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Comment by venomsnake | Hacker News Reader

How can lightbulbs be national security issue?

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Laugh, but LEDs by their nature are semiconductor devices capable of very high speed modulation, and the complexity of what's being built into the LED packages is increasing.

Subversion of these low-level components to create a data exfiltration vector is a legitimate concern, even if it may not be the deciding factor in this case.

A LED is also, inherently, a photodiode (albeit a bad one). You can use it to build useful, if basic, detection circuits.

"to create a data exfiltration vector"

That sounds interesting, could you expand please?

You can modulate an LED at a very high frequency and with the correct receiver send data[1] theoretically you could put a passive receiver into a light fitting (or something as low tech as a high gain microphone), have it record data and then play it back via the LED's, someone walking through the building with the correct receiver could then download the data.

It's a long shot but intelligence services have done strange things (fake rocks, bugging devices in typewriters, setting up cameras over copy machines etc etc)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Fi

Calling it a long shot is almost like an over-estimation.

And vetoing the sale of a billion dollar company because of the super niche spy case? Yeah, no, that isn't credible.

Why? do you think USA national security isn't worth more than a billion?

How can you have a doubt after all that we have known post-Snowden

well France declared a yogurt maker in the national interest

I agree, this is the same kind of egregious misuse of this kind of law.

was it a critical repository of culture?

Maybe the further development of the LED tech could be useful for creating militarily useful lasers?

national [economic] security

They are the same thing, as Russia will shortly re-learn. I guess they have forgotten why they lost the Cold War.

Exactly. It's very hard to argue that a strong economic risk is not also a national risk.

One word: Lifi.

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