Bright Noise

Confused? Looking for surveillance hardware instead of paranoiac attempts at TEMPEST countermeasures? You probably wanted BrightNoise Inc instead.

Disclaimer: BrightNoise Inc is not affiliated with Deekoo.net or the brightnoise-console countersurveillance program.

The current version is 0.5. (2002 November 22).

Last I tested, it worked in 5.8. Should also work in 5.6 and maybe 5.005.

It requires Expect.pm. (in libexpect-perl, if you're using Debian).

The goal of the program is to make TEMPEST (over staticy links, at least) and over-the-shoulder surveillance more awkward for the surveillor. It should at least make it so that cow-orkers wanting to observe your screen contents must stare longer trying to figure them out.

Plus, it looks cool. Or annoying, depending on your taste.

Bright Noise uses consolefont and the esc]Pnrrggbb terminal escape code. I suspect that these may be fairly Linux-specific, though I may be wrong.

Bright Noise is licensed under the Surveillance Obstruction License. Which is essentially a demand that the user send me all information on me that their organization is compiling. Read the program to see the license.

Download Bright Noise.

For a list of command-line parameters, run brightnoise-console --help.

The current version of Bright Noise is only a prototype. As can be surmised from the above filename, I'm considering doing an X11 version. Less obvious (but a higher priority) is a console version that doesn't have the pile of display bugs mentioned above - having vim not liking to run under Bright Noise severely limits what I can do under it. Later versions will likely also have more controllable parameters.