NSA Releases Historical Documents on TEMPEST

sgunhouse writes to mention Wired's Threat Level has a piece on a recently-declassified document detailing the history of TEMPEST. "It was 1943, and an engineer with Bell Telephone was working on one of the U.S. government's most sensitive and important pieces of wartime machinery, a Bell Telephone model 131-B2. It was a top secret encrypted teletype terminal used by the Army and Navy to transmit wartime communications that could defy German and Japanese cryptanalysis. Then he noticed something odd. Far across the lab, a freestanding oscilloscope had developed a habit of spiking every time the teletype encrypted a letter. Upon closer inspection, the spikes could actually be translated into the plain message the machine was processing. Though he likely didn't know it at the time, the engineer had just discovered that all information processing machines send their secrets into the electromagnetic ether."

Comments

oblig

[kongit]

Van Eck phreaking and lot of panty hose

Re:Maybe the silliest consequence?

[Anonymous Coward]

__t ___e ____ _r________, ____ ___r_____ ______ ____ _o ____ __ ___ __ ________ _r__ _ __i_ __s__ t__ computer, right? I mean in modern times, we don't really have to worry about this at all, right? Cuz there's so much else being processed and sent down a bus by the processor that you'd never pick out the data accurately, and probably not from more than a millimeter away. Sir he just sent a secret message to Mr. Slas H Dot again. TEMPEST couldn't make it all out but it should be enough to indite.

Re:This is gonna be interesting.

[errxn]

Here's another one.