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There have been a number of comments here about the "secret" secure room in San Francisco where Internet traffic is snooped. When General Alexander was head of the NSA (where he built a replica of the Star Trek bridge with taxpayer money for his commmand) he issued the directive to "Collect it all!"

The "room" was in AT&T's facility, not Google's, and tapped a major Internet backbone link. It's been known and documented for years. See the deposition of Mark Klein dated June 8, 2006, formerly of AT&T (class action suit led by EFF vs AT&T: C-06-0672-VRW in US District Court, Northern District of California). He describes the sequence of events, persons, locations, equipment, and details involved in installing the tap of all Internet traffic passing through the fiber lines at the AT&T location at 611 Folsom St., San Francisco, and sending them to room 641A, designated a secret locked "secure room." More technical details, diagrams, and photos here but note that all this info is VERY OLD - 13 years old!

All the major telcos participated in the program back then except Qwest which (as noted by drinkypoo above directly resulted in the destruction of that company (they lost major government contracts) and 6 years in prison for its CEO Joseph Nacchio (for relying on those contracts). Nacchio was finally released from prison in 2013 after serving the full 6 years. The telcos were later granted immunity by congress and other cases have been quashed on grounds of lack of standing because evidence would impinge on national security. Perhaps it seemed all too technical and abstract at the time for people to pay attention but the news has been out there for a long time. We can only imagine where things stand today.

There have been a number of comments here about the "secret" secure room in San Francisco where Internet traffic is snooped. When General Alexander was head of the NSA (where he built a replica of the Star Trek bridge with taxpayer money for his commmand) he issued the directive to "Collect it all!"

The "room" was in AT&T's facility, not Google's, and tapped a major Internet backbone link. It's been known and documented for years. See the deposition of Mark Klein dated June 8, 2006, formerly of AT&T (class action suit led by EFF vs AT&T: C-06-0672-VRW in US District Court, Northern District of California). He describes the sequence of events, persons, locations, equipment, and details involved in installing the tap of all Internet traffic passing through the fiber lines at the AT&T location at 611 Folsom St., San Francisco, and sending them to room 641A, designated a secret locked "secure room." More technical details, diagrams, and photos here but note that all this info is VERY OLD - 13 years old!

All the major telcos participated in the program back then except Qwest which (as noted by drinkypoo above directly resulted in the destruction of that company (they lost major government contracts) and 6 years in prison for its CEO Joseph Nacchio (for relying on those contracts). Nacchio was finally released from prison in 2013 after serving the full 6 years. The telcos were later granted immunity by congress and other cases have been quashed on grounds of lack of standing because evidence would impinge on national security. Perhaps it seemed all too technical and abstract at the time for people to pay attention but the news has been out there for a long time. We can only imagine where things stand today.

I've seen this idea proposed at least since the mid 1980's. The problem is the so-called "spatial light modulator" which doesn't exist beyond something a few millimetres on a side capable of not much more than making a fuzzy dot, and that only in the monochromatic light of the laser. The problems, to be practical, are being able to produce a plane larger than the area to be viewed that can change the phase of the source light precisely (with fractional wavelength accuracy) in real time at a density of greater than 25,000 pixels per linear inch and the bandwidth and computing horsepower to run it. No one has shown a way it can be done with today's technology for arbitrary images even though there has been much interesting work put into it over the decades. It's still out of reach for now. There is a way to address the issues and we can produce full colour displays that have both horizontal and vertical parallax as well as addressing the focus issue. Gabriel Lippmann, who won the Nobel prize in Physics in 1908 for his invention of a method of true spectral colour photography that were actually true full colour holograms which he produced a half a century before Dennis Gabor's work, also proposed a method of 3D imaging which became known as Integral Photography. Using an array of tiny lenses (NOT prisms as in lenticular displays) one can reconstruct wavefronts using a subtractive approach (subtracting phase components from discrete samples of white diffuse light) instead of the additive one used in modern holography. Numerous examples of varying quality exist going back many decades. Although impractical at the time, today it can be done. Back in the mid 1980's I received a patent (US patent 4,878,735) on using diffractive elements for the lens array and have a description of the technology in terms of it being an optical computing architecture (which I called "Integral MicroOptics") at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with some pictures if you are interested). Interestingly, the Patent office introduced a typo in the title of the patent calling "zone plates" "tone plates" and that has never been fixed! (Being a musician, I've always gotten a laugh out of that!)

Interesting work with a lot of unobvious possibilities. "Lensless" is a little misleading. Pinholes are just the center circle of a zone plate. Zone plates are lenses that work by diffraction instead of refraction. They look like a bulls-eye (see http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for a quick and simple primer). The diameter of the hole determines the focal length - hence too big OR too small leads to fuzzier images. The have a couple of big drawbacks - the focal length is a function of wavelength hence objects in the image have rainbow edges and the aperture of a focused pinhole is small (the f-stop). The effective f-stop can be increased at will by adding additional zones around the pinhole but zone plates that work by blocking areas can only achieve efficiencies of around 10%. That can be improved to around 90% or more by replacing the opaque zones with tapered phase-shifting zones. Back in the mid 1980's I worked with a similar technology using arrays of zone plates which we called Integral MicroOptics. We used arrays of micro-zone plates (and pinholes) to capture image data over large sheets (hence from many angles at once) and then reconstruct that data with full parallax in 3D and color, both stored and in real time and sometimes with some optical computing applied - all using passive devices! They were the equivalent of full color holograms using a subtractive technology instead of an additive one, hence no lasers were required and the more diffuse the light the better. It was amazing what could be done with thin flat sheets of plastic and printing but the technology of the day was too crude to get very far. Today much more could be achieved. If interested you can see the original paper from 1986 at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with updated graphics and a link to the original) and http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for some images created using the technology at that time.

Interesting work with a lot of unobvious possibilities. "Lensless" is a little misleading. Pinholes are just the center circle of a zone plate. Zone plates are lenses that work by diffraction instead of refraction. They look like a bulls-eye (see http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for a quick and simple primer). The diameter of the hole determines the focal length - hence too big OR too small leads to fuzzier images. The have a couple of big drawbacks - the focal length is a function of wavelength hence objects in the image have rainbow edges and the aperture of a focused pinhole is small (the f-stop). The effective f-stop can be increased at will by adding additional zones around the pinhole but zone plates that work by blocking areas can only achieve efficiencies of around 10%. That can be improved to around 90% or more by replacing the opaque zones with tapered phase-shifting zones. Back in the mid 1980's I worked with a similar technology using arrays of zone plates which we called Integral MicroOptics. We used arrays of micro-zone plates (and pinholes) to capture image data over large sheets (hence from many angles at once) and then reconstruct that data with full parallax in 3D and color, both stored and in real time and sometimes with some optical computing applied - all using passive devices! They were the equivalent of full color holograms using a subtractive technology instead of an additive one, hence no lasers were required and the more diffuse the light the better. It was amazing what could be done with thin flat sheets of plastic and printing but the technology of the day was too crude to get very far. Today much more could be achieved. If interested you can see the original paper from 1986 at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with updated graphics and a link to the original) and http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for some images created using the technology at that time.

Interesting work with a lot of unobvious possibilities. "Lensless" is a little misleading. Pinholes are just the center circle of a zone plate. Zone plates are lenses that work by diffraction instead of refraction. They look like a bulls-eye (see http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for a quick and simple primer). The diameter of the hole determines the focal length - hence too big OR too small leads to fuzzier images. The have a couple of big drawbacks - the focal length is a function of wavelength hence objects in the image have rainbow edges and the aperture of a focused pinhole is small (the f-stop). The effective f-stop can be increased at will by adding additional zones around the pinhole but zone plates that work by blocking areas can only achieve efficiencies of around 10%. That can be improved to around 90% or more by replacing the opaque zones with tapered phase-shifting zones. Back in the mid 1980's I worked with a similar technology using arrays of zone plates which we called Integral MicroOptics. We used arrays of micro-zone plates (and pinholes) to capture image data over large sheets (hence from many angles at once) and then reconstruct that data with full parallax in 3D and color, both stored and in real time and sometimes with some optical computing applied - all using passive devices! They were the equivalent of full color holograms using a subtractive technology instead of an additive one, hence no lasers were required and the more diffuse the light the better. It was amazing what could be done with thin flat sheets of plastic and printing but the technology of the day was too crude to get very far. Today much more could be achieved. If interested you can see the original paper from 1986 at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... (with updated graphics and a link to the original) and http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... for some images created using the technology at that time.

Although there were internal documents, I don't believe any public papers were ever published on this project. The group's purpose was to identify technologies and get a head start on medical technologies useful in the 10 to 15 year time frame, and the company kept the work quiet. This project was about building a gas chromatograph on a chip to analyse blood gasses in real time non-invasively. In addition to etching the chromatograph tube as a channel, we also fabricated an on-chip thermal conductivity sensor and a "no moving parts" valve and compressor using fluidic logic also on the chip. We actually had the components working and were looking at building an integrated prototype that would self-calibrate and be able to do 10 samples/second of samples obtained through the skin. My "vacuum tube on a chip" experiment was something I tried using parts from those other experiments. The interesting thing we found was that heaters became unnecessary when the dimensions got very small, due to "surface electron clouds" or tunnelling we didn't have the time to find out. I do have an SEM picture of the sensor (which also worked as a heater) which I have posted at http://www.eastjesus.net/tech/... if you're interested in seeing it. We worked closely with Dr. Henry Guckel at the University of Wisconsin. He was profoundly knowledgeable and helpful on that project and I later worked with him again on a separate optical computing/imaging project later (more on that elsewhere in that web site). If you haven't already, you might want to look into some of his other work which was published. Best of luck and let me know if I can be of more assistance.