Hacker News

Turns out we're all livestreamers:

> In 1985, Wim van Eck published the first unclassified technical analysis of the security risks of emanations from computer monitors.[2][3] This paper caused some consternation in the security community, which had previously believed that such monitoring was a highly sophisticated attack available only to governments; van Eck successfully eavesdropped on a real system, at a range of hundreds of metres, using just $15 worth of equipment plus a television set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

In this context "emanations" means a signal allowing the listener to reconstruct the image and read the words on the screen.

I'm not sure if it works with modern monitors (CRTs were pretty high voltage!), but they are also quite "loud" in EMF. A fun experiment is to walk around your house with a portable radio in AM mode. You can "hear" all the electronics!

The Thing is full of surprises to this day.

> The Thing was designed by Soviet Russian inventor Leon Theremin, best known for his invention of the theremin, an electronic musical instrument.

Seems like the devices they found in the IBM Selectrics during Project GUNMAN (though, same ‘conflict’).

https://media.defense.gov/2021/Jul/13/2002761779/-1/-1/0/LEA...

Haseltine’s The Spy in Moscow Station is also a fascinating account of events.

I suppose you can activate such device by just sweeping a high power radio wave over a frequency range. At that point, you can see what signals it sends back. Excite, then listen. This is how a lot of detection methods work, including radar, so it is not a weird idea.

Also there are ways to detect diode junctions now.

What if the Thing was supposed to be found? People think it was for surveillance. Maybe it was to make the Americans more paranoid.

That Dan Gelbart lecture where he also explains how retroreflection[0] is used to detect remote viewing, was it anything with a lens or even human eye is really good.

[0] straight link to where he explains retroflection https://youtu.be/0MtRxX0crjU?t=3019

Also many other videos where he explains how to solve hard problems are really good too.

e: There seems to be commercial product using retroreflection advertised Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaXSRpTeMbU

Not to disk, writing to RAM is the important part. DDR3 runs at high fixed frequencies, so you can use a pretty sharp filter to find it.

Intelligence services are very likely far ahead and for obvious reasons the public is not privy to it.

Did you find any occurrences of hidden cameras ?

I had wondered time to time, as a guest, but also as a host (if guest left devices after).

"an NLJD is correspondingly capable of detecting almost any unshielded electronic device containing semiconductors, whether the electronics are actively powered or not."

Is properly shielding something really that difficult or expensive that people are not shielding their gear? Or is more of nobody gives a damn to be bothered?

Reminds me of how every random electronic item would seemingly pick up audible interference from nearby GSM phones. Nonlinear components would involuntarily modulate the RF signal.

I'd have asked the speaker if he scanned his actual hotel room at the conference.

I'm actually quite certain that he did. Imagine the scoop, opening your conference presentation with what you found upstairs the evening before!

The purpose is to discover hidden cameras; an elaborate process for detecting them isn't necessary unless they're there to spy on you!

Does it though? The Eye of Sauron represents the being so sufficiently single-minded that it corrupted the Palantir and weaponized them for evil ends.

AKA, you know, Peter Thiel.

Right, but adding a big memory chip may be difficult in a video camera that must be as small as possible, except when using some expensive packaging method, with chip stacking.

Ensuring almost perfect shielding is cheaper and simpler. The camera should be completely enclosed in a metallic case, with only 2 small holes, for the camera lens and for the antenna output. Also its schematic should include adequate filtering components superposed to the integrated circuit packages, to minimize the length of the metal traces with variable potential, which radiate electromagnetic waves.

Improved shielding and filtering should reduce a lot the detection distance from the 20 meter range obtained with ordinary cameras, perhaps to a range under 1 meter.

If the camera is designed to not watch continuously, but to halt its activity for random intervals, it may have great chances to not be detected even by close sweeps with the camera detector.

Shielding is addressed in the paper. They did some testing covering it with aluminum sheet (from coke can not aluminum foil) which decreased detection range from 30 to 2m. That's still not a bad range compared to other similar projects attempting to detect hidden cameras using EM. But with a properly designed shield the detection is probably even worse. Within limitations section they mention, they had problems detecting some smartphone cameras due them using low power memory and in general being better shielded.

> The speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.

With a bit of practice it's actually quite easy to understand the accent of Chinese speakers as they have some typical patterns and speak slowly.

I must say, I loved listening to him because this was genuine human work. Human made slides (with lots of ugliness coming with PowerPoint), human typos, human grammar mistakes, all of it. It may be flawed in some ways but this fully removed any doubts that a slop machine came even near it. So refreshing in this day and age!

Youtube subtitles can help in situations like this. Although they're not able to understand perfectly either. Example (1m0s) speaker means to say 'they can be disguised' but subtitles are:

> they can be disgusted

I think the speaker genuinely gets that word wrong; a malapropism (as opposed to the auto-generated English subtitles getting it wrong).

Yes but only for detecting 5ghz WiFi cameras (actively streaming). If it’s 2.4ghz WiFi, or Ethernet wired, or it’s just recording to an sd card, it can’t be detected using the quadRF.

They already use fiber-optic borescopes with no electronics on the lens side to create distance from electronics when their targets do sweeps.

You can also have opto-mechanical listening devices where the electronics are 100 m away. There is a vibrating membrane at one end, and a laser through the fiber reads the vibrations.

Potentially, although raw pixel data presents its own challenges - one 1080p60 camera will fill a terabyte of storage in less than an hour.

A better mitigation might be to take a leaf from cryptography and develop a constant-time codec.