Remote listening devices

Scary, probably true article from a few days ago about the ability to listen to the output of a keyboard (assuming ps/2) by tapping into the electrical grid nearby. In an office building I think that there is some deflection in that there is a solid chance that there are several people typing at any given moment, so it is likely to be a little harder to isolate one signal from another. Some of the Slashdot commenters pondered if this is what a few unfunded researchers where able to come up with just consider what the NSA would be able to to. I thought this dated article would help those people sleep at night. The Van Eck's effect is the rather interesting ability to use get the information from CRT's and LCD's. The Wikipedia Article about the Tempest project that investigated the phenomenon and tried to secure assets against it, has no information on the active use of this technology for intelligence gathering, but is interesting in its own right. Either way, it is an interesting extension of old research and just further illustrates the relative insecurity of computers.

Slashdot via Network World