Theremin's Bug Let Soviets Spy On USA For More Than 7 Years (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: Theremin, yes the same Theremin who built the instrument that made the Star Trek theme song famous, had a hand in espionage as well. Albeit not a willing one. Turns out his life is actually quite tragic. In addition to that story, Adam Fabio takes a trip through the details of "The Thing", a bug installed in the US Embassy by the Soviet Union during the cold war. It used no batteries, instead depending on a carrier frequency transmitted by the "listener", causing the resonant cavity to transmit back the audio from the room at a higher frequency. Pretty nifty, and so was the hiding place: a hand-carved wooden seal of the United States. Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts, right?

Comments

Engineer should have written the article

[mykepredko]

I cringed at the sentence "Receive tuning (if it can be called such) was achieved by the precisely cut antenna." which is actually how EVERY radio is tuned; the antenna is a component of the resonant circuit which forms the receiver.

I've read about the bugged seal for years, when I was a kid it was used as an example how how nasty Soviets could never be trusted. It's an interesting story - but honestly, the story of the US embassy built in Moscow in the early 1980s is much more interesting. I knew two people involved with the analysis of the building and it's a fascinating case of hubris. The US felt that they could detect any passive resonant cavity devices using the same techniques they used for "The Thing" and, more importantly, for active radios, they could detect them by a non-linear junction detector (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_junction_detector) which finds the P-N junctions of diodes and transistors.

The Soviets, knowing this, simply dumped a bunch of diodes in the concrete used for the building meaning that everywhere in the building, the diodes would be found and could not be distinguished from any other electronic devices in the building making the search for bugging devices impossible.

My friends spent several months chipping at the concrete walls of the embassy and never found any listening devices, just diodes which were labouriously separated from the concrete. It's interesting to see articles of the day (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/15/world/the-bugged-embassy-case-what-went-wrong.html?pagewanted=all & http://articles.latimes.com/19...) claiming that listening devices were found in the building but what I was told was that there were a few pieces of rebar which were not properly installed and about $500 worth of diodes mixed into the concrete. The claims of listening devices are most likely exaggerated to lessen the embarrassment that the Soviets had pulled over such a big coup over on the US for what amounts to petty cash.

Re:Star Trek not so much

[gameboyhippo]

Start at the new Doctor Who in Season 5 episode 1. Watch until "Day of the Doctor". Then go back to Season 1 episode 1. Finish off the rest of new Who. Then go back and watch the classic Who (at least what exists).

Why Season 5 Episode 1? Because there are some huge spoilers in earlier seasons. (It's a time travel show). It also makes a certain episode in Season 4 a lot more tragic.

As for classic who, my advice for watching it is to view it like a play rather than like a modern show.

Re:Star Trek not so much

[erikkemperman]

I am not liking Capaldi or the new writing though, it just tries too hard to be deep and avant garde anymore.

Have to disagree about Capaldi. Tennant got the right balance of dark and light, but I thought Smith was just all fluff, so I like that Capaldi's Doctor is rougher, grizzly even. But then I was a huge fan of The Thick of It.

The writing, yeah I miss Russell T. Davies. Moffat is clearly a talented writer (I love what he did with Sherlock) but the best episodes of the Who reboot, for me, are basically all Russell. And Torchwood doesn't look like coming back either, I'd probably rate seasons 3 and 4 over all of Who.

Shame Neil Gaiman didn't do more.