Subj : Decreased Energy, Decreased Threat
To   : All
From : warmfuzzy
Date : Sun Sep 22 2019 00:20:32

Have you been wondering whatever happened to TEMPEST surveillance?  Has its
technology been rendered obsolete?  Well I'll point to some common sense
thoughts and consider whether it is still viable.  If you buy cables with the
highest shielding and the lowest current to produce the signal there just
wouldn't be enough signal to leak outside of your computer room.  For example
when I went looking for a monitor several years back I bought a NEC 14" with
the lowest power consumption of any other monitor that I could find.  We were
talking in the 20's of watts if I recall correctly.  So common sense states
that if you are some spook trying to snoop on someone's monitor it will be
much harder to do if you simply don't have enough power going through the
system to then inturn cause those electrical-magnetical power and data cables
to radiate usable signals that can be reconstructed.

In the old days TEMPEST surveillance was very very easy.  There were
thousands of volts of electricity going to power the tubes into the
production of images onto the screen.  These high energy signals would travel
far beyond the premises and could even be readable by a spook living across
the street or far away if there was a capture and forward system setup.  The
capture system would record what was captured from the emission of spurious
signals on to a hard drive and then sent through communications systems such
as the Internet on to a surveillance posting that would receive the signals
at a great distance from the originators of the signals by forwarding what
was captured onto their operations room anywhere in the world.

So, now for the big question... does TEMPEST still work?  Honestly I do not
know.  But I can observe the reactions of the governments of the world. 
There was a hacker (computer security) conference a while ago and they pulled
the talk about TEMPEST, probably because they had something to hide.  It was
pulled by the government not the hacker conference, for clarification.  If
the big three letter agencies have a problem with the disclosure of TEMPEST
information then it should be looked into.

One thing to mention however, in case you were unaware "TEMPEST" stands for
the "Transmission of Electromagnetical Pulse Emissions Standard" or something
close to that.  It is the reconstruction of signals from a source to receiver
at a significant distance for the utilization of those signals in the
practice of surveillance or espionage.

Best regards,
warmfuzzy

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