if the signal is your own, and it would not exit the home by its own force, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy by a 9-0 vote of about any SCt since Taft died. Well, 7-2 anyway. However, if the signals are from outside, received in the home (isn't that what Wright was after?), the issue remains a bit unclear. I, you see, don't necessarily have the same reasonable expectation in *your* home. MacN On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, John Young wrote:
Let me try again after reading Time's Q&A and the responding attorney claiming that anything inside a home is protected but nothing outside it is.
My question concerns the methodology of "illuminating" or "radiating" an object, say, within a home, in order to acquire signal that may be striking that object, say emissions from an electronic device but not escaping to the outside under there own momentum.
Peter Wright in "Spycatcher" describes use of this technology to acquire signal from crypto machines, French as I recall. There was discussion of this here a while back, in connection with the contraption concealed by the Soviets behind the great seal in the US Embassy in Moscow. Wright analyzed that contraption for the US to understand how it worked.
Wright is not altogether precise in describing the methodology nor that of other counterintelligence tools he and others invented, but some of them appear to be related to acoustic analysis. (Wright and his father worked for Marconi which specialized in producing classified comsec products for the UK military and secret services.)
In any event, if a method is used to acquire signal *within* a home, would that acquisition be forbidden by the thermal decision? That is, if a signal is sent into a home to acquire an interior signal, is that a violation?
This may seem to be similar to a bug planted just outside the face of an exterior wall of a home, or reading the vibrations of window glass, but I'm trying to imagine an alternative technology to these, perhaps one that remains classified.
BTW, there has been speculation that NONSTOP and/or HIJACK are codewords for acoustic vulnerabilities of the sort I'm fumbling with.
The reason I'm pursuing this is that I've been told we are not asking NSA the right questions to be answered under FOIA, that there is technology which has not been revealed in public and whose names are secret. But we haven't been able to determine what to ask besides stuff usually associated with TEMPEST.