Snooping Through Walls with Microwaves 217
denis-The-menace writes "According to an article from newscientist, scientists have devised a system to use microwave energy for surveillance. If people are speaking inside the room, any flimsy surface, such as clothing, will be vibrating. This modulates the radio beam reflected from the surface. Although the radio reflection that passes back through the wall is extremely faint, the kind of electronic extraction and signal cleaning tricks used by NASA to decode signals in space can be used to extract speech. Although, I doubt it would work in this room"
Makes little difference (Score:5, Interesting)
The laser can be defeated by double glazing (I think), devices to vibrate windows and laser detectors (to tell you if you're being listened to).
A microwave device can be defeated by the good old tinfoil hat - by which I mean wallpapering in foil or otherwise turning the room into a faraday cage.
In analogue phone days (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because the receiver was on the cradle didn't mean that the microphone wasn't active.
The cops played stuff back in interviews/court that was off topic but was the occupants bitching about each other to try and divide and conquer them.
This was in Leeds, UK.
I can't remember many more details or find a link. I didn't know them at the time and only heard about it later as a warning.
Re:Makes little difference (Score:4, Interesting)
hence, the drug lords of south america spend tonnes of tonnes of cash on goodies.
The best crims are never found out hence, their success and covertness.
a) buy gold
b) hide in 50% legit 5% return businesses
c) learn sign language
d) study tonnes of tonnes of history of cold ware espianage
e) never ever talk , paint a false picture to everyone including your wife/kids
f) cover tracks and never park anywhere, unless you own the govt, or they owe you billions.
This isnt new (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look at any high security building(NSA, etc) they will have multi layers on the outside and inside of the buildings.
Not only is it physical security, but sound and wireless security.
Re:It was news... 45 years ago. (Score:5, Interesting)
- There were no "lasers" in 1960. At least not the very stable continuous-wave lasers that you need for this, and especially not in the USSR.
- Think-- do lasers go through glass? Do lasers bounce off glass? Might other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation act similarly?
- Microwaves bounce off most anything, if you pick the right angle. Conveniently, most buildings have the windows recessed a bit, and any concave corner makes an EXCELLENT "corner reflector", which has the amazing property of bouncing any incident beam right back to the sender.
Not only did they bounce microwaves off glass-- they had the hutzpah to give the US ambassador a honorary plaque, which he hung on his office wall. Unbeknownst to us, there was a little diaphragm inside the plaque, just the right wavelength to reflect K-band microwavesm, which vibrated very nicely to every word spoken in his office. Look it up.Re:In analogue phone days (Score:5, Interesting)
Survellience was also carried out against embassy cypher machines using unshielded telephone cables picking up eletromagnetic emissions from the cypher machines, in many cases enabling the reading of both the en clair message and the cypher material.
None of this was admissable in a UK court. Phone tap evidence still isnt.
Re:Invest in AA (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Fluff piece (Score:5, Interesting)
There's an anecdote in the engineering field: where some poor sods at Racal-Dana had a phase detector at 50MHz that was so sensitive to vibration they had to stop their experiments whenever a plane took off from Orange County Airport (quite a few miles away). They eventually had to get special thick aluminum wall castings to enclose the phase detector to block the vibrations. And this was at just 50MHz. Phase detectors get more sensitive proportional to operating frequency, so a 5,000 MHz phase detector is *mighty* sensitive!
Maybe I am missing something... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Tinfoil hats out, team! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It was news... 45 years ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
I looked it up. 330 MHZ is not K-Band microwaves. It's UHF. HF is from 3-30Mhz VHF is from 30-300...
The bugged seal had a resonant quarterwave antenna tuned to 330 MHZ. This used 1946 technology, not K band microwaves. K band is near 20 GHZ. There wasn't much in the 1 GHZ and up band then. Vacuum tubes just didn't work that high.
Re:Invest in AA (Score:2, Interesting)
OLD NEWS:This has been in active use since the 50s (Score:5, Interesting)
The second sign is when you feel toasty warm and the chair feels cold. In the 70's and 80's the carter and reagan administrations were perpetually complaining that the level of microwave energy measured inside the US embassy exceeded the OSHA limits for exposure. Eventually the US built a new embassy with enhanced shielding. UNfortunately the Soviet's put listening devices into the bricks. The embassy had to be knocked down and rebuilt. Of course, peter wright [bbc.co.uk] did exactly the same thing to the Soviet embassy in canada. Each night he snuck into the construction site and pulled wires up the inside of the walls to his microphones in specially made window sills. The soviet's learned about it from a mole in MI5 and had to build a second interior wall so that no rooms were near the windows.
Doppler microwave spying is quite old. As is laser vibrometry on windows.
In the dot-matrix printer days (Score:2, Interesting)
The United States used this against the soviets for quite a while.
Used Here (Score:4, Interesting)
-Waldo Jaquith
Doing this with my research project... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OLD NEWS:This has been in active use since the (Score:4, Interesting)
The russians did that to the US, too. With a nice giant carving of the Great Seal - with a device behind a small hole beneath the beak.
Consisted of a cavity resonator about the size of a stack of 10 or so dimes, with a tuning post up the middle, a diaphragm for one end (to detune it according to air pressure) and a wire antenna maybe a foot long coupled into the cavity. Excite it with a microwave signal near but not dead-on the resonance and the reflection is amplitude modulated by the sound from the room.
Better yet: Put a diode in a movable surface. Excite it and it returns harmonics (easy to sort out from other reflections because they're on a different frequency), phase-modulated by doppler shift from the object's motion (like its variant FM, PM is very noise-resistant).
Russian laborers constructed an embassy where the walls were FULL of thousands of diodes - embedded in the construction material. US had to abandon the building and build one of their own. News items suggested the diodes were to make it hard to sniff for bugs. But IMHO they were the bugs themselves, using the harmonic-generation/doppler/PM trick.
Like the posting in the root article, this makes every surface a bug. You have to get diodes into them, but the return is cleaner and stronger than echoes from a passive reflector.