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Radio & Disruption: Open Signals and Dataveillance

The Ionosphere is a strange place. Full of sporadic transmissions, whooshes, and whirls, the transmissions that populate the Earth’s electromagnetic field have intrigued amateur hobbyists pretty much as long as the experts. Radio enthusiasts are known to spend upwards of thousands of dollars on industrial and even military-grade equipment (1) to tune into the signals from the farthest edges of the radio spectrum. While a large portion of high-level radio usage is heavily encrypted, that hasn’t stopped networks of users to keep tabs on government controlled stations, speculating on repeated signals, or using decoding software to read messages. With the advent of streaming and online access to applications known as a WidebandSDR’s (2), which previously required pricey receivers, listening in to the whole range of frequencies has become easier than ever, though the activity still remains rather niche. Small communities online, such as the NSRIC (Numbers Station Research and Information Center), have functioned as open databases , keeping tabs on government stations, archiving significant broadcasts, and  speculating on the purposes of stations. Contributing users may spend hours a week listening in to military drills, navigational signals, and encrypted communications from around the world.

To contextualize the significance of open SDR listening in a political context, a 2016 article explains the staying power of shortwave communication, outlining the NSA’s usage of HF(High Frequency) monitoring to keep tabs on the political leanings of high profile political figures critical to decision-making in the United Nations, in this case in reference to policy decisions in Iraq: “intelligence derived from HF collection provided the position and voting intentions of several key players.” (3) With the exponentially increasing amount of data the lay-user has potential access to today, sous-dataveillance may prove an effective method in equalizing the power structures between citizens and government entities; “counterbalancing surveillance by the state (oversight) with citizen-based sousveillance (undersight) to achieve a ‘democratic homeostasis’, or equiveillance, where the veillant forces of the state and citizens are balanced.” (4)The increasing arsenal of citizen-accessable data makes this ‘equiveillance’ more possible. While the usage of radio to monitor political happenings has been in some citizen’s arsenals for many decades, the depth of access in recent years may prove to be significant in years to come. Footnotes: 

1)  "The Quadrus SDR: A New Military-Grade Software Defined Radio Receiver." (Press Release) The SWLing Post. January 23, 2015. 

2) http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901

3) Williams, Margot / Lee Micah, "Iraqi Insurgents Stymied the NSA and Other Highlights from 263 Internal Agency Reports." The Intercept. August 10, 2016 

4)  Gradecki, Jennifer, and Derek Curry. "Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency: Prototyping counterveillance." Big Data & Society 4, no. 1 (2017)  

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Radio and Disruption: Pirate Parties

“This is Radio Free Scotland proclaiming to the nation that the fight for independence is on in earnest.” These words, followed by a patriotic blast of Scotland the Brave, took over the airwaves one evening in 1956, just after the BBC’s programming wound down for the evening. It became standard for the SNP to broadcast their show each evening at 11PM after the BBC’s wrap-up. The Scottish National Party (SNP) today holds 35 seats in parliament, the highest number of any independent party, an unlikely thing to imagine in 1956, a period when the SNP and Plaid Cymru were banned from broadcasting on radio or television. Playing news, political banter, pro-SNP idents, and occasional cheeky sketches (), the pirate station served to establish legitimacy of the party, and these illegal broadcasts certainly generated a substantial amount of press for the party. The management of the station was distributed across SNP members and volunteers in a rather DIY manner- for example, Scottish Politician Gordon Wilson was in charge of frequently moving the station’s transmitter to avoid it from being located and seized by law enforcement. (2) Some of the broadcasts even came from Wilson’s apartment (1). Consistently gatecrashing and intercepting the BBC’s network, the party was able to use the platform to build steady momentum for the party.  The success of the SNP from Radio Free Scotland poses some interesting questions on the value of broadcast in relation to politics and public service, as one one hand, the SNP in many ways subverted the power structure of the BBC’s hierarchical order of broadcast, yet in taking over the airwaves for over a decade, albeit to a smaller audience, the same power structures inherent to broadcast are accepted. 

Footnotes:

1) Lynch, Peter. "Gordon Wilson." In Scottish National Party (SNP) Leaders, Chapter 14 2) Wilson, Brian. "Gordon Wilson obituary." The Guardian. June 26, 2017.

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Radio and Disruption: Pirate Radio in 90′s Britain

The word “broadcasting” is an agricultural metaphor referring to the distribution of seeds across as far and wide a field or territory as possible (1). In this post, I’ll be examining the impact of pirate radio across Britain in the 1990′s. Indeed many cultural and musical seeds were planted during this period, and continue to this day to bear fruit, albeit in unexpected ways. 

Writer and Theorist Simon Reynolds, in a fruitful discussion with Mark Fisher, perhaps best sums up the impact of pirate radio of this time period:     ���Pirate radio is important also because it is public: the culture is underground, but this is an audible underground, it is broadcast terrestrially, blasting out onto the airwaves of London or the other U.K. cities. It’s a community asserting its existence on the FM radio spectrum. This means that people who don’t like the music or the social groups it represents will stumble on it, but also that people who don’t know about the music will encounter it — potential converts to the movement. “ (2)

The act of “tuning in” is in many ways unique to radio, and while this is partially speculation, I think it’s reasonable to suggest that this “tuning in” action of the technology influenced how people engaged with this musical movement. Even without a hint of nostalgia or romanticism, it’s very possible to get a sense of what it’s like locating these stations-between-stations to tune in to the ghostly transmissions in the gaps of the airwaves.

While illegal broadcast can be considered a disruptive act (though not necessarily inherently so), never until this point had pirate radio infiltrated and shaped a culture on such a large scale. The technical and legal challenges of maintaining pirate radio stations was no easy feat, and a testament to the value people saw in this platform. A sense of futurism, successful or not, deeply penetrated the culture and atmosphere of the time, and even if many aspects of rave culture seem pastiche and dated today, the lasting impact of rave culture and pirate radio’s lost futurism is evident. While some pirate stations continue to transmit today, the influence of this period has been sown into the DNA of many contemporary and boundary-pushing contemporary acts operating today.

Sophia Loizou’s 2016 album Singulacra captures the “ghost in the machine” of pirate radio, sonically warping and fragmenting remnants of her own personal recordings of this era

Footnotes:

1) Gripsrud, Jostein. Understanding media culture. London: Arnold, 2002. Pg. 211

2)  Reynolds, Simon / Fisher, Mark  "You Remind Me of Gold: Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds dialogue about the state of dance music and the state of "the future" (2010)." ReynoldsRetro. 2010. 

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Radio and Disruption: Ghost Armies and Stories of Deception

“He had discovered that the effects of playback on location can produce definite effects- playing a recording of an accident can produce another accident. Anybody who carries out similar experiments over a period of time will turn up more ‘coincidences’ than the law of averages allows.” - William Burroughs, Electronic Revolution (1)

“As soon as volume exceeds 80db, blood pressure rises... Unconsciously we always react to sound like Stone Age Beings.” - Joachim Ernst-Berendt (2)

The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known to many as the “Ghost Army” was formed in the heyday of World War 2, as a small and unconventional army that specialized in tactics of deception using state of the art technology in the battlefield. With many soldiers hired from art schools and creative professions, the special troops were able to approach the battlefield in ways beyond the of of the typical trained unit. (3) The Sonic Unit of the Special Troops were armed with Dub-plates, Radio Transmitters, state-of-the-art speaker systems (with designs that would later influence the improvement of hi-fi speaker systems and studio monitors), and perhaps a copy of The Art of War.

The Ghost Army’s tactics were adopted by quite a few Allied units during WWII, and whether it was by the 3132nd division themselves, or other special units, spoof radio proved an important weapon in more than a few operations in the war (3). Broadcasting tactical decisions that never happens, misguiding news, and spoof military code, the airwaves proved to be a perfect battleground to distort information and keep enemies on their toes. While the 3132nd division and other specialized units pursued radio deception in a tactical sense, the power of radio was never underestimated in the spreading of propaganda- “During the 1930′s, Hitler’s Ministry of Information and Propaganda was deploying wire recorders to deceive listeners about his actual location by playing prerecorded speeches on the radio and pretending that they were live broadcasts.” (4) Examining the usage of propaganda in radio could take up a multiple blog posts, but essentially, the fact that radio in itself is invisible, spectral, yet still somehow tangible, means it’s a medium or tool with incredible power, and that power can be used or abused.

Footnotes: 

1)   William S. Burroughs , Electronic Revolution (Expanded Media Editions, 1971) p. 10 2) Joachim- Ernst Berendt, The Third Ear (Perth, Australia: Element, 1985 ), Pg. 79 3)  Kneece, Jack. Ghost Army of World War II. Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2005. Pg. 168 4)  Goodman, Steve. Sonic warfare: sound, affect, and the ecology of fear. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2012