U-Boats, Spies, and White Magic: The Invention of Wireless Cryptography

The wireless telegraph station in Sayville, New York was one of the most powerful in the world. Constructed by the German company Telefunken in 1912, it served as a transatlantic relay point for diplomatic messages and business communications. It was a beacon among amateur wireless enthusiasts around the United States who could tune their home-made sets to the station's nightly press dispatches. All of this changed when one of those amateurs uncovered the station's true purpose.

The Navy seized the station in 1915 on suspicion of relaying covert commands from the German Empire to U-Boats in the Atlantic, and a congressional bill was introduced to ban all civilian wireless activities from the airwaves. The interruptions to the story that follows consist of excerpts from Hugo Gernsback's serial novel The Scientific Adventures of Baron Mnchausen, which ran in Electrical Experimenter magazine right as news of the wireless cryptography scandal unfolded.

Static was always a problem as the summer heat rolled in.

Situated on a hundred-acre plot along the Long Island coastline and dropped in a mosquito-infested field, the Sayville wireless plant began experiencing the seasonal interference that comes with longer days and warmer weather in May 1915. At that point little older than the twentieth century itself, wireless telegraphy (a precursor to radio) was not an entirely reliable medium. Debates over the precise cause of this seasonal static soon broke out among the tinkerers and oddballs of the early wireless community. Some said that radio waves experience more interference as they propagate through denser, more humid air. (There was still talk at this time of the existence of a luminiferous aether.) Others speculated that because messages came in clearer at night, the heat of the summer sun on the station's aerials was affecting their transmitting capabilities.

By late summer, Sayville operators announced that interference from so-called equinoctial storms was forcing them to restrict messages to official government communications. Some commenters quipped that wireless buffs were getting cause and effect mixed up: "they said the electrical effects [of the station] absorbed all the moisture and made Sayville dry as a Saratoga chip," referring to the potato chip first invented in Saratoga Springs, NY in the 1850s. Perhaps the station itself was altering its surrounding atmospheric conditions.

When one contemplates the marvel of sculptured sound on a graphophonic record, and realizes that from the cold vorticity of line there may magically spring the golden lilt of the greatest song voice that the world has ever heard, then comes the conviction that we are living in the days of white magic.

At the rate of a dollar per word, civilians and government officials alike could relay messages from Sayville to its sister station at Nauen, Germany. In addition to commercial and diplomatic communications, Sayville sent out press dispatches every night at 9:00 that amateurs around the country tuned in to using their hand-built crystal detector sets. Receiving transmissions from the Sayville station was the gold standard for both wireless sets and their owners (who referred to themselves as 'muckers'), and electronics manufacturers regularly promised easy reception of Sayville transmissions in advertisements for their products. The static that came with summer weather was nothing new for these wireless professionals and amateurs. Seasonal disturbances were simply a part of the natural rhythms of a new medium.

A 1907 crystal radio receiver housed in mahogany, designed by Harry Shoemaker in 1907. History San Jos, Perham Collection.

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U-Boats, Spies, and White Magic: The Invention of Wireless Cryptography

Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tift w/ the Intercept, and If He’ll Leave the Embassy – Video


Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tift w/ the Intercept, and If He #39;ll Leave the Embassy
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits down with Democracy Now! inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been living in political asylum for over...

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Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tift w/ the Intercept, and If He'll Leave the Embassy - Video

Julian Assange on Aiding Snowden, Tiff w/ The Intercept …

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AMY GOODMAN: We return to our interview with WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange from inside Ecuadors Embassy in London, where he has political asylum and has been living for more than two years.

AMY GOODMAN: In a nutshell, Julian, if you would, can you summarize the releases of documents since the "Collateral Murder" video was released in the spring of 2010? For people who arent keeping up on things, and even if you are an avid viewer of the media or reader of the media, especially in the United States, they may know who Julian Assange is, the publisher of WikiLeaks, but actually what it is you have released, the substance of these documents, could you just go through them?

JULIAN ASSANGE: WikiLeaks has been publishing since 2007. We have published material from every countryalmost every country in the world and about every country in the world. We are now up to just over eight million individual documents that we have released during that period. Now, the heat in the debate with the United States arose in 2010. We have had heated debates with other countries, and weve had major court cases in the United States in relation to our fight with Swiss banks and so on. In 2010, the number of documents and publications that we were releasing, each one after another, ended up erecting a grand jury against us by the DOJ, National Security Division. And so, we entered into a major media conflict with the U.S. government.

So, going in order, they are "Collateral Murder," a documentary that we produced based on the tape from an Apache helicopter mowing down 12 to 18 people in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists, and very clearly engaged in the murder. And the murder was an unarmed man, wounded, crawling in the gutter, and good Samaritans came to rescue him, and all of them were killed, and two children came away with serious injuries.

Then the Afghanistan War Logs, now, these came at a very important moment in 2010, where Michael Hastings had justthe late Michael Hastings had just released a report on McChrystal, and these publications came not long after that.

AMY GOODMAN: This is the Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash.

JULIAN ASSANGE: Rolling Stone journalist who died in a car crash. And that shifted the debate about Afghanistan. Early in 2010, it was: What can we do to win in Afghanistan? After the Hastings article about McChrystal and WikiLeaks war logs, the result was: There was no longer a debate about can we win in Afghanistan; it is how were we going to get out of Afghanistan. So it was quite an important shift.

Then, with the Iraq War Logs, which were published in October 2010, which in some ways has been one of our best analytical works, we worked together with not just other media organizations, but a number of statistical organizations to work out what the kill count was for Iraq, and combining with other figures, and we ended up with more than 100,000 civilian casualtiesin fact, 15,000 new, completely undocumented civilian killsand documenting U.S. involvement and approval of Iraqi torture centers within the police and many killings of civilians at checkpoints and some political issues and so on. And that produced a number of inquiries and has fed into cases that have been taken by Iraqis, and that has now ended up with an ICC filing, International Criminal Court filing, against the British military.

If we then move on, in December of that year, we started the release of Cablegate, the more than 251,000 U.S. diplomatic cables from all around the world from 1966 to 2010. And that is the largest compendium of diplomacy that has ever been released. Its about 3,000 volumes of material. As a sort of history of how the modern world behaves in practice, its extremely important, and it fed into the Tunisian revolution quite directly. In fact, Ben Alis propaganda minister, after the government fell, said that the WikiLeaks releases about Tunisia is what broke the back of the Ben Ali system.

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