I dunno...as an ex-optical engineer/physicst, I'm sceptical about this whole scary "tempest" bullcrap. Even if it can be made to work fairly reliably, I suspect deploying it is extremely costly. In contrast, the main benefit of CALEA is that they can merely provision their copy of a circuit to go back to VA or wherever. They can be eavesdropping while surfin porn all without leaving their desk and cup of coffee. Hey--if they want me that bad these days, it would probably be cheaper just to send the van and beat whatever they need out of me. Actually, I suspect that Tempest is some kind of smokescreen..."Don't bother encrypting because we have this super-technology called tempest that can read your mind anyway." -TD

From: Sunder <sunder@sunder.net> To: "Roy M. Silvernail" <roy@rant-central.com> CC: cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: [IP] more on more on E-mail intercept ruling - good grief!! (fwd from dave@farber.net) Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 16:15:59 -0400 (edt)

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The Tempest argument is a stretch, only because you're not actually recovering the information from the phosphor itself. But the Pandora argument is well taken.

Actually there is optical tempest now that works by watching the flicker of a CRT. Point is actually even more moot since most monitors are now LCD based, etc. so there's no raster line scanning the display, etc...

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