What Exactly is an "All Night Listening Post"?

Over the past month, a few people have asked me why this blog is called The All Night Listening Post. I thought it was high time to to share exactly why it is and what it means.

If you've read the about page, which hopefully you have, you'll know that The All Night Listening Post is an eclectic collection of articles, essays and images from which to draw inspiration. In other words, the goal of the blog is to collate and share some of the most interesting content on the web as well as to produce interesting original content in the form of images and essays. So, what's a listening post and what has it got to do with this blog?

A listening post is a facility established to monitor radio signals and analyse their content in order to  secure information and intelligence for use by the security services, governments and diplomatic communities. Listening posts come in all shapes and sizes; Satellite arrays inside the Arctic circle, the sprawling NSA station at Teufelsberg or small backroom operations with covert antennas and plausible deniability.

All nations operate listening posts, scanning frequencies across the globe to gather intelligence on friends and enemies alike. If you travel to former soviet bloc countries, you can see that the landscapes are still littered with evidence of the USSR's past - Antenna arrays and large 'golf ball' domes are a frequent reminder of Russia's history of paranoia. As technology has advanced, listening posts have evolved into wiretaps and packet sniffers but they still perform the same basic function, recording and relating information of interest to their controllers. 

Listening posts operate 24/7 but often come alive at night, when clandestine operations commence and covert messages are transmitted. I guess that's kind of how I work, hence, The All Night Listening Post. 

Keep listening.