People get details wrong all the time in eyewitness reports.
The people who fly on BOS-LAX in first class tend to be "important". Similarly the NYC-LAX and NYC-LON flights. DCA even more so. I mean, we saw a very high level Samsung exec as one of the first to post photos in the flight which crashed at SFO recently; not unusual at all.
The quality of intelligence you could get by monitoring first class is why Air France (well, French intelligence) actually installed microphones in the headrests of some of their fleet. Probably wouldn't do this for Orlando to Nashville flights in coach.
"Every computer emits a frequency that can be picked up by our equipment and that allows us to read it by locking on to it manually," a senior executive of the firm told the Independent.
"It's a bit hit and miss at the moment, but it can be done and the technology is improving all the time."
I assume they were referring to TEMPEST. Basically every piece of electronic equipment has unintentional radiation. It's super-easy to read keyboard input even from a wired keyboard, or to read from a screen (CRT or LCD) based on the pattern, with about $50k (in 1999) of RF equipment -- could do it in the hundreds or thousands now.
Reading from a CPU is harder, but it can be done, especially if you only need to recover one thing (like a key), can force the processor to load the key on demand (like, sending a packet which needs to be decrypted), can record a lot of samples, and know the structure of the software and equipment which is processing it (like if it is a standard phone). Cryptography Research (Paul Kocher, aka one of the smartest people in security who doesn't work at NSA) and his team have done this for years -- live demo of the attack in ~10 minutes at various conferences.
Industrial espionage and political spying (domestically) are what bother me the most. I actually don't mind gov/mil vs. gov/mil spying (except to the extent it is a waste of resources which should be spent on more productive things, like environmental remediation, tech development, education, debt, etc.) -- it's gov vs. people which is the problem.
> If you look at who was seated right next to the terrorists it reads as a who's who of foreign owned, telecommunication surveillance companies involved in fiber optics, digital communications and caspian sea oil interests.
...and actors, politicians' wives and other public figures and businessmen. Lots of rich people. The kind of people who you might expect to find flying first class on a commuter flight.
I respect that we should remember the victims and particularly those related to the tech industry on HN, but this article is difficult to read based on how often the author has to over-emphasize Lewin's achievements.
Look, it was a terrible event in our history. But, 1) it happened 12 years ago (yes, I was a working adult back then, I remember exactly what I was doing and mourned with the rest of the country), at some point you stop pouring salt in a wound, and 2) if anything, America's response to 9/11 has completely squandered any rightful outrage we had over it. Look at what happened in response to 9/11 -- everything is "terrorism", blanket spying on Americans, indefinite detention, war against "terrorism"?? -- and all I can say is that the terrorists achieved at least partially what they were going for. David Foster Wallace said it best:
...what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?
Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?
I get it, I'm supposed to be scared about a single event that occurred 12 years ago and give up all my rights because of it. I don't need to have it screamed in my face all the time.
