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Comment by keithpeter | Hacker News Reader

I would imagine all the main Western governments are building meeting rooms inside Faraday cages somewhere hard to reach and not in a line-of-sight of other buildings &C

Above seems somewhat lo tech

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My wife's grandfather designed buildings like that in the 1960s for the Ministry of Defence in the UK. They had special wall and ceiling coverings, artificial floors and were lined with RF shielding even back then. They had an immense list of engineering checks that had to be done right down to light transmission.

One of the really cool things is they had developed a method of determining what keys were pressed on a typewriter by the sound back then (these were IBM ones so this wasn't hard) and had to design ways for the sound to be dampened enough to not reveal it outside of the communications rooms. Even things like heating pipes were carefully dampened.

Yeah, likely implemented in a hurry, but Faraday cages don't solve all. Remember that wire is a thing. Turning up the music and speaking quietly in a small group may be lo-tech, but it works. You'll need a widely spaced microphone array with more microphones than there are loudspeakers at the very least to separate the music from the speech. That's easier to do when you don't have to worry about wiring, but it's still hard.

You are aware that you can record audio and send it later?

Well, yes.

Are you suggesting that the music being played is to frustrate a member of the meeting from secretly recording the proceedings? Or that the local secret service can't sweep the room and deny subsequent access to hostile agents?

If the mobile phones are turned into bugs, they should not record the voices.

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