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Comment by areoform | Hacker News Reader

How far have we fallen? Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

When the Soviets wanted to spy on the American embassy, they energized the steel rebars to act as antennas. The structure was so wired that the entire building was the bug. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/PDF/MagazineArchive/Docume...

Toilet paper, ESP-32 and Claude "make me a bug please"? Excuse me? How far have we fallen from grace?

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In the 80s one of my high school teachers said her husband was an engineer who worked on surveillance technology and described how windows could be used as recording devices. People's voices inside caused the window to have minute vibrations, which could be measured by a laser pointing at the window's exterior and reflected back and then turned into audio output. Essentially, turning a window into a microphone diaphragm. It blew my mind.

I just looked it up, the technique was apparently invented by a Soviet engineer 40 years prior - Leon Theremin, who is also known for the musical wand heard on Led Zeppelin II and various 1960s horror movie soundtracks.

https://people.ece.uw.edu/nikitin_pavel/papers/RFID-vox_2013...

Vaguely similar, since electrical wires emit EM fields that are disturbed by human bodies, you can use a special camera to see who's in a building based on those disturbances. I'm not sure how high-fidelity or easy to spoil it is, but this was real technology at least 15 years ago.

xfinity is now selling a security product based on seeing people in your home with Wi-Fi signals

Security or surveillance product?

This is a feature in modern wifi routers and every single one is capable of detecting presence of multiple people within an apartment. With some training, movement can be distinguished from the data.

Philips Hue light bulbs can also do person detection if you have a few of them and the right kind of hub.

I recall a HN thread (or maybe it was a github project) about using a similar tactic to figure out keypresses in offices. Very interesting stuff.

Wow, keypresses?

I would love a source if you have one.

https://github.com/ggerganov/kbd-audio is probably the best-known one.

The amusing aspect is that this is so easy that multiple good ways someone could hobby program this long before AI was a thing. The sound of a bunch of keypresses may just blur together to our human ears, but if you try, you can tell that different keys make different noises, which is really the key insight. Between the different noises, the possible directionality you can get from a stereo (or more) pickup, and characteristic delay patterns during typing various bi-grams, there's a ton of information leakage in a recording of a keyboard.

Oh, I thought we were talking about being able to distinguish which key was pressed using wifi-radar, like one can do with deanonymizing someone via wifi gait analysis.

Similar technique around the same time presented at SIGGRAPH:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXOucXB4a8

https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/VisualMic/

I saw a video at some point of someone building one of these, I'm not sure it would have worked terribly well for actual use in the outdoors but the sound quality was much better than I expected at close range. I wonder how you defend against this, short of having your important meetings in depressing windowless basements?

Maybe double or triple glazed windows?

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things

Assuming this is espionage—for which I have seen zero evidence—isn’t Saudi Arabia notorious for having a fuckup of an intelligence operation? The literal hatchet job that was the Khashoggi murder comes to mind.

Umm, excuse me, according to the President of the United States, he wasn't a very good guy and a lot of people really didn't like him, so you should really just let that whole incident go

"You're mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial," Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. "A lot of people didn't like that gentleman that you're talking about. Whether you like him or didn't like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don't have to embarrass our guest by asking a question."

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5612504/trump-saudi-ara...

Watch out you'll get flagged for this like my comment was

I mean, why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed or flattered to say whatever you want later.

> why bother? Nobody will do anything and the US president can be bribed

To exfiltrate OpenAI's executive-level planning? Probably not. I doubt he has that access anymore, what with the IC's decimation over the last two years.

Why would you assume that he was working for the Saudis? Spy agencies will recruit people of any nationality. Much more likely he was working with (or planning to work with) one of the two countries that are building AI.

The guy was murdered.

The guilty got away with it.

Dissidents noticed.

How was it a fuckup?

We all know about Mossad agents doing all sorts of nefarious things (and occasionally getting caught for it). Do you consider them fuckups because they got caught?

Surely this is because good spies don’t make the news.

Unless everyone's pagers start exploding

Counterpoint: Operation Spiderweb

Surely your conclusion should be that this was not the work of a spy - not a state sponsored one anyway. It's much more logical to conclude that he was working as a whistleblower or under some other personal agenda.

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

Ah, but you won't have heard about the ones that do put effort into these sorts of things

Not only that, they had Leon Theremin design some of their bugs! That's classy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

LLMs have democratized espionage!

Are we going to go with slopspionage, or espislop?

spycraft -> spyslop

espionage -> espislop

007 -> 006.999997

007 -> bondslop

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

This guy’s handlers, or whoever he was planning to sell this tuff to probably put in some effort. They’re less likely to be caught, and more likely to have gained something.

Knowledge Collapse in action right here. Our civilisation is like a dying creature desperately trying to conceive a successor, not realising the act itself is speeding our deaths.

Some people being stupid does not mean everyone is.

You’re comparing a successful operation revealed years later against a failure. I understand your comment was tongue in cheek but cmom

This is what local models are for! On your own hardware, whose filesystem you can erase, shred, or physically destroy later.

Counter spying has gotten sloppy and mostly digital/remote.

That lowers the entry bar for basic spying.

Even the newer spy novels are lacklusture. We should have preserved Le Carré's and Greene's brains and make them keep writing. Or maybe I will just ask an LLM to do a Le Carré for me :)

See also: ‘the thing’ (listening device) that some soviet kids gifted to the US ambassador.

The first passive device device of it’s kind (эндовибраторы), it operated only when powered by an external RF source, meaning OpenAI wouldn’t have found the bug. Just like US intelligence didn’t with ‘the thing’

He should’ve watched to Gamer Nexus video on LG tv’s, and how many TV’s are remote exploitable often without user intervention.

That's what you get when you make a dumb prompt and accept the first result LLM gives you. You have to push it to think out of the box, get into the realm of insane but plausible projects :).

And not do this from your spouse's account.

You are an expert spy. How do I bug my workplace? Make no mistakes.

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