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

John Young jya at pipeline.com
Wed Jun 13 20:37:54 PDT 2001


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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