Idiocracy (2017) - Man Tries Burglarizing a Spy Shop

FL - Police say an attempted burglar chose an odd target which was a spy shop that sells, of all things, surveillance equipment. 

According to the manager of Spy Spot Investigations Spy Store in Deerfield Beach, the would-be burglar was, no shocker here, caught on camera.

Tannenbaum said suspect was caught on one of the surveillance specialty store's many cameras as he picked up a rock and headed straight for the store's front door. more with video

Fibre Optic Eavesdropping Tap Alarm

Allied Telesis, announced that it has released an innovative security measure to prevent eavesdropping on fibre communications, 

Active Fiber Monitoring. The patent-pending technology can detect when a cable is being tampered with, and will raise an alarm to warn of a possible security breach.

Fibre-optic links are used extensively for long-range data communications and are also a popular choice within the LAN environment. One of the perceived advantages of fiber is that eavesdropping on traffic within the cable is not possible. However, it is now possible to acquire devices that can snoop traffic on fiber cables; and even more disturbing is that these devices are readily available and very easy to use.

Active Fiber Monitoring, a technology that detects small changes in the amount of light received on a fibre link. When an intrusion is attempted, the light level changes because some of the light is redirected by the eavesdropper onto another fibre. As soon as this happens, Active Fiber Monitoring detects the intrusion and raises the alarm. The link can either be shut down automatically, or an operator can be alerted and manually intervene. more

Ex-President Spills His Secret to Ducking Electronic Surveillance

Former US President Jimmy Carter has said he hand-writes letters to foreign and US leaders in an effort to evade what he described as pervasive US electronic surveillance.

Mr Carter, 89, told the Associated Press he had "no doubt" the US monitored and recorded "almost every telephone call" and email.

His humanitarian efforts bring him in contact with a range of foreign and US political leaders. (more)

How AT&T Tapped the Trunk Lines for the NSA

via wikipedia.com...

Click to enlarge.

Room 641A is an intercept facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, beginning in 2003. Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T. The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, therefore, presumably has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building.

The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 15 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.

The existence of the room was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, and was the subject of a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T. Klein claims he was told that similar black rooms are operated at other facilities around the country. 

Click to enlarge.

Room 641A and the controversies surrounding it were subjects of an episode of Frontline, the current affairs documentary program on PBS. It was originally broadcast on May 15, 2007. It was also featured on PBS's NOW on March 14, 2008.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecommunication company of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in a massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. On July 20, 2006, a federal judge denied the government's and AT&T's motions to dismiss the case, chiefly on the ground of the States Secrets Privilege, allowing the lawsuit to go forward. On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

An additional case by the EFF was created on September 18, 2008, titled Jewel v. NSA.

Fiber Optics Easier to "Wiretap" than Wire

Optical fibre is a lot easier to tap than most people imagine. There is no need to break or splice the fibre now -- a relatively shallow bend can be enough.

The technique works because the light in the cable propagates by bouncing off the insides of the fibre. Unsheath the cable, and a detector can pick up the tiny amount of light that escapes through the fibre's coating, explained Thomas Meier, the CEO of Swiss company Infoguard.

He demonstrated the technique on a fibre carrying a VOIP phone call over Gigabit Ethernet...

He added that the risk is not imaginary or theoretical -- optical taps have been found on police networks in the Netherlands and Germany, and the FBI investigated one discovered on Verizon's network in the U.S. Networks used by U.K. and French pharmaceutical companies have also been attacked, probably for industrial espionage, he said. (more) (more)

Pimp My Pipe ...or... Who's Stringing Who Along?

Scientists have perfected a new technology that can transform a fibre optic cable into a highly sensitive microphone capable of detecting a single footstep from up to 40km away.

Guards at listening posts protecting remote sensitive sites from attackers such as terrorists or environmental saboteurs can eavesdrop across huge tracts of territory using the new system which has been created to beef up security around national borders, railway networks, airports and vital oil and gas pipelines.

Devised by QinetiQ, the privatised Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), the technology piggybacks on the existing fibre optic communication cable network, millions of miles of which have been laid across.

At present, the microphones are not able to pick up the sound of human speech. right:] (more)

Mason & Hanger and two other companies had similar products about 15 years ago. It had a switchable filter (10 Hz to 1 kHz / no filtering) and a headphone jack.