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Japan's secret spy agency
- Jolter 8y agoI bet someone is getting disciplined for leaving the blinds open in that first picture...
- tniemi 8y agoNo sensitive work should ever be done in a place with glass windows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone
- rl3 8y agoOr you just pump rock music in between the panes of glass.
- jacquesm 8y agoTake the same music, invert phase, add to original: sound recovered. Very loud white noise would be a lot more effective.
- kuschku 8y agoTake rock music, played by a $0.20 shitty chinese speaker. Indistinguishable from white noise.
- eeZah7Ux 8y agoActually a shitty speaker makes it even easier to filter out by producing a smaller spectrum. You need real white noise - not very loud, but it has to be random as in not predictable.
- rl3 8y agoYou don't actually: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95689436 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=956894... "And to prevent sophisticated laser devices from capturing the telltale vibration of his voice on the glass, music played between the panes."
- anfractuosity 8y agoBut then they can film your plants/crisp packets instead to pickup audio - https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/
- rl3 8y agoI can only imagine the lens required to do this from a distance. They'd need a telescope. Then you'd have to account for stuff like building sway.
- saagarjha 8y agoIs this practical? I'd expect that temperature gradients and moisture in the air have an effect on the distance the laser light has to travel; are the changes caused by vibration significantly larger?
- SiempreViernes 8y agoI guess the primary reason it works is because the factors you mention vary significantly slower than the vibrations from speech.
- austinh100 8y agoLaser microphones can be mitigated by vibrating the glass at the frequency of human speech. https://www.shomer-tec.com/laser-surveillance-defeater.html https://www.shomer-tec.com/laser-surveillance-defeater.html
- ShorsHammer 8y agoMitigating it seems like a last resort when there's no other option. With researchers like Mordechai Guri out there, I'd say the GP comment is solid general advice. https://cyber.bgu.ac.il//advanced-cyber/airgap https://cyber.bgu.ac.il//advanced-cyber/airgap https://youtu.be/4vIu8ld68fc https://youtu.be/4vIu8ld68fc
- subcosmos 8y agoId imagine that rigging the windows with piezoelectric transducers, and vibrating them with FAKE office chatter, would be an even more effective solution.
- nabla9 8y agoHas anyone tried to make passive listening device based on laser reading? Take small microphone element that captures human speaking range vibrators and connect it to equally small retroreflector. Then you can read the sound from any angle using laser/sensor next to each other. There would be no electrical or radio frequency transmissions at all.
- dgacmu 8y agoDo those work with modern multi-pane windows?
- walrus01 8y agoSCIFs don't have windows.
- stevehawk 8y agoNot a chance. I worked at an intelligence agency for nearly a decade and it was impossible to get people to follow the rules of "keep the blinds closed".
- leaveyou 8y ago>In 2012, the country’s police investigators were repeatedly thwarted by a hacker known as the “Demon Killer,” who posted a series of death threats online. The hacker used Tor to successfully evade detection for seven months, which was a major source of embarrassment for Japanese police — and likely fueled demand for new surveillance capabilities. yes.. it was a bad bad hacker who fueled demand for more money thrown at the defense industry and not someone acting on purpose.
- Moodles 8y agoIt seems pretty plausible to me that a bad bad hacker could do such things and a reaction from the Japanese government would be to try to break Tor. Do you think it's a lie? If Tor doesn't actually help hackers against the Japanese, then what is their motivation for lying? Do you think the Japanese government just want an excuse to spy on their people? (genuinely asking)
- mikekchar 8y ago> Do you think the Japanese government just want an excuse to spy on their people? I could go into a long discussion of Japanese culture and the relationship of Japanese society with the government, but... Really, you can't expect any large organisation to act rationally. All such organisations are made up of many, many people all of which have their own agenda. The action that is expressed at any given moment depends entirely on the ebb and flow of internal power struggles. You can't really predict it or reason about it in the same way you might for a single person. It could be anything.
- CapacitorSet 8y ago>Do you think the Japanese government just want an excuse to spy on their people? I'm not OP, but I would be very surprised if the attack was the root cause for strengthening their spy agencies. In the United States we have seen time and again that laws for a stricter surveillance are passed with the pretext of anti-terrorism or anti-child pornography; Japan could very well be using such a case to justify their surveillance needs.
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- stareatgoats 8y agoThanks to Snowden (who keeps on giving, even 5 years more or less to the day after his escape to Hong Kong), we can assume that Japan too conducts dragnet surveillance. It is the state of current affairs that it hardly raises more than a yawn. Still an interesting article, since it reveals that the Japanese take their secrecy really, really seriously, and so we may not assume much of what they are up to, really. The problem with secret government agencies is otherwise generally that they are notoriously difficult to reign in. They are governed by law, but are likely to develop their own agendas, and since lawmakers are kept in the dark they can end up meddling in policy, using all the means at their disposal. Our ultimate line of defense against such, and only hope are the brave whistleblowers. Edward Snowden needs to be pardoned.
- auntienomen 8y agoWith the benefit of hindsight, I'd say: 1) The TLAs have fairly healthy cultures. 2) The TLAs are doing what we pay them for. 3) Snowden looks increasingly like a Russian agent. The point of no return for me was seeing him and Assange trying to interfere in Catalonia. Neither had ever expressed the slightest interest, and then suddenly, they're both pushing the same line. What a marvelous coincidence! Snowden can apply for a pardon after he turns himself in.
- kankroc 8y agoI'm sure the current US gov will pardon him! /s
- Someone1234 8y ago> The TLAs have fairly healthy cultures Weren't the CIA caught red handed spying on congress?
- java-man 8y agowe have no recollection of this fact, Senator.
- Tepix 8y ago
- creo 8y agoCan someone please link me street view near those gigantic balls? Thanks!
- tcfunk 8y agoNot sure if they are the same green balls, but I found the location of the first screenshot: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.858905,141.7240164,913m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@42.858905,141.7240164,913m/data...
- cowpewter 8y agoHere you go! This is the location of the second arial photo in the article. https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4416085,130.6032298,3a,60y,208.08h,90t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s40oXFiYhgGMfqyQZXn6M7w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4416085,130.6032298,3a,60y,2...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- getoj 8y agohttps://goo.gl/maps/ggcc8ZQBwPr https://goo.gl/maps/ggcc8ZQBwPr
- mabn 8y agoYou might enjoy this: https://www.google.com/maps/@50.102203,19.5471605,203m/data=!3m1!1e3 https://www.google.com/maps/@50.102203,19.5471605,203m/data=...
- creo 8y agoThanks everyone!
- tlear 8y agoClearly they can keep things secret unlike NSA and co. Whole article is random guesses, names of building and not much of anything else, that is kind of impressive. In fact the only real stuff is from a power point shared with NSA..
- willstrafach 8y agoLooking at source materials, it is not hard to see what they are doing. They have radome’s to obfuscate where their dishes are pointed, and use them to collect signals that pass through the Chinese and other satellites they can see. They appear to request processing assistance from NSA, so the most educated guess would be that they know the right satellites to collect from, but are not quite there yet in terms of normalizing and analyzing most of the data. You can scroll to the bottom of linked article to view the source documents.
- euske 8y agoFunny you put it that way because it sounds very Japanese to me. Japan always focuses heavily on the physical infrastructure. They meticulously build amazing machines, bridges and grid systems, but don't know what to do with them.
- blattimwind 8y ago> No internal documents from Japan’s surveillance agency have ever been publicly disclosed before. It makes me kinda sad that somewhere in a nondescript office building someone has to wipe the "No documents leaked since 67 years" counter off some whiteboard.
- zipwitch 8y agoWait, it's not called Public Security, Section 9?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Ftuuky 8y agoWasted opportunity.
- yborg 8y agoWhen you have a long-established culture of unaccountable organizations with nearly unlimited budgets and nothing else to do, you eventually will get something like Section 9.
- monocasa 8y agoI wish... Section 9 is outrageously competent.
- disposablename 8y agoYou mean section 6
- ggg9990 8y agoI have basically always assumed that all governments are conducting the maximum amount of espionage on their citizens and adversaries as they are able to within the constraints of their technology and budget.
- neves 8y agoThe Intercept is the most impressive free press initiative of the last 50 years. We thought that the Internet would democratize the free flow of information, that we could be free of a handful media conglomerates and what we got was Facebook. Snowden whistle blower greatest consequence was the initiative to create The Intercept.
- rdtsc 8y agoI agree. They do a great job with investigative journalism. I highly recommend them as well. They have a donation page if anyone is interested in helping https://theintercept.com/donate/ https://theintercept.com/donate/
- driverdan 8y agoI have such mixed feelings about The Intercept. They break extremely important news but mix in too many opinionated blog posts. Read some of their articles about animal cruelty. The topics and information are great but the writing is littered with opinion and assumption instead of objective journalism. I couldn't even take two podcast episodes before I stopped listening. They had skits mocking Trump. That's not journalism. That just makes people who like Trump shut down and call your site fake news. Stick to the facts and leave the BS to the bloggers.
- krapp 8y ago>That just makes people who like Trump shut down and call your site fake news. ... good riddance?
- enqk 8y agoLooks a lot like the NHK (national broadcaster) got the word in order to prepare the public for a constitutional change..
- icanhackit 8y agoI'll just leave this here... https://theintercept.com/feed/?lang=en https://theintercept.com/feed/?lang=en
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoWhat’s the point of this?
- icanhackit 8y agoRSS link to free full-length reports from the Intercept.