In the mid-90s, I worked for a small consulting firm that was looking to rent some office space. We were given a tour of an amazing space on the top floor of a

In the mid-90s, I worked for a small consulting firm that was looking to rent some office space. We were given a tour of an amazing space on the top floor of a rather sizable skyscraper. We were told that it had been occupied by a federal contractor and that it was TEMPEST secure. Most of the tour involved regaling us with stories of how it was set up around this idea of security. I had not been aware of TEMPEST security before, and so they explained the basics of EMF snooping and the countermeasures employed in the design of this place. They also led us into rooms where people worked on designs, and they explained that every chalkboard had a curtain that could be drawn for privacy, and every such room had a guard stationed with M16 who could just shoot any intruder. To this day, I have no idea if any of those stories were based in truth, or embellished; after all, their goal was to have us rent it out. We ended up passing and found much more humble digs to work from (we weren't working on anything so secure that we needed TEMPEST-proof architecture) but the visit has stood out in my memory as an amazing relic of the Cold War.