As Ellsworth mentioned on Friday, a roomful of smart people did the math and determined that a Russian satellite has been jamming GPS signals over Europe. But it's not the only new of orbital shenanigans to hit the wire this week. In conversation with information security expert Steven Murdoch, the folks at 404 Media discovered that the United States could be directing covert operations using data hidden inside of the GPS signals that the rest of us use to navigate to Starbucks.
"I think the evidence that it's for key transmission—for use in distributing the keys for accessing the military GPS signals—is pretty strong now," Murdoch said in a call with 404 Media. He noted that the military has "specialized receivers that have the ability to have keys loaded into them" and "presumably have the ability to decrypt these special messages."
In his new article, Murdoch described how this "forgotten 176-bit slot in the world's most successful navigation signal turned out to be its quietest and most consequential broadcast."
For those old enough or nerdy enough to remember, this sort of spy crap used to be carried out (we think) using Numbers Stations: shortwave transmissions featuring synthesized voices that rattled off seemingly random numbers in a constant loop. If you had the hardware to listen in on the broadcasts, you'd occasionally snag on using letters, phrases or even morse code.
So, it may well be that every time you use Google Maps to get lost, you've may also have been receiving encrypted instructions for black bag work in Eastern Europe.
Previously:
• A satellite has been jamming GPS over Europe
