It’s a steganographic technique used to slowly send messages, a bit or two at a time, from intelligence agencies to their spies. It’s typically desirable to send messages in broadcast form to permit the recipient to not be identifiable. As shortwave radio has fallen out of use and thus possessing a receiver for a numbers station has become less innocuous, that channel for broadcast messages has become less desirable. But today, everyone has a smartphone and uses social media. Change a regular message from its normal form just a little, introduce “errors” that actually bear data, and you can send a small amount of data. A bit here, a bit there, triggering assassinations, exfiltrations, activating sleeper agents. Those comma ellipses are your view into the hidden real workings of the world, your glimpse of the levers that shake the world being pulled.
It’s a steganographic technique used to slowly send messages, a bit or two at a time, from intelligence agencies to their spies. It’s typically desirable to send messages in broadcast form to permit the recipient to not be identifiable. As shortwave radio has fallen out of use and thus possessing a receiver for a numbers station has become less innocuous, that channel for broadcast messages has become less desirable. But today, everyone has a smartphone and uses social media. Change a regular message from its normal form just a little, introduce “errors” that actually bear data, and you can send a small amount of data. A bit here, a bit there, triggering assassinations, exfiltrations, activating sleeper agents. Those comma ellipses are your view into the hidden real workings of the world, your glimpse of the levers that shake the world being pulled.