Historical Tech Espionage

Comments discuss Cold War-era and modern government espionage involving compromised hardware, such as bugs in typewriters, copiers, embassy devices, and backdoored encryption machines by agencies like CIA, NSA, and KGB.

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Keywords

washingtonpost.com US OK OSS wordpress.com spectrum.ieee TEMPEST RE scam.html www.cs cold war spies war cold soviets moscow spy soviet secret government

Sample Comments

dredmorbius Sep 22, 2021 View on HN

Curiously, a similar organisation would bug same.https://web.archive.org/web/20210730214414/https://spectrum....https://archive.is/T16Fj(GDPR-noncompliant co

hedora Feb 3, 2024 View on HN

More details here:https://web.archive.org/web/20200212014117/https://www.washi...

edge17 Feb 11, 2020 View on HN

It's weird this article talks like this is new information. I guess it's not probably not widely known, but this stuff was discussed in James Bamford's Puzzle Palace, published in the early 1980's (nearly 35 years ago).

anemic Jul 3, 2013 View on HN

There is a book called Blind Man's Bluff that documents how this started during the cold war by NSA tapping soviet undersea communication cables.According to the book one of the captured tapping devices is on display in Moscow and on the side it says "Property of the United States Government". No point in hiding it...http://en.wikipedia.org&#x

digitalengineer Nov 28, 2012 View on HN

Reminds me of the Cold War when the CIA planted camera's inside XEROX copiers and was stealing everyone’s secrets for decades. http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=47ddf19823b89

gcampos Feb 27, 2021 View on HN

Not exactly what OP mentioned, but something like that did happen in the past:https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/14/russian-s...

whimsicalism Nov 18, 2022 View on HN

Many cases like this with US spieshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Allen_Davis_incident

justinjlynn Jul 10, 2017 View on HN

It seems espionage is a recurring theme : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/12/14/buran-shut...

rvba Jan 7, 2023 View on HN

Was this used as some sort of a spy device?

amatecha Oct 4, 2018 View on HN

Huh crazy, I hadn't heard about this before! Just found a couple posts on it [0][1], for anyone who's interested.0: https://electricalstrategies.com/about/in-the-news/spies-in-...1: https:/&