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I always thought it was Transient ElectroMagnetic ProteEction STandard. Wikipedia says: TEMPEST (Telecommunications Electronics Materials Protected from Emanat

• schoen 6y ago
  Why would it be protected from emanations security? Achieving emanations security is the goal of these protections! Aren't all of these are probably backronyms for an originally randomly selected codeword?
• Burner99 6y ago
  Replying with a burner account: TEMPEST is and has always been a code name, not an acronym. I've been seeing forced acronyms to TEMPEST for decades, all of them wrong because there is no acronym.
• jcrawfordor 6y ago
  It is an intelligence community convention to write codewords in ALL CAPS to differentiate them from the normal use of the same word. This doesn't indicate that they are acronyms. The appearance, though, combined with the fact that they are often in mixed use with acronyms, leads to a tendency for people to make up expansions of codewords which aren't intended to have one. Codewords were intentionally selected to have little if any relationship to what they describe. To further muddy the waters, the military is just as fond of writing things in all caps as the intelligence community is, but they usually actually are acronyms or abbreviations. In contrast to TEMPEST consider PAVE PAWS, which is an acronym, and USSPACOM, which is abbreviation.