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The Thing

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Re: The Thing

#91

Post by icedchai »

derefr wrote: post #83
maxlybbert wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on a software project that was targeted at the federal government and required all programmers to be US citizens. It didn’t require us to have special security training or anything, though; and there was a different project that required programmers to leave their cell phones in lockers during the day. I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other p…

If you're a US citizen, the US government already knows enough about you from just your regular stream of activity that makes its way to them—your taxes, any times you've been arrested, etc. So—even disregarding stuff like Prism—they already have a baseline estimate for how trustworthy you are, without needing to do a background check. (Also, they can rely on other partial background checks you've passed in the past,…

Not really, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing background checks for security clearances. Some of them are extensive. They interview your friends.

Re: The Thing

#92

Post by gene-h »

I wonder if there are any uses for mechanically modulated retroreflectors today. NASA is investigating fully mechanical rovers for Venus because semiconductors do not work very well at Venusian temperatures while mechanical devices do[0]. To get data back from a fully mechanical device they propose to use retroreflectors. Although the bandwidth they can achieve with their approaches, using semaphore messaging with retroreflectors and looking at the doppler shift provided by spinning disks, is low. Perhaps by using a device like the thing they could transmit data at acoustic rates. I am also curious if there are more down to earth applications for devices like the thing other than espionage. [0]https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/201700...

Re: The Thing

#93

Post by derefr »

icedchai wrote: post #91
derefr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a US citizen, the US government already knows enough about you from just your regular stream of activity that makes its way to them—your taxes, any times you've been arrested, etc. So—even disregarding stuff like Prism—they already have a baseline estimate for how trustworthy you are, without needing to do a background check. (Also, they can rely on other partial background checks you've passed in the past,…

Not really, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing background checks for security clearances. Some of them are extensive. They interview your friends.

A security clearance requires that the government know more about you than just the background-level life events of yours that they passively subscribe to.

All they need to know for a plain-old no-clearance public-servant position is that you're not beholden to a foreign power (e.g. part of a foreign gang, or in debt to a major foreign corporation.)

There's an easy (though imperfect) heuristic for determining whether you're potentially beholden to a foreign power, from the data they already have: the addresses you've lived at, your job history, and your arrest record. Just join that set to the set of organizations they're tracking as catspaws for foreign powers [and their active locations], count the joined rows, and you have a log-probability that you've ever had the opportunity to interact with someone who might have had cause to convince you to work for a foreign power.

Re: The Thing

#94

Post by icedchai »

derefr wrote: post #93
icedchai wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, otherwise they wouldn't bother doing background checks for security clearances. Some of them are extensive. They interview your friends.

A security clearance requires that the government know more about you than just the background-level life events of yours that they passively subscribe to. All they need to know for a plain-old no-clearance public-servant position is that you're not beholden to a foreign power (e.g. part of a foreign gang, or in debt to a major foreign corporation.) There's an easy (though imperfect) heuristic for determining whether…

This sounds too simplistic. There are other factors, like large debts (domestic, foreign, or otherwise), extra-marital affairs, etc. that could make someone easy to turn in the future.

Re: The Thing

#96

Post by cryptonector »

maxlybbert wrote: post #41
wyc wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once on an international flight, I overheard some construction workers describe how the US government must fly in US citizenship-holding personnel and US sourced materials in construction of certain foreign projects for security reasons. Does anyone know more about this?

I worked on a software project that was targeted at the federal government and required all programmers to be US citizens. It didn’t require us to have special security training or anything, though; and there was a different project that required programmers to leave their cell phones in lockers during the day. I’m convinced that the government doesn’t believe citizens are any more loyal or hard to bribe than other p…

Requiring U.S. citizens denies adversaries the ability to use their own without first having to put them through immigration and naturalization in the U.S. That's not nothing. Sure, adversaries can also recruit Americans, but that's harder than recruiting their own citizens.

Does it prevent espionage by Americans? No. But it does make espionage by foreign adversaries at least a bit harder.

Re: The Thing

#97

Post by minipci1321 »

acqq wrote: post #11

The creator is interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léon_Theremin And his most famous creation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin

Interesting? Wikipedia article doesn't even get close. There are various accounts of his life and achievements, memoirs of witnesses, people who knew him in various contexts, the descendants/family, records of his own recollections -- all available on Internet. Unfortunately, most of it is in Russian. Reading it gives you that messy, undefinable feeling of experiencing a genius.

Re: The Thing

#98

Post by 24gttghh »

icedchai wrote: post #94
derefr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A security clearance requires that the government know more about you than just the background-level life events of yours that they passively subscribe to. All they need to know for a plain-old no-clearance public-servant position is that you're not beholden to a foreign power (e.g. part of a foreign gang, or in debt to a major foreign corporation.) There's an easy (though imperfect) heuristic for determining whether…

This sounds too simplistic. There are other factors, like large debts (domestic, foreign, or otherwise), extra-marital affairs, etc. that could make someone easy to turn in the future.

At this point I think it depends on what type of security clearance you're talking about now. The above sounds more like checks done for a CIA analyst than for a embassy drywall contractor...

Re: The Thing

#99

Post by VLM »

madengr wrote: post #5

Maybe someday the Soviet side of things will be declassified, and we can read the technical account from that end. Would be interesting. There seem to be some technical unknowns in the article. I don’t think you can get FM back from the passive cavity, just AM, unless you can pump the cavity with feedback. Same goes for re-radiating at a harmonic. Maybe if the Q of the cavity were super high. Again, would be interest…

My guess is the excitation power is broadband, which explains the unusually high power required.

Smooth white noise with a spectrum 50 KHz wide centered on the theoretical center of the resonator, then the 3rd harmonic can rebroacast a resonant tiny high Q slice of up to 150 KHz deviation FM as the microphone diaphragm wiggles with sound.

Imagine a transmitter design where you make a very powerful white noise signal, then filter out a little bit of some tuned frequency and pass that narrow sliver out the antenna. A historical example of this transmitter topology would be old fashioned spark gap transmitter generating noise from DC to daylight as they used to say, then couple it to a resonant antenna. "The Thing" is merely a much more elaborate and refined variation on the idea.

Re: The Thing

#100

Post by 0xffff2 »

maxlybbert wrote: post #90
derefr wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a US citizen, the US government already knows enough about you from just your regular stream of activity that makes its way to them—your taxes, any times you've been arrested, etc. So—even disregarding stuff like Prism—they already have a baseline estimate for how trustworthy you are, without needing to do a background check. (Also, they can rely on other partial background checks you've passed in the past,…

I didn’t work for the government directly, and I don’t want to sound like I was doing anything covert or especially difficult. Basically, the company I worked for knew the government was one of its biggest customers with some unusual requirements compared to other customers (not “we need to spy on people,” but more like FedRAMP), and we helped other teams implement those feature requests. But it was the federal gover…

It's interesting how broad and disjoint the US Federal government is. I'm a Federal contractor and while many of my coworkers are not US citizens, the government does do a quite thorough (non-clearance) investigation on all of us that involves filling out a rather long form, providing past addresses and contacts for each of those addresses, etc. AFAIK they don't do in person interviews for non-clearance background investigations, but they do send out questionnaires by mail to all of the people you list on the form.
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