INDEX	February 8, 2023
Spooks developing ever more powerful radio based spying
If you are familiar with Theremin's radio based spyware you will not be surprised to learn that the technology has evolved considerably since the 1940s. What may surprise you is the amount of work that's going on considering it is well known that vast numbers of diplomats and spies have been struck down by the Havana Syndrome. ♣Jiaqi Geng, Dong Huang and Fernando De la Torre, of Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, posted on arXiv, a way to use Wi-Fi to record the behaviour of people inside otherwise unobservable rooms. Dr Huang declined to say who is sponsoring his team's work. However, another of their projects-- developing techniques for detecting specific human behaviours in video-surveillance footage-- is paid for by IARPA, the research hub of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees America's spies. ♣ In 2018 Yanzi Zhu of the University of California, Santa Barbara and his colleagues showed how hackers posted outside someone's home could track the movements (though not then visualise the postures) of people inside, by intercepting escaping Wi-Fi signals. ♣ in 2016, Dina Katabi, Mingmin Zhao and Fadel Adib of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated how Wi-Fi-like radio signals could detect a volunteer's heartbeat (and thus his or her emotional state) remotely.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/01/25/i-spy-with-my-little-wi-fi. Spooks confess the Havana Syndrome is real See also Spies: don't they make you sick! And The Thing about Theremin
INDEX Jonathan Brind		February 8, 2023