Ken Layne takes us on a tour of weird, possibly espionage-related Twitter accounts, from a "numbers station" that has tweeted 318,000 hexadecimal numbers since 2009 (possibly from Khabarovsk), to a "joke" CIA account that seems to have a lot of inside dope, to a massive cluster of accounts that tweet nothing but "Iowa City schools ask state for an audit," over and over again.
Here are some of the 38 followers of an inscrutable account called @googuns_staging—many of these are obvious fraudulent accounts with randomly generated profiles such as, "I like Jonathan Richman/The Modern Lovers to listen and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The to watch. I'm brave and chivalrous." Well, of course you are!
GooGuns posts nothing but strings of letters and numbers, like b39e65fa00000000 in intervals of about five minutes on average. The string of characters always ends with zeroes, occasionally with the location service turned on, so you can see that 554705fa00000000 was allegedly tweeted from the "Region of Khabarovsk." This has been going on all day and all night, for years, with more than 318,000 tweets posted since 2009. But why?
There is an iOS game called GooGun with its own website and a dubious iTunes graphic with the words "No Longer Available" over it. "Space robots are attacking," says the promotional video showing game play on this game that is not available to play.
The Real Weird Twitter Is Espionage Twitter [Ken Layne/The Awl]
(via Wil Wheaton)
