Some of my colleagues (including Markus Kuhn) do research into “Tempest” where you eavesdrop on the RF emissions of electronic equipment.
So, it is certainly possible to do this.
It is also, probably, not a cost effective means of making sure people pay their TV license fees. It seems that what TV licensing actually does is assume nearly everyone watches TV, and send a threatening letter to everyone who doesn’t have a TV license.
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Conspiracy theory version: if the government is doing Tempest attacks on a small number of high value intelligence targets, checking that people have paid for their TV license is a great cover story for why you have a van full of RF monitoring equipment parked in the street.
Also, at some DARPA event (unclassified, and in front of journalists, so this story is ok to repeat here) some three star general, talking about infosec, makes analogy to “strategic deployment of stay dogs”:
Suppose:
you do not have enough explosives-detecting sniffer dogs
You do, however, have as many untrained stray dogs as you want
The enemy does not know which kind of dog is which
The principle applies to more than just sniffer dogs at check points.
Can work well as long as the enemy don’t have good intel regarding that actual number of trained dogs, even if they cannot identify the specific dogs. But I suspect there are probably ways to get the trained dog to reveal itself without actually giving up the bombs.
I would be surprised if this even works against the average 911-era terrorist. Stochastic enforcement with 10% success is good enough to stop well to-do people from shoplifting (small benefit, large expected cost) and to catch repeat offenders, but the success criterion for a suicide bomber is to explode and die! Why wouldn’t they just YOLO it?
I suppose it might be different if, say, you have a dozen checkpoints and only one dog, and the bombers could probably avoid a single checkpoint without getting caught sneaking over a fence or something, but if the bombers jump a dozen fences they’re likely to be caught, and if they go through all the checkpoints the one with the real dog will get them.
Some of my colleagues (including Markus Kuhn) do research into “Tempest” where you eavesdrop on the RF emissions of electronic equipment.
So, it is certainly possible to do this.
It is also, probably, not a cost effective means of making sure people pay their TV license fees. It seems that what TV licensing actually does is assume nearly everyone watches TV, and send a threatening letter to everyone who doesn’t have a TV license.
======
Conspiracy theory version: if the government is doing Tempest attacks on a small number of high value intelligence targets, checking that people have paid for their TV license is a great cover story for why you have a van full of RF monitoring equipment parked in the street.
Compare the Simpson episode with the “Two guys from Quantico” pizza van.
Also, at some DARPA event (unclassified, and in front of journalists, so this story is ok to repeat here) some three star general, talking about infosec, makes analogy to “strategic deployment of stay dogs”:
Suppose:
you do not have enough explosives-detecting sniffer dogs
You do, however, have as many untrained stray dogs as you want
The enemy does not know which kind of dog is which
The principle applies to more than just sniffer dogs at check points.
Can work well as long as the enemy don’t have good intel regarding that actual number of trained dogs, even if they cannot identify the specific dogs. But I suspect there are probably ways to get the trained dog to reveal itself without actually giving up the bombs.
I would be surprised if this even works against the average 911-era terrorist. Stochastic enforcement with 10% success is good enough to stop well to-do people from shoplifting (small benefit, large expected cost) and to catch repeat offenders, but the success criterion for a suicide bomber is to explode and die! Why wouldn’t they just YOLO it?
I suppose it might be different if, say, you have a dozen checkpoints and only one dog, and the bombers could probably avoid a single checkpoint without getting caught sneaking over a fence or something, but if the bombers jump a dozen fences they’re likely to be caught, and if they go through all the checkpoints the one with the real dog will get them.