Comment by amelius
1 year ago
> Thousands of diodes were mixed by the Soviets into the building's structural concrete, making detection and removal of the true listening devices by its American occupants nearly impossible.
Wow ...
1 year ago
> Thousands of diodes were mixed by the Soviets into the building's structural concrete, making detection and removal of the true listening devices by its American occupants nearly impossible.
Wow ...
I wonder if it would be feasible, with modern techniques and sufficient motivation, to map where the “background” diodes ended up setting in the concrete; then to measure newer sweeps against that baseline.
That's called playing the long game, and playing it quite cleverly!
Not really. It makes it clear from the first attempted sweep they altered construction -- the opposite of a long game.
That depends on what the game is. For example if they wanted the embassy to stay in their old already compromised premises they achieved that. (for about twenty years at least.) If they wanted the USA to spend a lot of money they also achieved that.
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Several days ago, a long interview with the former Czech ambassador to Moscow, Vítězslav Pivoňka, appeared in Czech newspapers. Unfortunately it is mostly paywalled. [0]
As you could expect, bugs everywhere, but some were used for intimidation. E.g. he says, on a weekend morning, we were still in bed with my wife, when a cuckoo started cuckooing out of a wall. Yeah, it was a bug, and it was meant to emit sound and make you more nervous: "we know about everything that happens in your bed".
He said that the Russians never cross the red line of actually physically manhandling diplomats, but as far as bugs and psychological pressure go, there is nothing off-limits.
[0] https://denikn.cz/1549047/deptali-ho-kukanim-a-ponizovali-ha...
Yeah!
It also makes me suspect that the device would not be super-useful in most environments today because our homes and offices have false positives littered all over the place. Such a countermeasure would be unnecessary now.
> our homes and offices have false positives littered all over the place
Sure, but location matters. Searching weird (for electronics to be), but line-of-sight places (like a bookcase) you might still have a good signal to noise ratio.
Now you've got me wondering how common embedded RFID price tags are.
As I understand it clothes from Uniqlo have RFID tags in them.[0]
https://www.morerfid.com/uniqlo-rfid-tags/
it's not just electronics cause positives-- corroded metal does too, anything that forms a semiconductor can get detected.
> useful in most environments today because our homes and offices have false positives littered all over the place
Like the structural elements in your house/apartments have something similar to diodes in them, or what are you referring to?
I had a vague recollection that rectifiers for battery chargers were once made out of stacked layers of oxidized copper disks, and then, in the article danbruc linked to, I saw this:
Note that other semi-conducting materials, such as a rusty nail or an oxidised piece of metal, also generate harmonic frequencies and may therefore cause an NLJD to generate a false positive.
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/df/tscm.htm#nljd
It turns out that the rectifiers in question were copper - cuprous oxide - lead sandwiches:
https://hackaday.com/2022/04/20/copper-rectifying-ac-a-centu...
I think a lived-in place has enough stuff in and near the walls to make this kind of scan less than useful. We have things hanging on the walls that'd distort it. Maybe an empty one would be OK now, but I think the ecobees all over the place would even distort it for those.