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A comment on Operation Gunman – how the Soviets bugged IBM typewriters (2015). Parent comment

Re:Operation Gunman – how the Soviets bugged IBM typewriters... by hwillis on Saturday January 27, 2018 @05:05PM (#16248356)
As an electrical engineer (but a new one, so take this with a grain of salt) it really is kind of staggering. This probably could only have worked with the selectric- they're quite special and if you haven't seen one in slow motion it's a thing of beauty[1]. The bug only had to measure magnetic disturbances in a few dimensions to recover text, and because it can measure the amount of time it takes to locate a new letter the field measuring error is much more acceptable. You wouldn't be able to do that with a more classic typewriter.

The level of sophistication here reminds me of current research[2] using software-defined radios. I'd LOVE to see a diagram of this thing. Old circuits were elegant by necessity, and something this sophisticated has to be a work of art.

> It contains special components to hide its presence even from non-linear junction detectors (NLJD)

That's really amazing. NLJDs work by blasting broadband noise at a circuit- any internal wire trace gets turned into an antenna, and if it's attached to a transistor or diode it'll re-radiate at multiples of the frequency. Typically you can even find just chunks of metal touching a semiconductor with those... the fact that they evaded detection is very impressive.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izZ02t2UEGc

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ7Nz942yAY

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Re:Operation Gunman – how the Soviets bugged IBM typewriters... by shriphani on Saturday January 27, 2018 @11:46PM (#16249867)
Did these need qwerty keyboards? The mechanism seems to not need the qwerty arrangement - might have been a legacy thing?
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Re:Operation Gunman – how the Soviets bugged IBM typewriters... by hwillis on Sunday January 28, 2018 @05:26PM (#16253950)
As in, were they fast enough to be used with other layouts? Yeah, but this was back when letters were dictated- secretaries didn't go switching to dvorak. Any typewriter could technically use any layout, since you'd just have to swap out the characters.

The biggest advantage of the selectric was that you could swap out the ball to get different characters or fonts. The ability to get italics was a pretty big deal.

Here's Bill Hammond talking about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRCNenhcvpw

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