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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.
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.
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
MI5 developed this in the 1950s, and called it Special Facilities. All it required at the start was a modification to the phone - a single washer, and the phone could be used as a surveillence device. Later versions enabled activation using high frequency radio waves to activate the telephones microphone and required no modification to the phone itself.
Survellience was also carried out against embassy cypher machines using unshielded telephone cables picking up eletromagnetic emissions from the cypher machines, in many cases enabling the reading of both the en clair message and the cypher material.
None of this was admissable in a UK court. Phone tap evidence still isnt.
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.
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!
Evidence?? Court?? You are running an old version of UK, please upgrade where these bugs have been removed in an effort to improve security.
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
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.
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
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