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We were told about this by our lecturer in university (USSR). Discipline was "data protection / security" ("Защита данных" in Russian).

The device was masqueraded as a canned "Килька черноморская в томате" (Canned fish: Black Sea sprat in tomato) and was transmitting short narrow beams upstream on schedule.

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maybe something more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_cryptanalysis ?

I suppose it could be capturing EM emissions from the printers rather than acoustic, but that would make it fundamentally more like the other TEMPEST hacks as a way to exploit unintentional emissions, rather than as a sneaky covert channel where you have control over the computer equipment, but don't have access to external interfaces to offload your stolen data.

Unless I'm misunderstanding some part of your description, anyway.

With the printers and mainframes of old being big, couldn't it be just recording vibrations of the wall?

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