Thermal Imaging Decision Applicable to TEMPEST?

Declan McCullagh declan at well.com
Tue Jun 12 06:43:21 PDT 2001


BTW John your cryptome.org writeup says: "This decisions appears to be
applicable to TEMPEST technology, the first instance to make use of
this technology illegal."

I'm not sure that's accurate.

First, this is a Fourth Amendment case, and the court only decided 
what limits should be placed on police, not private citizens.

Second, the ruling would allow TEMPEST monitoring by police if they
get a warrant. No reading of it would ban police TEMPEST surveillance
outright, and warrants are not that difficult to get.

-Declan


On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 09:21:16AM -0400, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> I noodled over this in my article:
> http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44444,00.html
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 08:58:36AM -0700, John Young wrote:
> > The Supreme Court's decision against thermal imaging appears 
> > to be applicable to TEMPEST emissions from electronic devices.
> > And is it not a first against this most threatening vulnerability
> > in the digital age? And long overdue.
> > 
> > Remote acquisition of electronic emissions, say from outside a 
> > home, are not currently prohibited by law as far as I know. And
> > the language of the thermal imaging decision makes it applicable
> > to any technology not commonly in use.
> > 
> > Conventional wisdom of security wizards are that the emissions
> > are very difficult to acquire from more than a hundred yards or
> > so, but James Bamford claims in his recent "Body of Secrets" that
> > NSA was able to acquire leaky emissions from Russian crypto 
> > equipment 6 miles offshore Cuba in the 1960s. Advances in 
> > technology would presumbably increase that capability.





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