Good reading - an intelligence report from the cold war.

Jan 20, 2009 14:27

A recently (partially) declassified document on the history of TEMPEST.Background: TEMPEST is the reconstruction of signals from electronic noise or actual sounds made by that equipment ( Read more... )

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baudot January 20 2009, 23:31:05 UTC
It's quite difficult for the LCD monitors, last I heard, but for the old CRTs the scan ray was plain as day if you knew what to look for. Or so said some people who'd made receivers - others implied it was harder than it was being made out to be. At the very least, civilians were able to replicate the technology and demonstrate it to reporters. Wired ran an article about it back when we were at Digidyne that described some such demonstrations. It may submit to google search.

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kuenai January 21 2009, 09:08:14 UTC
My recollection was that they could also pick up keystrokes, as well, which was more important than it sounds. (Passwords, anybody?)

This is one reason we spent so much money on computer equipment - a lot of it had electronic screening on it to prevent/cut down on the electronic emanations that could be read. Also made some of it heavy as hell, too.

Paranoia, thy name is military.

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baudot January 21 2009, 18:35:38 UTC
Yep. If you look further into the document, they talk about being able to get all kinds of information about the internal workings of machines from the sound of keystrokes. What's more, one of the still classified sections is on snooping via seismic data!

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