motherboard.vice | Prior to the release of the ANT catalog, the last time the public had
ever heard anything about retro-reflection technology being used in a
surveillance device was in 1960. And the technology became such a
sensation that it earned one of the most iconic nicknames of the Cold
War.
On August 4, 1945, as World War II was winding down and new tensions
with the Soviets were starting to wind up, Russian schoolchildren paid a
visit to the American Ambassador in Moscow and bestowed upon him a
token of good will: a Great Seal of the United States. The Ambassador
hung it in his residential study.
There it hung until one day in 1952, when a British radio technician in
Moscow, listening in on Russian air traffic, discovered something
unexpected on one frequency: the sound of the British ambassador, loud
and clear, along with other American-accented conversations. Thus began
one of many exhaustive tear-downs of the embassy. They were looking to
find a listening device—and they did, along with a new frontier of
spying. The culprit was the Great Seal.
Inside the Americans and British found a tiny device the likes of which
they’d never seen. So alien was the Great Seal Bug that the only
appropriate name for it seemed to be “The Thing,” after the character in
the Addams Family (which was then still just a New Yorker cartoon). It
was a retroreflector.
“The Thing,” turned out to have been invented by the legendary Russian
engineer Lev Sergeyevich Termen, or Leon Theremin, who may be most
famous as the father of
the spooky radio-based instrument named after him, but is also considered a pioneer of RFID technology.
But perhaps surprisingly, despite all the public interest in the
revelation, “The Thing” did not seem to herald more “things.” In the
history of espionage technology, it was a great story, but ultimately a
footnote. As far as the public knew, after its fantastical discovery
there were fifty-three years of radio silence, so to speak.
“In hindsight,” Ossmann said, “it’s obvious that these types of attacks
are practical and employed. For someone who knows a little bit about
electronics and a little bit about security, RF retroreflectors should
be completely unsurprising. However, I couldn't find anyone who had
published any research on the subject at all. That was astonishing."
(This is where things get a bit complicated again; it's worth it, but
if you simply can't deal with the details, take my word for it, and skip
down to the next section.) Fist tap Arnach.
