TIME.com: Nation -- Supreme Court: Relax. The Heat is Off

Mac Norton mnorton at cavern.uark.edu
Wed Jun 13 18:24:00 PDT 2001


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.





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