Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
While annoying to a small number of people who can't connect to them, the coralcache links are vastly better than the alternative of slashdotting a site that cannot handle the load of a million nerds with refresh buttons.
When that happens, NO ONE can get to the page, not just those with lame firewalls.
[ObNerd]
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
This space for rent.
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 ?
Tinfoil is an excellent reflector. Therefore I'm sure tinfoil hats will actually help the snooper by creating much better signals.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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
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!
Greetings, You may feel free to borrow my design:
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
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.
The United States used this against the soviets for quite a while.
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
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).
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