Behind the Screen: VIRUS

January 20, 2021

Level 99 Paranoiac. The Balaclava Lady (they always wore a balaclava). And now everyone’s wearing masks too. And watching TV: “Coronavirus! We’re all going to die! Be afraid, watch and listen to me, and do everything I say.” TVs are a great tool for mass control. All the info from the ASS-KISSER (TV) goes to the media, social networks, and the internet. Then word of mouth takes over, and things get crazy.

THE ZOMBIE BOX

To start, you can check out this video: ☭ Technologies of our potential “friends.” ☭ Illuminati, Masons, CIA, NSA, FSB, Russian hackers, Matryoshkas, Bears, Padded Jackets, Balalaikas. All of that is nothing compared to what you’re about to learn. You’ll never see this on TV))) What idiot would tell the truth to other idiots…

The Spread of Digital TV: A Double-Edged Sword

The widespread adoption of digital TV and flat-screen panels is undoubtedly a benefit for consumers. But it’s possible that intelligence agencies benefit even more—these technologies make it possible to watch everyone, right in their own homes!

In the late 1990s, TV started losing ground to the aggressively expanding internet. TV companies worried about losing ad revenue and wondered what alternative they could offer their subscribers. But they didn’t have much to compete with the global web.

Popular websites could use contextual, targeted ads that automatically adapted to users’ interests based on their search history. TV channels, on the other hand, could only target the “average” viewer, based on sociological research.

Sure, they could do more audience research—find out preferences by channel, topic, time of day, etc. Usually, this meant randomly selecting people willing to be “guinea pigs” and installing equipment in their homes to track the necessary data.

With the arrival of digital TV (especially IPTV), this became even easier—data could be tracked on provider servers. But to show contextual, targeted ads, TV companies needed very unusual information—specifically, what people were doing at the exact moment they were watching TV.

• Are they making breakfast?
• Watching a show before bed, lying in bed?
• Getting dressed in the morning, glancing at the news on the screen?

And they didn’t just want “average” data (even if based on hundreds of thousands of people)—they wanted info on every single subscriber.

The Unsolvable Problem

Faced with this seemingly unsolvable problem, representatives from the TV company NeoBroad turned to the American research corporation FICTUM (Factual Integrated Collection and Trends Unification Methods), which specialized in such tasks.

The research department (Department of Advanced Concepts, DAC) was led by the legendary Canadian with French roots, Dr. Nicolas Pannier, who had worked for years in the depths of the American military-industrial complex.

The initial idea from FICTUM’s engineers was simple: install cameras in every TV. But they quickly abandoned this “head-on” approach—cameras were still expensive and not compact, and the idea was to build one into every TV, meaning hundreds of thousands or even millions of units.

Then Nicolas Pannier, who had spent years developing stealth aircraft and phased array radars for American defense companies, came up with a brilliant idea: use the TV screen itself to collect data.

On the Other Side of the Screen

“It’s well known that almost any speaker can work as a microphone,” recalls Nicolas. “So I thought: why can’t a screen work as a camera sensor? After all, under the layer of liquid crystals are light-sensitive semiconductor elements—transistors that control the matrix. When light from outside hits them, you get a response.”

Pannier’s team started working in this direction—registering changes in the control signal sent to the active matrix transistors, depending on the lighting distribution on the screen from outside.

The research took six months. Then the team faced another nearly unsolvable problem—decoding the data. The TV screen has no optical system, so there was no “image” as such. Here, Pannier’s radar experience helped: phased array radars also have no focusing systems.

Using radar signal reconstruction algorithms, by 2000 Pannier had built a prototype system capable of “peeking” at what was happening in front of a TV screen. No hardware modification was needed—the solution worked at the firmware level of the set-top box (STB) and the TV, which could be updated remotely over the network (the provider got the TV model info from the STB to select the right firmware).

After that, the operator could see a fairly blurry image of what was happening in subscribers’ homes—as long as the TV was on. Plasma panels were even easier: to save screen life, manufacturers equipped them with light sensors for automatic brightness and contrast adjustment. By modifying the image (invisible to the human eye) and reading the light sensor, it was possible to reconstruct the room with fairly high resolution.

The All-Seeing Eye: Omniscience

In 2001, these two technologies were combined under the name Omniscience and patented as a “Method for reconstructing an image by registering the intensity and phase of reflected modulated radiation from a distributed two-dimensional array of light-emitting elements.”

However, after reviewing the research results, NeoBroad decided not to use Omniscience. First, management feared subscribers would see it as an invasion of privacy. Second, for TV companies, “spying” on subscribers was useless—you can’t hire a bunch of operators to figure out what every subscriber is doing at any given moment!

To determine “context,” automation was needed, which required significant investment. For the same reasons, other TV companies weren’t interested. But the technology did catch the eye of the so-called “cloak and dagger” crowd—intelligence agencies.

For them, Omniscience was perfect—no need to break into a target’s home or even get close. If the target had cable TV and a flat-panel TV (and who doesn’t these days?), all it took was remotely loading special firmware into their TV decoder, and an operator at a secret agency HQ could watch and listen to everything happening in the target’s home.

You could check the room for bugs a dozen times, but no one would suspect their own TV was the culprit.

US intelligence agencies quickly saw Omniscience’s potential and moved to seize and classify all related materials. Pannier and his team were paid large sums for non-disclosure agreements. Details of the technology only became public seven years later, when the NDA expired.

This Side of the Ocean

Don’t think this is just an overseas problem. Even though the patent documents were seized and classified, the genie was out of the bottle: for almost two months, the patent was available to anyone.

Reportedly, intelligence agencies from Russia and several European countries—posing as digital cable TV operators—managed to copy the documentation, and their government engineers didn’t sit idle in the following years.

For example, in Russia, it’s no coincidence that in 2000, alongside the SORM phone wiretapping system, SORM-2 was introduced to cover digital network traffic (it was already clear that IPTV was the future). It’s quite possible that intelligence agencies helped spread and lower the cost of digital TV and flat-panel TVs—just to have the technical ability to watch every subscriber.

So get used to living “under glass.” Big Brother is watching you—from your own home TV screen.

How Omniscience Works

The Omniscience technology works like a phased array radar, but in the optical range. Each matrix transistor can act as both a backlight control element and a photosensitive sensor. A special signal is mixed into the control signals sent to the matrix transistors.

This adds a probe signal to the screen image, invisible to the human eye (developers call it a probing field). This dynamic signal, sent to some transistors, modulates the screen’s backlight in a certain way, while other transistors pick up the light reflected from objects in the room. The collected data is compressed and sent to a central server, where special software reconstructs the image in real time. Both LCD and plasma panels produce a color image (LCDs use built-in color filters, plasma uses color pixel modulation).

However, LCD panel colors are partially distorted: due to polarization, glossy objects in the room appear in “fake colors.” The system’s resolution is in millimeters.

The Iron Curtain: How to Protect Yourself

Dr. Nicolas Pannier shared some secrets for protecting yourself from Omniscience with Popular Mechanics:

• First, you can turn off the TV. However, modern TVs don’t fully power down—they just go into standby, turning off the screen. So the possibility of at least “listening” (and in some models, visual monitoring) remains.
• You can unplug the TV and decoder (but that’s very inconvenient).
• You can cover the screen (and the light sensor, if there is one) with a thick cloth, but this only partially blocks the visual leak.
• Only special metal blinds that close when the TV is off fully block the visual channel. You can use foil, but it must completely cover the screen—otherwise, it just reduces the system’s resolution and sensitivity.
• If you have an old CRT TV, you don’t need to worry—this problem hasn’t been solved yet. “Yet?” I ask. “No comment!” Pannier smiles.

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