The Thing(en.wikipedia.org) |
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15498685
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272072
From what I remember the case lingered well into Perestroika period when complete documentation on this project was passed to the Americans as a gesture of "goodwill and friendship", presumably in exchange for chicken leg imports (aka "Bush legs") and other Western luxuries.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1988/11/15/world/the-bugged-embassy-...
I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other people, but insisting on citizenship would make it easier to charge us with particular crimes if the need arose.
Apparently, during the construction of the embassy in (edit: Moscow) -East Berlin-, the construction company (surely at the direction of the KGB / GRU) placed passive bugs in the concrete (they only transmit when blasted with microwaves at the right frequency and would avoid counter-intel sweeps unless active). They built the buildings almost pre-fab style, laying the concrete out then assembiling it. It's then when the bugs were placed.
The west eventually learned about this, if I recall correctly, it was from a Russian defector by the codename of Mother.
It was called Operation Top Hat (that's where i'd start googiling). The US knew the embassy in (edit: Moscow) -East Berlin- was bugged on the first 3 floors by the Russians as well as having secret hollow support columns with clandestine access to the building. The decision was made to just not use the first 3 floors of the embassy for classified discussion. The remaining floors were built by Americans and undoubtedly under FBI/OGA watch.
IIRC there was also a network of tunnels leading from the embassy in West Berlin to under the wall to listening posts.
Edit: my memory is shot apparently. It was in Moscow, not Berlin. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/private-tour-cias-inc... https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-07-29-mn-177-st...
I think i screwed up another thing Hanssen revealed and that was a tunnel from West Berlin to East Berlin and under the Soviet embassy.
Question to Armenian Radio:
- What is American embassy built from?
- Micro-concrete.
- What's Micro-concrete?
- 10% concrete, 90% microphones
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Theremin
And his most famous creation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_0WmqnC6eA
Looks like the documentary is no longer on Netflix, but it is on Amazon Prime streaming. Rotten Tomatoes for the movie:
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/theremin_an_electronic_odys...
Chapter after chapter devoted to figuring out what the Germans were up to on the technology front, then one-upping them. Lots of engineering porn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(roadside_attraction...
edit
found it
Almost everyone that needs to bug a room is either 1. Catching their partner in an act of infidelity or 2. A professional with money to spend, and isn't spying on a nation state.
There seem to be some technical unknowns in the article. I don’t think you can get FM back from the passive cavity, just AM, unless you can pump the cavity with feedback. Same goes for re-radiating at a harmonic. Maybe if the Q of the cavity were super high. Again, would be interesting to see the technical details of the receiving equipment.
>The length of the antenna and the dimensions of the cavity were engineered in order to make the re-broadcast signal a higher harmonic of the illuminating frequency.
That wouldn't actually work by itself. There would have to be some sort of non-linear element to cause the harmonics. Chances are there was something like a varactor in there. The original technical description probably omitted critical details because spooks are like that...
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/science/sonic-attack-cuba...
Super interesting, especially given this was early 1940s.
https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta...
Most of the books on this topic seem to be more about the "communism is evil" angle than actually talking about the science.
You can still post the links that are most interesting to you, please, the google translate service is quite usable.
"Don't be an idiot. There's no way millions of people are going to PAY us to put an internet connected listening device in their homes..."
In order to get FM modulation from a passive resonator, the decay time of that resonator has to be much longer than the modulation; i.e. the resonator Q has to be very high, much narrower bandwidth than the modulation.
A back of the envelope calculation, for 3 kHz audio bandwidth, and a 300 MHz resonator, that sets the unloaded Q=100E3, which you can't get even close with a passive resonator, short of a superconductor. Not to mention the loaded Q from the monopole radiation is going to lower it even more.
You can get FM modulation out of an oscillator because the feedback is generating a negative resistance to compensate for the resonator resistance; the active circuit is a Q multiplier, getting you that massive Q.
The interrogator would have to set up not only a standing wave, but provide coherent feedback. Sort of a stand-off oscillator. Even if you had low-level FM modulation, it's still going to have the spectrum of DSB AM as the Bessel components are pretty far down.
Maybe it is doing that stand-off oscillator, but my hunch is the receiver is a coherent AM demodulator. You have the carrier available , so might as well use it.
Smooth white noise with a spectrum 50 KHz wide centered on the theoretical center of the resonator, then the 3rd harmonic can rebroacast a resonant tiny high Q slice of up to 150 KHz deviation FM as the microphone diaphragm wiggles with sound.
Imagine a transmitter design where you make a very powerful white noise signal, then filter out a little bit of some tuned frequency and pass that narrow sliver out the antenna. A historical example of this transmitter topology would be old fashioned spark gap transmitter generating noise from DC to daylight as they used to say, then couple it to a resonant antenna. "The Thing" is merely a much more elaborate and refined variation on the idea.
If the diaphragm goes non-linear (say from high sound pressure), then perhaps you'd get harmonics and maybe an f/2 response. At this point it's acting like a parametric amplifier, with your carrier frequency and pump frequency. Parametric amps need a strongly non-linear reactance, hence pumping a varactor diode with a strong signal.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/01/ctx4000_nsa_e...
More links are at the bottom.
My 1280 surely doesn't.
(I would kill for another silver Nokia E61, but with modern CPU, running mainline Linux, with an unlocked bootloader, and isolated baseband, preferably with open device firmware.)
The same cannot be said of foreign citizens (even ones who are permanent residents); to the government's eyes, they're "opaque"—and even background checks run on them would only turn up what their homeland wants the US to turn up. (A background check that could turn up more, wouldn't really be a "background check" any more, but rather espionage, since they'd need to bypass the "public API" of the other government.)
All they need to know for a plain-old no-clearance public-servant position is that you're not beholden to a foreign power (e.g. part of a foreign gang, or in debt to a major foreign corporation.)
There's an easy (though imperfect) heuristic for determining whether you're potentially beholden to a foreign power, from the data they already have: the addresses you've lived at, your job history, and your arrest record. Just join that set to the set of organizations they're tracking as catspaws for foreign powers [and their active locations], count the joined rows, and you have a log-probability that you've ever had the opportunity to interact with someone who might have had cause to convince you to work for a foreign power.
But it was the federal government that insisted that we be US citizens. As far as I know, they didn’t require us to pass any special background check. And they didn’t require us to have any special training. But we absolutely had to be citizens (not just “legally able to work in the country”).
Hm.. I definitely feel it's easier to mitigate some risk by using US citizens. One of the goals is to limit possibility of foreign interference via these citizens. By using your own people, you can track their interactions with foreign entities via their trips outside of the US and their self documented contacts with foreign nationals. It'd be a lot harder to track these things when you hire someone from a different country because you're not going to have as meticulous records and all their friends and family are liable to be foreign nationals.
Seriously? While they have to plan for an inside threat, do you really think that they don't view their own citizens as being more reliable than foreign nationals?
Obviously, there are exceptions to this. The US has a much better chance of getting Assange than Snowden right now. But I believe, in general, the requirement isn’t about avoiding a security breach, but instead about punishing the culprits after the breach is discovered.
It is not always about the security side. There are certain requirements to employ US citizens based on the funding source. The charitable reasoning is ensuring the program can continue to run even if are at war.
Does it prevent espionage by Americans? No. But it does make espionage by foreign adversaries at least a bit harder.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Info...