The idea for this article in the Washington Post probably sprang from a lawsuit Wilco just settled recently. At the end of "Poor Places" from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot there's a woman repeating "Yankee... Hotel... Foxtrot" over and over; that sample was taken from a set of discs, called The Conet Project, which collected bits of shortwave radio broadcasts. The story behind the project is pretty interesting, and the explanation of the mysteriously random bits of numbers and codes is even a little bit creepy.