Rare Shot of POTUS Inside a Sensitive Compartmented Info Facility | Hacker News Reader

Rare Shot of POTUS Inside a Sensitive Compartmented Info Facility

thedrive.com

29 pointsbelter10 comments

That reminds me of the 2011 film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy where they had a number of secure Portacabins inside a warehouse.

Sorry for random deep links, there don't seem to be many images around.

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e5/78/05/e57805226f096495991321df1...

https://www.pluggedin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/tinker-...

They had a Faradays cage for meetings.

Unfortunately they didn't always close the door

Hey no spoilers!

Lots of defense contractors work inside SCIFs. Some of my co-workers collectively bought a record player because mp3 players, phones, and even CD boom boxes aren't allowed in and they wanted to listen to music while working.

Surely room noise could be fed back to the needle, leaving a trace ?

I don't think so, you'd need specialized hardware to write to a vinyl disk. The sound of your voice interacting with the needle isn't going to leave a mark. And any record already has an audio track written on it anyway.

In the mid-90s, I worked for a small consulting firm that was looking to rent some office space. We were given a tour of an amazing space on the top floor of a rather sizable skyscraper. We were told that it had been occupied by a federal contractor and that it was TEMPEST secure. Most of the tour involved regaling us with stories of how it was set up around this idea of security.

I had not been aware of TEMPEST security before, and so they explained the basics of EMF snooping and the countermeasures employed in the design of this place. They also led us into rooms where people worked on designs, and they explained that every chalkboard had a curtain that could be drawn for privacy, and every such room had a guard stationed with M16 who could just shoot any intruder.

To this day, I have no idea if any of those stories were based in truth, or embellished; after all, their goal was to have us rent it out. We ended up passing and found much more humble digs to work from (we weren't working on anything so secure that we needed TEMPEST-proof architecture) but the visit has stood out in my memory as an amazing relic of the Cold War.

I wonder whether the floor has been "debugged"? In the picture of Obama inside a SCIf in Rio, the floor seems to be the one of the hotel room...

I prefer the glass ones shown in movies. Much less claustrophobic. The people in them dress better and have better hair too.

Photo (2016), article updated (2020).

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