To: mr.mark who wrote (6157 ) 9/23/2000 12:01:04 PM From: Volsi Mimir Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 13018 Across the darkened street, a windowless van is parked. Inside, an antenna is pointed out through a fiberglass panel. It's aimed at an office window on the third floor. As the CEO works on a word processing document, outlining his strategy for a hostile take-over of a competitor, he never knows what appears on his monitor is being captured, displayed, and recorded in the van below..........eskimo.com Just how prevalent is emanation monitoring? There are no public records that give an idea of how much emanation monitoring is actually taking place. There are isolated anecdotal accounts of monitoring being used for industrial espionage (see Information Warfare, by Winn Schwartau), but that's about it. (However, see a very interesting paper written by Ian Murphy called Who's Listening that has some Cold War TEMPEST spy stories.) Unfortunately, there's not an emanation monitoring category in the FBI Uniform Crime Reports. (While not TEMPEST-specific, the San Jose Mercury News printed a November 11, 1998 article(O) on how much money American businesses are losing to economic espionage. Considering some of the countries involved, hi-tech spying techniques are likely being used in some cases.) Threat? There are a few data points that lead one to believe there is a real threat though, at least from foreign intelligence services. First of all, the TEMPEST industry is over a billion dollar a year business. This indicates there's a viable threat to justify all of this protective hardware (or it's one big scam that's making a number of people quite wealthy). This scope of the threat is backed up with a quote from a Navy manual that discusses "compromising emanations" or CE. "Foreign governments continually engage in attacks against U.S. secure communications and information processing facilities for the sole purpose of exploiting CE." I'm sure those with appropriate security clearances have access to all sorts of interesting cases of covert monitoring Some large companies are also jumping into this cloak-and-dagger market. On its Web site, Siemens AG, the German engineering and electronics giant, advertises several "emission-proof PCs," including its Tempest Deskbook and Tempest PC-DZ0.