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Honestly, why not investigate the utility of this? Could one develop a fiber optic coil based microphone? It would probably result in a microphone immune to RF and magnetic interference.
Could that make a mic with no feedback? Might make me replace my SM-58
Well I suspect that most feedback would still occur, because that’s largely an effect of sound from a speaker being picked up through the mic, then played back again through the speaker, over and over…
So you’ll run into feedback issues whenever you have a mic playing back to a speaker in the same place. (Any amplification scenario)
Besides, if researchers can do this successfully, you would imagine three-letter agencies around the world could do it even better.
You can’t just listen to a random fiber on the switch. You’d have to prepare a piece carefully and add the measuring system, by which point a micro is easier and smaller.
Yeah, it basically says, “researchers could potentially measure vibrations in the air to detect speech.”
I know. That’s how speech works.
/boggle
And in other news, water makes things wet.
Well, it’s more novel than that…
A coil of fiber is not meant to be a listening device, so they almost certainly exist in places where it wasn’t previously deemed a risk.
That said, exploiting this in the wild seems like a pretty difficult job, I can’t imagine how to do it without already having access to a target computer.
It’s the kind of spy movie shit where they need to listen to a confidential conversation in a room they can’t bug, but someone wildly hacks about on a keyboard, randomly pulls up schematics of the building showing all the fiber lines, immediately spots that there’s one near that room, conveniently has a gadget at hand or can quickly assemble it that they just need to attach somewhere and make every nerd cringe.
And I… am that nerd!
The chances are the places that would be most at risk (and have a risk profile that would warrant that kind of paranoia) are already taking measures to circumvent this.
