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"That is impossible" is literally the bread and butter of signals intelligence. Measuring light bouncing off a window to hear conversations, using millimeter w

by mike_d 3y ago

"That is impossible" is literally the bread and butter of signals intelligence. Measuring light bouncing off a window to hear conversations, using millimeter waves to see through walls, taking photos from space, and planes that could fly themselves were all the realm of science fiction at one point - while in the hands of intelligence agencies.

dmix 3y ago
Still, the whole "this is what we have imagine what the gov has" is usually wayyy overrated of a take and IRL it's usually way more boring and incremental, closely tracking commercial industry. In most cases it's their ability to spend money to build large teams to employ tech, the complete scale of operations (XKeyscore+TEMPEST comes to mind), and the care they take is where things like the NSA dominate vs the average ability of the best hacker. Their unique advantages are only rarely in the individual technological leaps, which either a) industry has no match of or b) well informed technical experts are unaware of, like the things you reference.
- account17 3y ago
  FWIW you almost certainly can at minimum generalize the location of a phone if you know roughly where to look via beamforming [0] Massive antenna arrays and SIGINT satellites have massive funding and decades of history, and they've already shown interest in tracking literally everything else [1] This isn't some star trek type of thing, this is a "would the USG dump enough money into SIGINT to implement it?" I'm very confident the technology exists to roughly track specific locations of interest for specific devices if not more. I understand people may disagree but it would be foolish to assume it's beyond the realm of possiblity. [0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/55143/is-it-possible-for-leo-satellites-to-detect-a-usable-signal-from-regular-mobile https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/55143/is-it-possib... [1] https://www.aerosociety.com/news/eavesdropping-from-space/ https://www.aerosociety.com/news/eavesdropping-from-space/
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> Measuring light bouncing off a window to hear conversations Laser microphones are old too. Clear and Present Danger features the use of a laser mic and that was written in 1989.

by mike_d 3y ago

dmix 3y ago

Still, the whole "this is what we have imagine what the gov has" is usually wayyy overrated of a take and IRL it's usually way more boring and incremental, closely tracking commercial industry. In most cases it's their ability to spend money to build large teams to employ tech, the complete scale of operations (XKeyscore+TEMPEST comes to mind), and the care they take is where things like the NSA dominate vs the average ability of the best hacker. Their unique advantages are only rarely in the individual technological leaps, which either a) industry has no match of or b) well informed technical experts are unaware of, like the things you reference.

account17 3y ago
FWIW you almost certainly can at minimum generalize the location of a phone if you know roughly where to look via beamforming [0] Massive antenna arrays and SIGINT satellites have massive funding and decades of history, and they've already shown interest in tracking literally everything else [1] This isn't some star trek type of thing, this is a "would the USG dump enough money into SIGINT to implement it?" I'm very confident the technology exists to roughly track specific locations of interest for specific devices if not more. I understand people may disagree but it would be foolish to assume it's beyond the realm of possiblity. [0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/55143/is-it-possible-for-leo-satellites-to-detect-a-usable-signal-from-regular-mobile https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/55143/is-it-possib... [1] https://www.aerosociety.com/news/eavesdropping-from-space/ https://www.aerosociety.com/news/eavesdropping-from-space/

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> Measuring light bouncing off a window to hear conversations Laser microphones are old too. Clear and Present Danger features the use of a laser mic and that was written in 1989.