A programmer friend worked on top secret software. He told me that they worked inside a faraday cage to prevent eavesdroppers from receiving their keyboard RF and decoding their keystrokes. Sounds paranoid to me but it was only government money.
Also every Defense contractor has a "SLIC" that is RF-shielded. That's just the low-end of the technology.
Look up TEMPEST ratings for very early attempts at shielding electronics. Modern technique make that stuff look like Tinker Toys. Old tech and standards. Newer ones are much harder.
Stuff like this wallpaper has been in use out of the public eye for decades. Bugs. Active and passive jamming of RF. Laser light off of windows to pick up sounds. Active window vibrators to thwart same. That's just the unclassified stuff these days.
A friend complains that a kindly vendor once sent him a very nice USB stick (well below the trigger limits for bribes) to his work address, which means he can't use it and it'll never leave the building without being ground into a fine powder, ever. The vendor joked that they can't send one to his house because of the same bribery laws.
Of course, they pay him handsomely for such inconveniences in his life (thwarts bribery again) and once he was chosen for that kind of work, he's pretty much set for life, money-wise.
There's a nice shiny new enormous data center in Utah looking for the right folks to live and work the rest of their lives with no public recognition and unable to speak of anything they do to anyone, even family, until someone publishes a tell-all book 50 years hence... and even then, all you might say is, "I can neither confirm nor deny."
Note, it's not a secret that most U.S. transcontinental fiber routes pass through or are easily and quietly reached from Utah. Railroad right of ways. Phillip Anschutz. Made a fortune.
Another now deceased ham radio acquaintance had a simple black award plaque on a small stand behind his hardware engineering workbench at home that said simply, "Honorary Award - NSA". No date. No information that could even hint at why.
He took whatever he built for them with him to his grave. Cleaning out his house, I've never carried so much digital circuit test gear from the 1970s era to a dumpster.
Super smart and the nicest guy.
We had another thread about Jesse's stop light project recently. This guy was the person I said always liked the AVR micro controllers better than the PIC that I did my projects with. That stop-light thing would have been about an hour from prototype to code-complete for him.
Took him about four days to design his own giant LED WWV clock for his living room years before GPS was even popular. Hardest part was waiting on the giant 6" LED number arrays to show up.
Bob was good people. He's missed. Always wonder how many lives he saved and didn't even know it.
Using video cards as massive parallel processing devices was a new-ish idea ten to fifteen years ago. Now that code is easily accessible to any password cracker who wants to use it. A mediocre-fast PC with as many video cards crammed in it as will fit power and space and cooling-wise, is an incredible crypto tool. A cluster of them is a monster. That's a decade old idea at this point.
Means that whatever's going into Utah is mind-blowingly fast. We'll hear about it in 50 years or so, if I'm still alive then to read the book.
http://m.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
James Bamford's books are a good primer on the general world of the NSA. He's ****ed a number of folks off over the years condensing and summarizing and putting puzzle pieces together from unclassified FOIA released documents and some which were questionable but fell into the realm of "no one will ever figure out how that relates".
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bamford
I think I liked Body of Secrets best... it went toward my data center and computer geekiness.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets
Then again, acting upset is an excellent disinformation technique.
You really can't tell in spy games who's lying and who's not, because the players start to believe the lies. Got to be some of the most fascinating history ever, spy stuff. Really tweaks your head thinking about the motivation to spy, how to counter spies with lies, etc. Fun.
For those who prefer nautical tales, "Blind Man's Bluff" was also an excellent read, if not with a few major errors and showing its age at this point.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man's_Bluff:_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Submarine_Espionage
