[Cryptography] 'The intelligence coup of the century'

[Henry Baker]

At 02:17 PM 2/15/2020, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>On Fri, 14 Feb 2020, Bill Stewart wrote:
>>The TEMPEST-shielded room we had in the mid-late 80s was good to about 120dB at 450MHz.  Since the VAX ran at 10 MHz, this wasn't too much of a risk, though the early Sun Sparc machines were probably 100 MHz and may have leaked some harmonics.
>
>One of my clients in a previous life was HMAS Watson, which is a training facility for the Royal Australian Navy (so I can't say too much); I was responsible for maintaining their Unix boxes.
>
>Anyway, the servers were supposed to be located in a shielded room (I don't know whether it was supposed to be TEMPEST-rated) and one of the officer's pagers went off.  He was flabbergasted, and posited that if that stuff could get in, then what was getting out?

All the IBM CE's and SE's had pagers, so perhaps paging frequencies were exempted??  :-)

I talked with a salesman of Tempest enclosures in Los Angeles back in the 1980's, and since
he couldn't talk about any govt clients, he told me the story of one of his non-govt clients:
a rock star living in Hollywood who had trouble sleeping, and who thought that aliens were
keeping him awake with 'rays' of some sort, so they built him a Faraday Cage for several
million dollars to sleep in.

He wouldn't reveal the name of the rock star, nor would he tell me whether the cage improved
his sleeping.  (The cage would work today, because his smartphone wouldn't work inside!)