You can also listen for audio simply by measuring any vibrating surface with a laser. Which goes all the way back to the late 40s, used by the USSR. |

Fun fact, it was invented by Leon Theremin. The inventor of the Theremin.

Funnily enough, first time I've seen it mentioned was in Ghost in the Shell manga from 1990s, where Major's side business illegally offers military grade optronic touch/etc senses in artificial skin for cyborgs, using measurements of bending fiber optic loops

> Back in the day it was CRTs emitting measurable waves through the neighborhood, with some papers even going as far as restoring the displayed image through a wall.

It's been some time since I've thought about Van Eck phreaking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

Just toss a doppler laser interferometer on a window, mirror, etc. At least with fiber-optics you need physical access. Single mode (I think that's most of FTTH) is pretty insensitive to vibration and hard to localize so you'd really have to install something.

I don’t get your point. Yes, there’s a lot of eavesdropping techniques available to actors with nation state capabilities (or with a lot of time, money, and expertise). This is another one of them. It’s good to be aware of things like this because it helps you better understand threat modeling for applications that require serious hardening.

There may also be unusual applications of this, like the traffic counting mentioned by another commenter.

(For anyone who needs hardening against things like this, you need a SCIF.)

So when AI takes over the world, it will have a convenient tap into every living space of every hoomin. Lovely.

Fiber optic interrogators are (for now) expensive and bulky, so I don't think commercial modems are capable of that (yet).

trackers are also now becoming near microscopic

they track BUTTERFLIES from Canada to Mexico by attaching tiny trackers with eyelash glue

* https://celltracktech.com/products/ctt-blumorpho

smaller than a tic-tac candy (about two match-heads)

* https://cellular-tracking-technologies.github.io/ctt_documen...

As soon as I've read your comment, I've thought about this Mr. Bean's sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9-vDow2d0

And reflections on other buildings (which usually cannot be compensated for,) wind bending antennas, etc.

Ah, the old ‘stand in a funny pose so the family can watch the show’. Such a classic. :P

Anything in my price range?

This is written to sound scary/capatalize on a relatively underdiscussed snooping mechanism.

But it isn't at all like straight UHF/VHF radio intereference spectra analysis or whatever we want to call it.

Wifi, Cell network bands, bluetooth and hard fiber lines are all far more exploitable than "regular" RF . A police squad car equipped with the RF package (which convienetly comes from defense contractors) can grid out your home and hotspot people, devices, etc. This is only possible due to exploits/abusing these standards and cooperation w/ device/tech vendors.

Is this a problem? Eh, not for me where I live. Is it illegal? I am not versed enough to know how procedural/ y the books this is. But it is odd that a passing police vehicle potentially has unmarshalled/warrentless seach running 24/7.

"I know this sounds scary, but don't worry - all this spying won't give you cancer!"

The article is about radio waves from TV broadcast towers, not the TV in your home.

This makes no sense.

This problem is solved via two ways (or both at once):

- Pihole

- Unplug the TV from ethernet and disable wifi

All my TVs display no ads because they are jailed.

There is: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/espectre-wi-fi-motion-...

There is with Zigbee: https://github.com/orgs/home-assistant/discussions/960

As made popular in Cryptonomicon!

Bad actors, and any WiFi capable hardware in your house. There's an official spec for it[1], and some routers already have the option built in. I remember seeing papers about this over 10 years ago, someone at MIT did it for a paper.

Philips Hue also has it built in to their newer lights, where they measure the Zigbee signals. They call it MotionAware[2]. Basically anything with an antenna and a bit of compute is able to do this now.

[1] IEEE 802.11bf-2025 [2] https://www.philips-hue.com/en-hk/support/article/motionawar...

> So, a bad actor can now know when I'm at my house or not.

A bad actor who wants to act on that information can just wait near your house on a workday morning and watch you leave, likely not to return for the better part of the day. No techno-voodoo required.

Bad actors have been doing that for millennia using their eyes.

This makes it more remote and subtle, but it’s not a new threat.

Even having three security cameras around the perimeter of your house can allow quite precise location and activity detection inside the house via their audio steams.

Those mics can be quite sensitive.

Or they could just knock on your door and see if you answer.

They already knew this from your cell phone not being in airplane mode.

Can't they already do that by snooping on ARP traffic on your home LAN? Failing that, if they can get whatever shitty wifi chipset they're using to enter promiscuous mode, they can also sniff all STAs that are in the vicinity, and with some ML they can probably figure out which MAC belongs to your phone.

Awareness of possibilities is not paranoia. One implies sickness. Healthism?

π RuView turns commodity WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection — all without a single pixel of video.

https://github.com/ruvnet/RuView

yeah, now I gotta unplug TV too

When I was young I could tell when the neighbours turned on their tv by the UHF whine.