That Loud Burp You Hear Today is History Repeating Itself

The upstart nation was a den of intellectual piracy. One of its top officials urged his countrymen to steal and copy foreign machinery. Across the ocean, a leading industrial power tried in vain to guard its trade secrets from the brash young rival.

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rogue nation was the United States. The official endorsing thievery was Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. And the main victim was Britain.

How times have changed...

Now, the United States accuses China of the very sort of illicit practices that helped America leapfrog European rivals two centuries ago and emerge as an industrial giant. more

A proposed solution.

Business Espionage – A Cunning Protection Plan to Protect us and U.S.

We are bombarded with news stories and court trials tornado-ing around Chinese spies. They’re everywhere. Collecting everything. They are such a fixture in and around our hapless businesses that it only seems right to offer them health insurance, a pension plan, cookies and milk.

But wait. Let’s think this through.

Aren’t these the folks who had the secrets of silk stolen from them by Justinian I? Humm, could this be why great neckties are made in Italy, not China? Even their espionage death penalty law couldn’t protect them. Boom! Business espionage devastated their economy.

I also recall a dude from the UK, Robert Fortune, sort of an early 007. He was sent to steal the secrets of tea production from… Have you guessed yet? China! That caper is now know as The Great British Tea Heist. Boom! Business espionage devastated their economy yet again.

Oh, and what about the Chinese secret of making porcelain? A French Catholic priest stole that one. BOOM!! I could go on and on. Gunpowder, paper, etc. Bing! Bam! BOOM! 

Feeling sorry for China yet? Don’t. They are making up for it, right now. The disk drive that just started whirring in your computer… it might be them.

And, don’t think this is just some cosmic Yin and Yang, great mandella, or as we say here in New Jersey, “What goes around, comes around.” No, that explanation is too simplistic, not to mention fatalistic. There is more to this industrial espionage business. The circle is bigger. This is history repeating itself, over and over and over, but I think I have the solution... more

CIA Spy Tool Kit (Preparation H suggested)

The CIA Rectal Tool Kit

Happy Birthday World's First Spy Musuem

The Spy Museum in Tampere, Finland opened to the public in the summer of 1998. It was the world's first spy museum dedicated exclusively to espionage. This year, the Spy Museum celebrated its 20th anniversary. 

Two years later, in 2000, a sister museum, the International Spy Museum, opened its doors in Washington, D.C.  more

The Surprising Spy Story Behind Lafayette Radio

by Rich Post KB8TAD 

Lafayette's three owners
Sometimes when you look closely at a company, a surprise pops up. Such was the case with Lafayette. The change in corporate names in 1939-40 and the separate catalogs in 1942 as well as the sudden and permanent disappearance of Lafayette from Atlanta and Chicago in 1951 triggered the question of why. Was there a rift among partners?

Searching on the names of the three owners as stated in the Federal Trade Commission action against Wholesale Radio in 1935 turned up nothing until... A search on the correctly-spelled names of Samuel J. Novick and Max H. Krantzberg came up with Krantzberg as the Executive Vice President of Lafayette with stock holdings just a bit less than President and Chairman Abraham Pletman in a Securities and Exchange Commission report in 1961. Each owned roughly a third of the outstanding shares...

The communist connection
Novick was not actually the author of "A Plan for America at Peace" but his company sponsored and paid for the publication. He had immigrated to the US from Czarist Russia in 1914 at age 17. One of his early jobs in the US was radio telegrapher. He became an excellent business man. He was also an avowed communist who allegedly paid the bills for radio commentators from the American Communist Party on the Blue radio network. He supported a variety of organizations later deemed to be underground communist groups according to FBI reports. Some labor unions at the time were also controlled by communists allegedly including the one that had honored him. Of course, in free speech America, this was allowed.

Spies and Lies
However, it was after the FBI uncovered a Russian spy that Samuel Novick came to their attention.

Arthur Adams was a high-ranking undercover GRU (Soviet Military Intelligence) operative under the code named "Achilles" and was assigned along with others in the NKVD (forerunner of the Russian KGB) to obtain US corporate and military technology secrets.

In 1937 Novick had written a letter to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service vouching that Adams was a highly skilled radio engineer who had worked for him for 10 years at Wholesale Radio as its Canadian representative and was needed in the US. It was a lie.  more

Extra Credit: Explore old Lafayette catalogues here, and later ones here. Old issues of Monitoring Times may be obtained here.

National Security Agency (NSA) - 136 issues of its internal Cryptolog periodical spanning 1974 through 1997.

Five years ago, the National Security Agency (NSA) released 136 issues of its internal Cryptolog periodical spanning 1974 through 1997. The collection offered a look into the some of the discussions being held within one of America’s most secretive intelligence agencies. Today the GWU-based National Security Archive is providing a complete index of all 1,504 items in the declassified collection, including but not limited to articles, interviews, and puzzles. more

Flashback: "Green You're Clean - Red You're Dead"

Detecting landline telephone taps was never as easy as this, but that didn't stop the hucksters and their magazine ads. Over thirty years ago, they preyed on people seeking cheap magic bullets to protect their privacy. Here are some of these bullets.

Most of these devices will tell you if someone picks up an extension phone (assuming basic phone service). Decently constructed wiretaps remain invisible, however.

One of these devices is totally bogus. (I tested and dissected it.)

The Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (TSCM) hucksters are still out there, these days with "professional looking" websites and even more blinky light gadgets.

Need a reality check, or second opinion, before you buy?
Ask away!

                       

Some of these gadgets date back to the 1970's. Some are still being sold today!

       

Detecting smartphone spyware is another story.

 

Thanks for viewing this collection of anti-eavesdropping mental band-aids.

  

Why Vienna Is the Spy Capital of the World

via Cindy Otis 
A former chief in the Austrian intelligence service once told the Telegraph that more than 7,000 spies operated in Vienna, a city of nearly 1.8 million people. It’s “a nice place for spies to live and bring their families,” he added. Although there are many reasons to visit Vienna for tourists and spies alike, Austria’s famous chocolate cake (sachertorte) and the city’s perfectly preserved Habsburg palaces are not the reason intelligence services still flock to the city.

Austria has some of the most relaxed laws on spying of any country in the world and those laws have not been updated since the Austro-Hungarian empire fell, even with two world wars and the Cold War since then. In fact, the only spying activities that are illegal in the country are the kind that directly target Austria. Vienna also hosts one of four headquarters of the United Nations and is home to about 40 other important international organizations that have delegations from all over the world, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). With approximately 320 bilateral and multilateral diplomatic representations operating in Vienna, nearly 4,000 diplomats, and more than 6,000 international officials, Vienna is brimming with information foreign intelligence services want to collect.

But it is in wandering the streets of Vienna that you really start to see why the city lives up to its cloak and dagger history. Vienna’s famous coffee houses have played an important role as meeting places for writers, musicians, artists and philosophers throughout history. At Café Central in the heart of Vienna, you can dine on Apfelstrudel in the same place where Leo Trostky and Sigmund Freud sat. You can also take advantage of the seemingly endless coffeehouse chatter to meet your sources under the radar and to mask any clandestine conversations you need to have. more hum-a-long

Auction: Apple I on the Block

A piece of computer history that helped launch a trillion dollar company is hitting the auction block.

A fully functioning Apple-1 being auctioned by Boston-based RR Auction in September is one of only 60 or so remaining of the original 200 that were designed and built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 and 1977...

The Apple 1 originally sold for about $666. It could get $300,000 or more at auction. more

Eavesdropping and Wiretapping History

In July 1956, the Pennsylvania Bar Association Endowment (PBAE) commissioned a comprehensive study of "wiretapping practices, laws, devices, and techniques" in the United States. At the time, Pennsylvania was one of several jurisdictions in the country without a statute regulating eavesdropping. Members of the PBAE's Board believed that a nationwide fact-finding mission had the potential to help state lawmakers establish effective policies for police agencies and private citizens. The man appointed to direct the study was Samuel Dash, a prominent Philadelphia prosecutor whose stint as the city's District Attorney had given him a first-hand look at eavesdropping abuses on both sides of the law. Two decades later, while serving as Chief Counsel of the Senate Watergate Committee, Dash would see many of those abuses come full circle...

The result of Dash's efforts was The Eavesdroppers, a 483-page report co-authored with Knowlton and Schwartz.  Rutgers University Press published it as a standalone volume in 1959.   The book uncovered a wide range of privacy infringements on the part of state authorities and private citizens, a much bigger story than the PBAE had anticipated. more (long, in-depth and very interesting) 

Auction: Some Remarkable Pieces of Telephone History

If you like old school gear that seems like it would kill you if you look at it wrong, well, we have an auction for you.

Click to Enlarge.

Auction Starts

Aug 4, 2018 11am EDT

The Telephone Pioneers of America was a group founded by various employees and bigwigs at telecom companies back in 1911. Alexander Graham Bell, the man Americans are often taught invented the telephone, was an early member.

At first, it was a way to create a community around the various people who pioneered the tech of telephony, then it shifted to a philanthropic mission. These days, it functions as a network of volunteers that help out in their community. Along the way, the non-profit set up a bunch of little museums around the U.S. dedicated to preserving old equipment and ephemera related to the history of the telephone.

Now, two of those branches are closing and you can buy their goods in an auction online or IRL on August 4th. Bruneau & Co, an auction house based in Cranston, Rhode Island, will handle the bidding. more

The Telephone Unmasked - The New York Times - October 13, 1877

The Telephone Unmasked

The New York Times

Published:  October 13, 1877

It is time that the atrocious nature of the telephone should be fully exposed, and its inventors, of whom there are any quantity, held up to execration.

When this nefarious instrument was first introduced, it was pretended that its purpose was an innocent one. We were told that the telephone would enable a man in New-York to hear what a man in Philadelphia might say; and though it was difficult to understand why anybody should ever want to listen to a Philadelphian’s remarks - which, notoriously, consist exclusively of allusions to the Centennial Exhibition and an alleged line of American steam-ships - there was nothing necessarily immoral in this possible use of the telephone.

Then it was claimed that by means of the telephone conversations could be carried on with other than Philadelphians, and that political speeches delivered in Washington could be heard in any city of the continent.

As the President was at that time making speeches in Vermont instead of Washington, the public was not alarmed by this announcement, and it was not until the telephonic conspirators mentioned that the uproar of a brass-band could be transmitted to any distance through the telephone that any general feeling of uneasiness was developed.

Nevertheless, the vast capabilities for mischief of the telephone, and the real purpose of its unprincipled inventors have been studiously concealed, and it is only by accident that the greatness and imminence of the danger to which the public is exposed have suddenly been revealed.

Suspicion ought to have been awakened by the recent publication of the fact that if the lamp-posts of our City were to be connected by wires, every confidential remark made to a lamp-post by a belated Democratic statesman could be reproduced by a telephone connected with any other lamp-post. It is true that this publication was ostensibly made in the interest of the Police force, and it was recommended that patrolmen should use the lamp-posts as means of communication with Police Head-quarters. It was evident, however, that the result would be to make every lamp-post a spy upon midnight wayfarers.

Men who had trusted to friendly lamp-posts for years, and embraced them with the upmost confidence in their silence and discretion, would find themselves shamelessly betrayed and their unsuspecting soliloquies literally reported to their indignant families; strange to say this suggestive hint of the powers of the telephone attracted no attention, and has ere this been in all probability forgotten.

A series of incidents which has lately occurred in Providence has, however, clearly shown the frightful capabilities of the telephone. Two men, to whom, so far as is known, no improper motive can be attributed, were recently experimenting with a telephone, the wire of which was stretched over the roofs of innumerable buildings, and was estimated to be fully four miles in length. They relate that on the first evening of their telephonic dissipation they heard men and women singing songs and eloquent clergymen preaching ponderous sermons; and that they detected several persons in the act of practicing upon brass instruments. This sort of thing was repeating every evening, while on Sunday morning a perfect deluge of partially conglomerated sermons rolled in upon them.

These are the main facts mentioned by the two men in what may be called their official report of their experiments, but it is asserted that they heard other things which they did not venture to openly repeat.

The remarks of thousands of midnight cats were borne to their listening ears. The confidential conversations of hundreds of husbands and wives were whispered through the treacherous telephone, and though the remarks of Mr. and Mrs. Smith were sometimes inextricably entangled with those of Mr. and Mrs Brown, and it was frequently impossible to tell from which particular wife came the direful threat, “O! I’ll just let you know,” or from what strong husband in his agony came the cry, “Leggo that hair!” the two astonished telephone experimenters learned enough of the secrets of the leading families of Providence to render it a hazardous matter for any resident of that city to hereafter accept a nomination for any office.

Now is has been ascertained that the wire of this telephone was not in contact with any other wire, and thus the hypothesis that the sounds heard by the two men were messages in process of transmission by the usual telegraphic wires is untenable. Moreover, a little reflection will show that cats do not send telegraphic messages, and that leading citizens do not transmit by telegraph petitions to their wives advocating a policy of conciliation in respect to hair.

The scientific persons whom the two men have consulted have no hesitation in saying that the telephonic wire picked up all the sounds in its neighborhood by the process of induction.

When the wire passed over a church, it took up the waves of sound set in motion by the preacher and reproduced them on the telephone. In like manner it collected the sounds from the concert-halls and dwelling-houses over the roofs of which it passed, and the peculiar distinctness with which is transmitted the remarks of cats was due to the fact that it must have passed in close proximity to several popular feline resorts.

We can now comprehend the danger of the telephone. If any telephonic miscreant connects a telephone with one of the countless telegraphic wires that pass over the roofs of the City there will be an immediate end of all privacy. Whatever is said in the back piazza by youthful students of the satellites of Mars will be proclaimed by way of the house-top to the eavesdropping telephone operator. No matter to what extent a man may close his doors and windows, and hermetically seal his key-holes and furnace-registers with towels and blankets, whatever he may say, either to himself or a companion, will be overhead.

Absolute silence will be our only safety. Conversation will be carried on exclusively in writing and courtship will be conducted by the use of a system of ingenious symbols. An invention which thus mentally makes silence the sole condition of safety cannot be too severely denounced, and while violence even in self-defense, is always to be deprecated, there can be but little doubt that the death of the inventors and manufacturers of the telephone would do much toward creating that feeling of confidence which financiers tell us must precede any revival of business.

Without Spies There May Have Been No 'Fourth of July'

By Nina Strochlic, for National Geographic magazine.

In 1777, the American colonies were badly losing their fight for independence from Great Britain. The British Army had captured New York City’s crucial port. Expecting further advances, the Continental Congress was evacuated from Philadelphia. It seemed that the war was lost.

Then George Washington, then Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, wrote a letter that changed the course of the war.

Washington was desperate to discover what was happening inside New York, but military scouts couldn’t get close enough. The general needed someone to penetrate enemy lines, but when he asked for volunteers, few of his troops raised their hands.

“Spying wasn’t seen as gentlemanly,” says Vince Houghton, resident historian at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

Finally, a young army captain named Nathan Hale volunteered for the dangerous assignment. He was caught a week later and hanged, the first known American spy to be executed on the job. (He’s memorialized with a statue outside CIA headquarters.)

Washington realized that the mission was too big for untrained volunteers, so he set about building an espionage organization.

John Jay, later the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, had been running counterintelligence as head of the New York State Committee and Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies. One of Jay’s operatives, a merchant named Nathaniel Sackett, had experience in secret writing and codes. 

In February 1777, Washington wrote a letter to Sackett in which he offered him $50 a month—out of his own pocket—to establish the first formal apparatus for the “advantage of obtaining the earliest and best Intelligence of the designs of the Enemy.” “Without the organization that Sackett set up, it would have been very difficult for us to win the war,” says Houghton. “We had a ragtag army and [the British] had the greatest army, greatest navy, and greatest economy in the world. We had no real business winning this war.”

But America’s spy service got off to an inglorious start. Most of Sackett’s agents failed at their jobs—including Sackett himself, who was fired after just six months.

Fortunately for the infant nation, Sackett’s replacement, 26-year-old Benjamin Tallmadge, created what is considered one of America’s greatest espionage operations: the Culper Spy Ring. Comprised of childhood friends from Long Island, the group included a shop owner inside New York City who gathered information, a traveling trader who smuggled it out of the city, and a whale boat captain who delivered it to Washington’s camp.

Employing the tools and tricks of the 18^th-century spy trade—hiding secret messages in hollow feather quills, using “dead drops” to transport letters—the Culper operatives unmasked enemy spies, busted a money counterfeiting plan, and stopped the British from sabotaging a French aid mission to the colonies.

After important letters were lost during an enemy raid, Tallmadge invented a “numerical dictionary” code that matched 763 cities, names, and words to numbers. (Washington’s code name was Agent 711.) Washington also asked physician James Jay (brother to John) to invent an invisible ink that could be revealed only with another chemical and would “relieve the fears of such persons as may be entrusted in its conveyance.”

Washington’s espionage experiment paid off. In 1781 the British surrendered, thanks in part to the intelligence gathered by the Culper Ring and their networks. “Washington didn’t really out-fight the British. He simply out-spied us,” a British intelligence officer allegedly said after the war.

None of the Culper spies were ever caught, and even Washington himself never learned exactly who was in the group. The ring’s very existence wasn’t discovered until the 1900s, and to this day no one knows for certain how many members it had.

After the war Washington asked Congress to reimburse him $17,000—nearly half a million dollars today—for his espionage expenses. The lawmakers obliged.

Washington Policymakers Bluster About High-Tech Foreign Surveillance (again)

Washington policymakers are growing increasingly worried about the threat of high-tech foreign surveillance, a development complicated by U.S. spy agencies' use of similar technologies.

Lawmakers are stepping up their demands for more information from the Trump administration about foreign efforts to spy on Americans' cellphones. more

The Great Seal Bug Story

Spy Collector Alert: Soviet Spy-Camera Auction

On July 12, Aston’s Auctioneers of Dudley, England (about halfway between Liverpool and London), will feature the Russian Collection auction, 25 lots of rare and unusual cameras collected from the Cold War days, when Russia merely constituted much of the U.S.S.R. and Germany was still separated into two states.

“To find as many [cameras] in one place is pretty unusual,” says Tim Goldsmith, photographic consultant to Aston’s. The unnamed source for the auction had been collecting Soviet spy cameras for 30 to 40 years, as far back as when smuggling anything of this sort in or out of the Soviet Bloc would have needed spycraft itself. “Obviously, that’s when East Germany was still completely surrounded,” says Goldsmith. Until recently, finding such a trove in the West was nearly miraculous. “And it’s unheard of in the U.K., though it’s dribbling out since the whole universe discovered these things on the internet."

Aston’s hosts three camera auctions a year, yet this one, as Goldsmith put it, “has fired everyone’s imagination.” more

Dan Ingram - RIP

Dan Ingram.
Super nice guy.
Unbelievably funny, even during the songs when nobody but the engineer could hear him.
more 7/4/68 Air Check

136 Old NSA Security Posters

In the 1950s and 1960s, the NSA made a bunch of posters to remind its employees that security is the most important thing, and that they must work hard to protect the country’s most important secrets.

Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by the transparency site Government Attic, we can now see these quaint, sometimes hilarious, but also menacing, posters.

Here are all the 136 posters the NSA released. We’ve chosen a few that we thought were the best ones. Some of them are cutesy, some are kind of lame, others are dark and dystopian, and others are straight up incredible. more

Don't it just give you, "The locking pneumonia and floppy-copy flue."

The Great Seal Bug Story - 58 Years Ago Today

In 1946, Soviet school children presented a two foot wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to Ambassador Averell Harriman.

May 26, 1960 – Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. displays the Great Seal bug at the United Nations.

The Ambassador hung the seal in his office in Spaso House (Ambassador’s residence). During George F. Kennan’s ambassadorship in 1952, a secret technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) inspection discovered that the seal contained a microphone and a resonant cavity which could be stimulated from an outside radio signal.

The cavity resonator ‘bug’ microphone found inside.

On May 26, 1960, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. unveiled the Great Seal Bug before the UN Security Council to counter Soviet denunciations of American U-2 espionage. The Soviets had presented a replica of the Great Seal of the United States as a gift to Ambassador Averell Harriman in 1946.

The gift hung in the U.S. Embassy for many years, until in 1952, during George F. Kennan’s ambassadorship, U.S. security personnel discovered the listening device embedded inside the Great Seal.

Lodge’s unveiling of this Great Seal before the Security Council in 1960 provided proof that the Soviets also spied on the Americans, and undercut a Soviet resolution before the Security Council denouncing the United States for its U-2 espionage missions. – U.S. Department of State... 

Read the fascinating full history here.

Infographic - The History of Privacy

Click to enlarge.

more

Eavesdropping Snoops – The Average Person’s Guide to Stopping Them
The History of The Great Seal Bug

USS Pueblo & Crew Remembered 50 Years Later

1968
USS Pueblo (AGER-2) is a Banner-class environmental research ship, attached to Navy intelligence as a spy ship, which was attacked and captured by North Korean forces on 23 January 1968, in what is known today as the "Pueblo incident" or alternatively, as the "Pueblo crisis".

The seizure of the U.S. Navy ship and her 83 crew members, one of whom was killed in the attack, came less than a week after President Lyndon B. Johnson's State of the Union address... The taking of Pueblo and the abuse and torture of her crew during the subsequent 11-month prisoner drama became a major Cold War incident...

Pueblo, still held by North Korea today, officially remains a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy. Since early 2013, the ship has been moored along the Potong River in Pyongyang, and used there as a museum ship at the Pyongyang Victorious War Museum. Pueblo is the only ship of the U.S. Navy still on the commissioned roster currently being held captive. more

2018
PA - Fifty years ago, Frank Ginther of Bethlehem was one of scores of American sailors held captive for nearly a year after their ship, the USS Pueblo, was attacked and seized by North Korea. 

Ginther and 81 shipmates — one other in the crew of 83 died in the attack — survived months of interrogations and beatings. They were finally released after the U.S. agreed to sign a false statement saying the ship had illegally entered North Korean waters...

Today, Ginther, 74, is struggling to recover from brain surgery he underwent shortly before Thanksgiving. He is unable to speak, is being fed through a tube and requires around-the-clock care, according to a friend who is trying to raise money to help Ginther’s wife with expenses. more