First of all: Hello again Unfiction! I first joined the ARG community in 2001 while "The Beast" was still going on and played/PM'ed several games after that, but I've been gone for a very long time. Can't believe it's been 5 years since my last Unfiction post. I'm thrilled to see how active the community still is, and the fact that Unforum still looks the same
Anyway, as mentioned above, I recovered the 2nd Central Park "tunnel" dead drop today. A full gallery of images can be found at:
http://imgur.com/a/RgJHO. Here is my report from the field:
CENTRAL PARK // TUNNEL DEAD DROP // FIELD REPORT
I arrived at the entrance to the park near Strawberry Fields at around 5pm EST, 5/16/2013. The plan, based on talking to others in the IRC channel, was to find the drop, recover what we assumed to be a CD, rip the CD to an ISO using a laptop I brought, and quickly replace the drop to avoid arousing suspicion. I immediately located the covered trellis we saw on Google Street View. We speculated that this was the "tunnel" mentioned in the message so I searched here for 5-10 minutes to no avail.
After a bit of looking around, I realized there was a lower path that ran directly underneath the area where I was standing via an underpass, AKA a tunnel! I made my way down to this path.
A few feet from the tunnel entrance, I found a clay head perched on a rock, which I immediately assumed was (at least related to) the drop.
Upon further examination: NOPE. It was just a weird piece of Jewish art someone left behind.
Well, time to explore the tunnel, I guess. It was surprisingly dark and creepy for its green, lush surroundings.
I spent about 15 minutes scouring the area while passing joggers and dog-walkers gave me weird looks. After recklessly sticking my hand in about a dozen nooks and crannies and doing the "oh shit shit i got spiderwebs all over me" dance at least thrice, I finally found this niche between two boulders:
Deep (20"?) inside the crack was a Ziploc bag! Inside the bag was a 5 dollar Australian bank note, and a MicroSD card.
The bank note's serial # is EA 06 360 322. Ew, should've clipped my fingernails before this mission.

According to others in chat, calling the agent system and giving it this number yields a message saying "Operations Command, standby" followed by disconnection.
The MicroSD card looked normal enough, but ruined my plans: The laptop I had brought to the park did not have a MicroSD card reader, so I was unable to carry out my plan of copying the data on the spot and replacing the drop exactly as it was. In place of the card, I wrote a silly note to leave behind which reads "DROP COMPROMISED. OTP22 guerillas suspected. Awaiting further instructions - 16043". Hopefully the PM will get a laugh out of this. Also I wrote the OTP22 name in case there are any independent players playing the game who don't know about the online community - if someone finds it, googling OTP22 will lead them to us. I could have left the $5 note behind, but since I have a weird sense of humor, I replaced it with a $5 off coupon from my barbershop which looks remarkably like a US $5 bill.
I put these inside the same Ziploc bag which I put back in the same hole. Once I got back downtown, I bought a MicroSD reader to read the card. The full contents of the card can be found here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/i4i768qndo0rfzc/p73Fkz0j_4/OTP22/Central%20Park%2C%20NYC%20Drop%20II
So far we have discovered:
- file.txt just contains "303-309-0004", the number we've known all along.
- data1-data4.bin are exactly the same data1-data4 files found at the last NYC dead drop a few days ago. Nadando in IRC confirmed that the MD5 hashes match.
- p1.txt appears to be the only new file. It is the same format and size as the p#.txt files found in the early dead drops, but with different data. Like the past files, it appears to contain a onetime pad for deciphering 5-character chunks of text. Previously, our OTPs were used to decrypt the
"NATO messages". However, we don't currently have any messages of the same form that need decrypting. Maybe the numbers will change in the next day or two to give us new ciphertext.
More to come as we figure it out.... Join us on irc.freenode.net #ARG for discussion!
-dan

Posted: Thu May 16, 2013 10:49 pm