[Analemma_]

I disagree? The point of a numbers station is that it broadcasts in the clear and anyone with a receiver can get it, but only people with the appropriate decryption key can make any use of it. Since it's broadcasting all the time, there's no need for steganography or covert transmission. That's exactly what a numbers station is.

Where the article loses me is the implication that this is somehow sinister or beyond the pale: it's just piggybacking on a global transmitter network that exists anyway, why not?

[thaumasiotes]

> Since it's broadcasting all the time, there's no need for steganography or covert transmission.

Well, you could look at it that way, or you could say that the fact that it's broadcasting all the time is the steganography. That constant transmission of nonsense that nobody wants is what makes it fail to be suspicious when you send a message that somebody does want.

[anigbrowl]

This implication is purely in your head. The article and the scientist whose work it describes are just pointing out the identification of some data that's been transmitted across a public channel for years without anyne noticing.

[defrost]

It's been noticed for a long long time, as noted in the article, this is more or less the first time it has broken in more general public news media.

Civilian high precision surveying has been reverse engineering raw GPS since the Navstar sats and swapping notes on back channels.

[BigTTYGothGF]

If you need a key it's not "in the clear".

[tokai]

Its all comes down to what we buy as the definition for a number station. For me a number station needs sends a message to be a number station, not a key.

[sgjohnson]

>For me a number station needs sends a message to be a number station, not a key.

We don't know that it's a key that's being sent. For all we know, it could be just random data. Obviously it's most likely not random data, but ciphertext. Either way, we have no idea what the message is.

[wildzzz]

It is kind of like a number station but it's meant for machine to machine communication of commands, keys, and probably test messages specifically for military GPS receivers. The US government has plenty of other satellites (and the internet) at its disposal for sending messages to people covertly. They don't need to risk screwing up critical infrastructure just to send a message to someone. It also wouldn't be prudent to give a secret agent something so obviously a piece of spycraft. There's plenty of off-the-shelf radio receivers you can buy worldwide that would be capable of picking up an encoded message transmitted by a passing satellite.

[robotresearcher]

A data payload you didn't already know is a message. This message contains a key.