My comments interspersed.
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From: John Young
Tinfoil is not sufficent any more due to increased sensitivy of interceptors. False protection left in place as ploy.
It might help if the cell phone was first wrapped in RF-absorptive sheet or foam, and then wrapped in aluminum foil. As a ham (callsign N7IJS; oddly, I'm the last "tech-plus" ham in the country due to the refusal of the FCC to act on my January 2010 license renewal application), I am reasonably aware of the technology. There are probably dissipative ferrite materials embedded in plastic/rubber sheeting which would do a good job absorbing RF. Example just found with google search: RF and Microwave Absorber - Ferrite Tiles and Foam Absorber I found that using Google 'rf dissipation ferrite sheet'.
False TEMPEST protection is especially effective, the best remains classified in a rolling fashion: more leaked to delude the more unleaked of what works. Inadvertent emanations are increasingly inadvertent as research in those waves leaps by giant bounds.
Not news to this crafty gaggle of uncontrollably paranoidic deceptors braying about faults, patches, new faults, new paths, rolling thunder to panic herds of panic-herders, pardon, infiltrated standards setters.
Jim, you may be the only experienced expert here in betrayal by trustees inside and outside the penal colony, pardon, West of the Pecos justice rigged-comsec industry. All hail MIT, industry leader of techno-rigging.
MIT does seem to get around! (Full disclosure: I spent four years there, 1976-1980).
BTW, are you at liberty to reveal the secrets of bio-chemical TEMPEST? The inadvertent body odor is somewhat more reliable than facial and corporeal. Rumor of testing on the bio-chem harvesting in prisons, separation of sexes into their many varieties of posturing, impostering, hybridity and crossings.
I would be happy to reveal any 'secrets' I know, problem is I don't really know any secrets. I haven't heard of analysis of bio-chem in prison, with the exception of DNA testing near the end of a sentence. I would imagine it would be possible to analyze the odor of a person using GCMS (gas-chromatograph/mass-spectrometer), and that should be extremely sensitive. How selective it is, between one person and another, is a question I do not know. And, of course, a given person's 'signal' could be expected to vary depending on his recent diet, or perhaps whether he has been ill recently. I have heard occasional references to the idea of diagnosing people of various illnesses based on the presence of minute amounts of chemicals in breath (a neat idea, BTW).
After 9/11 batteries of full sprectrum bio-chem sensors were set up in NYC transporation nodes, pretending to be about snffing for bombs but actually about varieties of human emanations. Later transformed and cloaked into the Microsoft-NYPD Domain Awareness program which pretended to be about data-gathering and infiltrating suspected terrorist conclaves, vaunted by resucitated HUMINT, but about, well, that's not for the inexperienced emanator to know.
Why not wrap the phone in a couple of layers of aluminum foil? (Although, it won't shield against audio if that's being recorded even while an RF contact does not exist...) Jim Bell
RF and Microwave Absorber - Ferrite Tiles and Foam Abso... RF absorber and microwave absorber for anechoic chambers, EMC testing and antenna pattern measurement: ferrite tiles, polyurethane foam absorber an... View on www.djmelectronics... Preview by Yahoo