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

Faustine a3495 at cotse.com
Thu Jun 14 15:03:17 PDT 2001


> 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.


Interesting: especially in light of the fact that the Supreme Court has held 
that monitoring (with a pen register) the telephone numbers that an individual 
calls from his home is *not* a search, in that it constitutes information 
already being monitored by the telephone company. 

I suppose this same logic would hold true for what's already being monitored by 
the electric company, or, say, what your ISP is already monitoring. So perhaps 
the "solution" to getting around warrants would lie less in superadvanced 
MASINT than in giving the private sector incentives for doing more monitoring 
themselves--while quietly developing your own set of tools to take advantage of 
it.

A sobering thought.

~Faustine.





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