Funny story

John Bjarne Grover

I heard this story on 'Radio Free Service' some time ago. There is the question how come it is not possible to have a spy satellite surveying details on the ground and transmitting these to the control centre on earth without the data being leaked to others? Hasnt the technology of randomizing shared code come far enough? Of course the data are encrypted in the satellite by being rewritten through a random code (some mega-tera-bytes of length when shot up from earth) the copy to which there exists only one and that is in the receiving computer on earth. But is it so impossible to make true random codes, or is it so impossible to keep the two code copies uncopied - that there always are secret agents from the enemy around who take extra copies when the random codes are made?

It probably isnt there. It is probably that it has to go un-encrypted from some antenna or 'lens' in the satellite through a cable before it reaches the encryptian unit, and then it is always possible for a surveillance unit on earth to focus on that cable and to tap the electronics going through it before these data reach the encryptian unit. It can be a matter of very few millimetres or even less - but modern surveillance seems to be without such borders. I have guessed that a satellite can tap the info in a pocket digital camera on earth if only they can focus on the millimetres between the lens and the storage card. And then the same can be done in reverse - tapping that cable between the lens and the encryptian unit in the satellite. This is the reason why encryptian of satellite data is perhaps no longer possible.

But it is worse than this. I have guessed that oldfashioned camera lenses soon will go out of use - that the new technology will be a credit card with storage of all the terabytes that are around in the district and then focusing and all other parametres are done on the computer afterwards. You just hold the receiver up in the air roughly in the direction of your object of photography and then you can do the details on your home computer.

But, if so, then the same can probably be done with a satellite. You just hold the receiver up in the air and if there is a satellite up there, you can tap it on your computer. But that is what the modern sun energy panels are doing on the houseroofs! You just run the data into your computer and can zoom in on any delicate detail that is the focus of attention of hyper-secret intelligence spy satellites.

But then of course any spy satellite can also zoom in on your zoom-in. They probably do not even zoom - that is done by the computer afterwards. They just are up there in the air, on the sky.

This program on 'Radio Free Service' (that is the internal 'intelligence channel' talking inside your head) was quite interesting and could have been about the puzzling phenomenon why it seems so difficult to keep surveillance data secret. I write something by hand on a paper - could be in a park, in a bus, on a cafe table - and only hours later it is around town in advertising. It is true that poetry often takes its reference in the future while prose takes it in the past, and therefore this problem can perhaps be worse for a poet than for a prose writer, but it is of course possible that surveillance data no longer can be kept secret in the way they could earlier.

Less funny is the idea (that was also a program on the same radio) that all air and hence all air waves are ionized and therefore can be photographed as an electromagnetic field probably even from satellite - which would mean that they can tap whispers which you cannot even hear yourself! And those computer filters strip off everything which is not linguistically relevant and therefore there is no problem hearing what the president whispers into the ear of the intelligence chief, however few decibels the whisper could contain and however much noise there could be in the surroundings.

Ah ja, there isnt much future left for oldfashioned paranoids.

Is there something strange about the word?





© John Bjarne Grover
On the web 26 march 2015