state, and it becomes a very difficult proposition to monitor HAM radio.
Another way of communicating to others is the use of a “dictionary code.” Short messages can be encoded rather simply:
1 Eliminate null words that add no real content to the message – words like “the” “and” – the fewer the words in the message, the better.
2 Use a book that has been agreed upon ahead of time. A dictionary or thesaurus is easiest. No one would think twice about seeing a dictionary on your bookshelf. Then you simply look for each word in the book. Then write down the page number, and the number of the word.
Let’s say that the word is “habit”- I look and see that the word is found on page 335 and the word is the 16th word listed on that page, the word habit would be replaced with the number 335.16
3 Do the same for each word in the message. You can add fake words at the beginning and end of the message as red herrings to complicate a potential adversary’s task in decoding the message. Use your imagination.
4 At this point, the weak link is probably one of the people in the communication, or perhaps traffic analysis. Sometimes the people who are communicating and the frequency of those communications are nearly as informative as the contents of the message themselves.
5 To hide this, a blog is a great way of putting messages out there. Post often, and simply append a short message to the end of each post. You can even make most of them fake and have it begin with a prearranged “real message” number at the beginning of the post, so your intended recipient knows if they should waste time trying to decode it. Say, any message that has a word on page 327 as the first word is a real one, the rest can be ignored.
I am sure there are other ways. Use your imagination. Just remember that Big Brother is listening.
