[jojobas]

So, basically the answer is "expensively monitor all outgoing international mail and hope for someone as stupid as to sign his spy letters".

[082349872349872]

The answer is that in 2020, when the median page weighs 2 MB and makes 70 requests over a dozen TCP connections, everything is a potential numbers station.

I had been joking about www.duckdascism.gov in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24458630 but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24526075 has people who've used that channel. (for the record, ~64kbps is more than most people had over dialup in the early days of the web)

[jojobas]

Internet connections are fundamentally different in that they are traceable. You've identified the "station", you can immediately see who's "listening".

Unless you co-opt a page everyone "listens" to, such as facebook or something.

[eternalban]

"The core principle of Tor, "onion routing", was developed in the mid-1990s by United States Naval Research Laboratory employees, mathematician Paul Syverson, and computer scientists Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag, with the purpose of protecting U.S. intelligence communications online. Onion routing was further developed by DARPA in 1997." - wiki on Tor

[jojobas]

Monitoring all sensitive employees for Tor usage is rather easy (or at least much easier than tracking down superhet radiation).

[marcosdumay]

No need to co-opt. You just post a cat image on twitter.

[kozak]

In 1970s USSR there wasn't much outgoing international mail, so the monitoring wasn't really that expensive.

[jojobas]

They weren't just quickly inspecting it, they found invisible ink on it.

[082349872349872]

Outgoing international mail sent by a nonlocal tourist might have been a quick triage signal for the local postmaster?

These days, of course, our communications pass through various boxes that can automate inspections, so no need to involve wetware.

Keyword search in 1960s US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7950_Harvest#Usage

[jojobas]

Nothing makes a "tourist" letter any more likely to be spy-related than any other letter going out of the eastern bloc, say a pen-friend letter to Sweden.

They probably were inspecting all outgoing mail.

[jacquesm]

And as well for all the satellite states.