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Do They Know Their Phone is a Radio? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-25
Back in the 70’s, I was working as a contract programmer for a medical instrumentation group. I had 8 weeks (it may have been 6 weeks) to program a small computer using machine language to allow a cardiologist 1) choose a typical heartbeat for the patient 2) correlate the chosen heartbeat to the patient’s subsequent heart beats 3) raise an alarm if the number of non-correlated beats went over a chosen limit and 4) display all the relevant information on a CRT. The interface for collecting the heartbeats also had to be built and debugged. Thank goodness that was not my problem
I did have to work with the person who designed and built the interface to debug it. When he plugged it in, it did not work at all. He finally figured out that the problem was that the computer was radiating enough to totally destroy the signals. The project leader hired an engineer who had experience building computer speed interfaces. He started by adding 20 to 30 capacitors to the circuit.
From that time I have had a firm belief that computers are little radios whether you like it or not. This was reinforced when my husband was undergoing training for secret classification at Lockheed and was told that Chinese trucks passing on US101 were no doubt recording the computer radiation from Lockheed buildings. ‘So be very careful which computers you are doing what work on and exactly where those computers are.’
Note the radiation we a talking here is not just the encrypted end-to-end internet packets Signal sends and then deletes later. It includes the plain text keystrokes and screen displays the person is reading and writing as well. So, not secure unless you are in a SCIF that you trust. I imagine we have SCIFs in Russia. I imagine we don’t trust them.
So the security leaders in our country do not believe or do not care that the Russians. the Chinese, the Europeans, the Iranians, etc. are listening. Were they depending on the idea that whoever is not sophisticated enough to decipher it? Do they think everyone is as stupid and lazy as they are?
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