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Snooping Through Walls with Microwaves
denis-The-menace writes "According to an article from newscientist, scientists have devised a system to use microwave energy for surveillance. If people are speaking inside the room, any flimsy surface, such as clothing, will be vibrating. This modulates the radio beam reflected from the surface. Although the radio reflection that passes back through the wall is extremely faint, the kind of electronic extraction and signal cleaning tricks used by NASA to decode signals in space can be used to extract speech. Although, I doubt it would work in this room"
is there's a van sitting outside your house, with a whole lot of kitchen appliances pointing at it.
I think I'm going to buy stock in Alcoa Operations...with shenanigans like this going on, they can only increase in value.
In the meantime, here's some telltale signs you might be under microwave surveillance:
Watch for these signs and protect your privacy...cause the government certainly isn't going to.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Now, when the NSA spies on me, my wi-fi network will be unable to work due to interference!
SecureThe.Net - Practical Resources for Securing Systems
luckily my parents basement has thick walls.
serenity now!
How many criminals protect against laser audio surveillance, where a laser beam is bounced off a window or other rigid surface, and the sound from the room vibrates the surface, wobbling the beam, the wobble being translated into audio by the snooper.
The laser can be defeated by double glazing (I think), devices to vibrate windows and laser detectors (to tell you if you're being listened to).
A microwave device can be defeated by the good old tinfoil hat - by which I mean wallpapering in foil or otherwise turning the room into a faraday cage.
Some associates were spied on by the telephone.
Just because the receiver was on the cradle didn't mean that the microphone wasn't active.
The cops played stuff back in interviews/court that was off topic but was the occupants bitching about each other to try and divide and conquer them.
This was in Leeds, UK.
I can't remember many more details or find a link. I didn't know them at the time and only heard about it later as a warning.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I don't think this a new technology. I think that this is just a new take on a technology that Léon Theremin (inventor of the Theremin instrument) was working on for the KGB in the 50-60s. He was using infrared bounced off of windows to detect conversations inside (or something). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Theremin
Even at 100GHz, the wavelength of microwaves is 3 mm. But sound waves inside a room would cause a surface to vibrate perhaps 0.001 mm. You cant modulate a 3mm wave to record 0.001 mm changes.
The Soviet KGB have been doing exactly this since before 1960. Windowpanes make good microwave reflectors. All it takes is a simple microwave source and mixer. Nothing new to see here.
I can just see how this is going to get the already paranoid all aflutter...
Still, I can definitely see some potential for this. I mean, say, listening to my sister b*tch about me to her friends in her room, or what my parents talk about in the sanctity of their bedroom. Mwahahaha...you shall have no secrets from me, feeble people who trust in walls, cower before my might...
Also, is it just me, but does the NewScientist site seem to be a bit...slow...*evil grin*...hehe...even the great NS cowers before the might of the barbarian Slashdot hordes.
cya,
Victor
How long till they incorporate this feature into an iPod?
Man, I knew that burrito I put in the microwave last night when I came home from a party was speaking to me...
This tech has been around for a very long time, just not in the public sector.
If you look at any high security building(NSA, etc) they will have multi layers on the outside and inside of the buildings.
Not only is it physical security, but sound and wireless security.
Wouldn't the sound in the room vibrate the foil on the wall? Said foil would reflect microwaves very nicely, I suspect...
Max.
Actually ... just the several inch leads on light fixtures and other electrical devices can become bi-directional antennas for the determined. You pretty much have to make the screen room such that power is completely issolated, and other other connections to the world severed.
My preference to microwaves transmitted in order to invade my privacy is to send hot lead back,at high speed
Geek Hillbilly
The summary mentioned microwave ovens, so some may be tempted to play around with a DIY radar. Don't!!! Of all domectic appliances a microwave is about the most dangerous to take apart. The RF radiation has a very high power and is invisible. When exposed to the electromagnetic field, currents start to flow inside the human body (mostly close to the skin) giving rise to burn-like wounds. Especially the risk of eye injury is significant. Don't try this at home.
Yeah, they listen to the music playing inside your house. Say you are hearing the latest hit from Britney Spears but the RIAA has no record of you buying it, well they turn the 'volume' to 11 on their microwave emitter and fry your balls, burn your house and kill your dog. Justice has been served, right?
Disclosure: I'm stupid
Funny thing is, with this kind of device tinfoil hats will actually improve "the black suits" reception, since tinfoil easily vibrates and reflects radiowaves really well.
*Sigh* what now?
J.
Could we like.. stop the idiotic use of Coral cache links?
Not everyone and their mother has a firewall that can connect outbound to port 8090. Now get coral cache running on port 80 and it would be no problem.. but posting links with port 8090 is just.. lame. No, I can't correct this problem myself as I am not a system administrator at this place, nor is the blocking of anything besides a few ports ever going to go away in this place.
I suspect I'm not the only one annoyed by those links.. *grumbles*
-pug
I can see if now.
"A local man was cooked alive by the FBI using of all things a Microwave to spy on his Bittorrent and file sharing PC! the man did not realize anything was wrong when he had a craving for his own arm. Local law enforcement were baffled to see that the man in question had eaten his arm to the elbow, and the rest of him seemed to be cooked except for his mid section which was on a rotating glass plate in his living room. A local FBI spokesman said, "We thought using a microwave oven would give us a clear view of the file sharer's life and how he does it!""
This is of course made up! haha. However using microwaves to peer through walls and see whats going on is kinda nifty. However, I would think it would be dangerous over prolonged exposure, since a microwave does move molecules around to heat stuff up.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
This is old news - I remember reading about it a few years ago.
It's scary technology though; the next house I build is going to have 2" of lead in the walls methinks.
The "Foil Room" won't help against snooping as you'd like to believe. (Prepare to ditch all your foil hats!!).
To truly block signals, you'd need to build a actual Faraday "cage" built with the smallest possible 'holes' so the waves created inside (be it voice, the sound of you typing or even waves emitted by the blinking LED from your Ethernet card) will be cancelled out. This is the same technology that the intelligence agencies employ against counter intelligence. That with foil (which is properly grounded) will work.
Solid surfaces such as foil can actually act as large AMPLIFIERS if implemented incorrectly since the waves will
Note that your microwave is surrounded by a Faraday cage to protect you from the rays; not foil.
A quick Google to back up my post yielded this page discussing similar topics.
-- dK
This has been around for a long time. In the book "Spycatcher" by ex-MI5 agent Peter Wright, he describes a bug used by the KGB to spy on the American ambassador in Hawaii (I think). There was a metal membrane hidden inside a wooden carving, which would passively vibrate with sounds in the room. A strong RF beam of around 900 MHz (details are hazy again, and it's not quite microwave) was directed towards the office from a fair distance away, then the signal would be minutely modulated and reflected by the metal membrane. It was able to work for several years, and this was in the 1960's. You can only guess what's available now.
I guarantee they're using a MASER. You can thank RADAR pioneers from M.I.T. and Bell Labs for that.
That being said it is easily defeated. For example - short wavelengths below 1cm start resonating with water vapor. That's why doppler radar has been such a boon to meteorology.
But there are ways to stop it. Metal impregnated and grounded cement walls that are, oh, 6 to 8 feet below grade level would be reasonably safe. Of course don't put any windows, just ventilation.
And if you're really that much of a target they'd bug the place before they resorted to using microwave to listen in. BTW, for a good fantasy view of using microwave to peek in I highly recommend watching "The Siege" with Denzel Washinton and Tony Shaloub.
Here is one such site.
-- Intelligence is soluble in alcohol
but wouldn't the simple precaution of turning up the radio/TV defeat this ? Humans can pickout certain noise and filter out everything else quite easily. How does tinfoil and other "vibrating surfaces" fare in this regards ?
The president at one of my former companies was a colonel in the Army Security Agency. He used to tell me all sorts of things, including how the Russians bombarded the US embassy with radiation to get signature signals back. And this was in the 60s or before. The surveillance technology available to intelligence now must be quite interesting.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
I actually know researchers who have been working with what they call "wall penatrating RADAR" and it sounds a lot like this - it more detects movement and sound then being able to image what is in a room. The big things they claim it would be good for is detecting fires from a distance, finding people trapped in places (it can detect a heartbeat) and, yes, seeing that sniper around the corner. I don't think they considered audio survallence, or at least they never told us about it. But I suppose once you have a patent, you can use the tech for any purpose, noble or sinister.
And fill the stub:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_detector
Any chance this could affect those with pacemakers?
They're called SCIFs (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), more info at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scif
Also see TEMPEST - "a U.S. government code word for a set of standards for limiting electric or electromagnetic radiation emanations from electronic equipment such as microchips, monitors, or printers. It is a counter-intelligence measure aimed at the prevention of electronic espionage. The term TEMPEST is often used more broadly for the entire field of compromising emanations or Emissions Security (EMSEC)." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I could have sworn this is ancient technology where they would use microwaves or a laser to do the same thing, but bounce it off glass. It seems to me a piece of glass would be far more superior to use than a wall. Of course, if you have double or triple paned glass, this could be a problem.
Can you mount the detector on top of a handheld railgun??
[Insert pithy quote here]
Heh heh, he said 'Dic'tion. Heh heh
Here's a typical article about MIR. Last I read, there were legal battles about shoddy treatment of potential vendors by the LLNL. Slashdot readers would probably do well to track this technology!
A taste of this from http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2004-09/dl
-- Real Stupidity is the Artificial Intelligence of the 21st century
Your comment about antennas reminds me of my old dorm room.
I was in the dorm next to the one that had the uni radio station transmitter on the roof. My room had LOS to the transmitter. When my portable stereo was plugged in but "off" and the tuner was set to that frequency, you could still faintly hear that station. Actually, considering where I kept it near the window, the stereo itself had good LOS. The running gag was that you could pick the station up on a toaster oven.
I hate to think what it was like to be on the floor directly under the transmitter.
"In Soviet Russia..." type comments ?
Site is down! Coral cache, anyone?
Oh, wait...
What, do I need a sig now?
In 1952 the Russians planted a small flexible microwave cavity inside the great seal hanging on an embassy wall and used passive microwave excitation to read the vibrations of the cavity and consequently the speech going on in the room. It worked for quite a while until people figured out that stuff discussed in the room was not very secret.
Gives new meaning to the term, "wall hack"
A wodden copy of the Great Seal of the United States was bugged. Part of the seal was used as a diaphram and was used as a passive resonant reflector. This would pass most bug sweeps as the device was not active, but passive. When painted with a 330 Mhz signal, it would modulate it.
The only update in the article is now they use microwaves and common materials already in a room.
Details here;
http://www.spybusters.com/Great_Seal_Bug.html
This bug is was delivered in 1946 and discovered in 1952.
The truth shall set you free!
or is it getting warm in here?
I'll just sit around the house naked =)
Troll? It was a joke!
Just write a mail http://www.bloggingbymail.com/
That reminds me of a movie. The main character was really paranoid of something, I don't remember what, but wasn't there a dog biting involved?
Weird movie though.
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Control thought of these things way back in the 1960's. Their highly advanced Cone of Silence(TM) and other innovations would be no match for such technology... er, would you believe that it's the other way around?
What? I told you not to tell me that!
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
The whole story. It was found in the fifties in American embassy in Moscow. The metal post was stuck in a carved wooden eagle schoolchildren gave to the ambassador. When found, the device was called "The Thing" because the US couldn't figure out what it was for. Peter Wright of MI5 eventually figured it out.
I guess with the processing power and algorithms of NASA, the US can do this microwave espionage without a metal post. Hrm.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
The first sign the Fed's are listening to you is when they give you a nice small bust of lenin for your mantle peice. That's exactly what the British did to the russian ambassador back in the post world-war two era. They gave him a a gift of a small statue and inside it they had mounted a corner cube which is a passive device that enhances the retro-reflection of microwaves beamed at it. (read about it is Peter Wright's (banned in UK) book Spycatcher--wright was the science officer for MI5 and inventor of the technique)
The second sign is when you feel toasty warm and the chair feels cold. In the 70's and 80's the carter and reagan administrations were perpetually complaining that the level of microwave energy measured inside the US embassy exceeded the OSHA limits for exposure. Eventually the US built a new embassy with enhanced shielding. UNfortunately the Soviet's put listening devices into the bricks. The embassy had to be knocked down and rebuilt. Of course, peter wright did exactly the same thing to the Soviet embassy in canada. Each night he snuck into the construction site and pulled wires up the inside of the walls to his microphones in specially made window sills. The soviet's learned about it from a mole in MI5 and had to build a second interior wall so that no rooms were near the windows.
Doppler microwave spying is quite old. As is laser vibrometry on windows.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
And here I thought the link would lead to a pic of a room of nudists ...
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
The United States used this against the soviets for quite a while.
Applied research from the Iraq war finding application in real life? /sarcasm/
Na, dubya wouldn't let science/technology get out of government hands unless it was going to line his pockets.
\sarcasm\
Sorry I got to get in my jabs when I can.
--"Sorry for the inconvience." Gods Last Words to his Creation
DNA, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
"All your CDs are covered with tiny cracks and will no longer play."
They just want to destroy your non-DRM'd CDs!
It's interesting to me to compare a Coralized link to a non-Coralized one. The last few times this link hit Slashdot or a similar high-volume site, the server basically went to 100% CPU doing dynamic content but never got particularly slow - I have it set up to throttle at around 3 megabits, and for that traffic mix, it kept it from ever getting sluggish. Currently, the direct site is still fast, and the Coral cache is a little slower, but it's nice to see that this time I'm only shipping out about a megabit, mostly the dynamic pages.
Fun stuff!
The US embassy in Moscow was built by local Russian labor (in like the 1970s/1980s) and the CIA et al. found that the large national seal hanging in the Ambassador's office had a microwave resonant cavity/diaphram to facilitate audio eavesdropping.
I made with similar "hobby projects" using microwaves and lasers in the mid 1980s. These guys "just" figured this stuff out now? Duh!
Looks like people will have to return to having meetings in the shower.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I believe this tech was devised just after WW2 by captured German scientists in something called the Morfino[?] Institute. A friend told me this is all described by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in his book _The Gulag Archipelago_.
Microwave radiation directed at people. Sounds safe to me.
Didn't they do this in uh... Sneakers?
They don't have to use microwaves. They'll bust your buddy, make a deal, he'll come over wearing a wire and they'll have every word you say while you're selling your baggie on tape.
ANY listening device can be defeated with a radio, CD player, or TV set, including the narc's wire. The more high tech the listening device, the easier it is to defeat.
The guy who said he was buying stock in Alcoa was right on: microwaves (or any other radio waves) won't go through a faraday cage.
But you know what? The feds (and state govs and your country's cops) have nerds, too. So you're going to get busted sooner or later.
Here in Charlottesville, home of the National Ground Intelligence Center (you might know them for a little kerfuffle involving their providing bad intelligence about nuclear weapons to some president...something about a war?), they've long had a thick wire mesh covering all of their windows. A former employee told me, when I was a kid, that it was designed to reflect microwaves for this very reason.
-Waldo Jaquith
THE CONE OF SILENCE! http://www.cinerhama.com/getsmart/innovations.html
There's an old saying in Washington, The scandal is not that laws are broken; the real scandal is that everything they do is legal.
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I missed you! Please, give me an anime emote, pleeease? I need one right about now. Please? It would make me feel ever so happy and gay.
I'm actually making devices to do this as part of an undergraduate research project. The devices I'm making are passive with frequency response up to the 100 GHz range. The best part these is that they don't require any DC bias and as such aren't subject to 1/f noise like schottky diodes. Right now we're looking at applications for security (really advanced metal/explosives detector) and aviation (water vapor is transparent in that frequency range).
Come on, this guy is fun to watch!
In the book Spy Catcher, they propose the same method for spying. Too easy to detect!
There was an unknown error in the submission.
This stuff has been happening since the fifties. Nothing new here.
The russians did that to the US, too. With a nice giant carving of the Great Seal - with a device behind a small hole beneath the beak.
Consisted of a cavity resonator about the size of a stack of 10 or so dimes, with a tuning post up the middle, a diaphragm for one end (to detune it according to air pressure) and a wire antenna maybe a foot long coupled into the cavity. Excite it with a microwave signal near but not dead-on the resonance and the reflection is amplitude modulated by the sound from the room.
Better yet: Put a diode in a movable surface. Excite it and it returns harmonics (easy to sort out from other reflections because they're on a different frequency), phase-modulated by doppler shift from the object's motion (like its variant FM, PM is very noise-resistant).
Russian laborers constructed an embassy where the walls were FULL of thousands of diodes - embedded in the construction material. US had to abandon the building and build one of their own. News items suggested the diodes were to make it hard to sniff for bugs. But IMHO they were the bugs themselves, using the harmonic-generation/doppler/PM trick.
Like the posting in the root article, this makes every surface a bug. You have to get diodes into them, but the return is cleaner and stronger than echoes from a passive reflector.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Consisted of a cavity resonator ...
Oh, yes. They also did one on that pattern that was disguised as an olive-on-a-toothpick, to put in a martini glass and carry around or leave sitting about at embassy parties.
And the diode trick also turns anything with a diode in it into a bug.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Walks over to thermostat
Hmm. . . well it's set at 76 . . . I wonder why. . . GOOD LORD! 386 degrees?!
Two spies are outside in van.
One spy to the other: Dammit! I thought I told you to put it on "defrost"!
www.linuxpenguin.net
"The first sign the Fed's are listening to you is when they give you a nice small bust of lenin for your mantle peice."
Wow! Actually, someone once gave one of my friends a small bust of lenin. Shit! (and I'm totally serious, but that's not to suggest that the feds would have any reason to spy on any of my friends)...
glue popcorn kernels on the walls. Not only are you warned of the surveillance by the appearance of a tasty treat, but each "pop" causes vibration to obfuscate what was being said. This is known as the Val Kilmer method in spy circles.
OK. This type of technology has been around (at least) 20 years. Someone is babbling in a secure, locked room. The blinds are closed. Armed guards are all around. From 2 miles away, a stealthy secret agent fires a laser at the center of the window. The very faint reflected beam is recieved, amplified and filtered to the same amplitude as the incident laser 'frequency' (the laser light need not be in the visible part of the spectrum, and for the purposes here, it's best that it isn't). The reflected signal is mixed with the incident one (like in a tank circuit, found in every superheterodyne radio made in the last 50 years --which is about 99% of all radios made in the last 50 years, (the good ones anyway)--. The sum and difference are passed through a diode and amplified, the difference between the two being the voice causing the window to vibrate --causing the signal to modulate--. A loud horn can be blaring outside, but it won't affect the reflected light. That they are using Microwaves rather than laser light is just a difference in frequency (it's all electromagnetic radiation). It was old in '87 (at least the voice part of it). That they don't need windows anymore, and can 'see' inside --no surprise.
Sheesh! They cover the chair, the computer, the books, the fridge, the ceiling and walls all with good 'ol tin foil, but NOT THE HAT??!? Why? There are satellites up there people, aliens just looking for some poor unsuspecting cranial thought to turn into an interplanetary movie-of-the-week! And it's all just for the taking. People don't even know when they've been hacked! Take it from me people, take your favorite hat, get some tin-foil, and tell people it's for Halloween! No alien is going to turn my thoughts into a movie of the week, not anymore, anyway! Don't believe me? Just let yourself get abducted, and you'll see! A hundred billion aliens all sitting in the intergalactic theater, chuckling through their third nose about some private thought you had while sleeping. It's just not fair!
I think that it is funny how crime and the methods of detecting it change so little over the years.
It is possible to more than listen to a conversation in a room using this type of technology. Theoretically it is possible to spy on what a person is thinking to oneself by scanning the way muscles move and then analyzing patterns. Those muscle movements are not noticeable to oneself but to a computer with some software it is possible to decode what one thinks.
everybody in the future is depicted as wearing those aluminum suits, cause their is so much microwaves traveling through the air!!! god now i get it!!! i always wondered about that.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
What this aticle about is the so called terahertz band technology. It was discussed big in the press some two to three years ago. Yes, it is supposed to let you see through walls, much like ultrasound and also allow eavesdropping.
The man who designed that device? A brilliant Russian engineer named Leon Theremin. Yes, the same one who invented the musical instrument that bears his name.