The Sad Story of USCG Procurements..

The highly recommended WIRED Magazine DANGER ROOM has an interesting story concerning the newest class of US Coast Guard Cutters, the DD-250 Bertholf, and their problems with TEMPEST. (Emissions from on-board electronics).

Here are my comments:

COTS meets TEMPEST. The services are mandated to use Commercial Off-The-Shelf stuff as much as possible. Okay, no sense paying to re-invent the wheel.
But, COTS don't know TEMPEST. COTS barely knows FCC Part 15! My laptop tears up my AM radio and my cellphone gets into everything electronic when it turns on or rings. COTS is noisy, RF wise.

The big question will be, "What is the threat?" TEMPEST is all about evaluating the threat of interception of compromising emissions.
Does a Cutter sitting tied to the dock in Key West face a TEMPEST interception threat? From whom and at what level of sophistication? How close do the bad guys have to be? If, because of physical precautions, the intercept antenna can't get closer than 100 yards is that a threat?
There are a whole lot of estimations, guesses, and trade-offs. It will be about balancing those by-guess and by-gosh things with the benefits of COTS. The bottom line will probably be a bewildering set of operating procedures that says something like "you can't fire up the targeting nework, even for simulation, if you don't have a sterile area 100 yards around the ship.", etc. A real pain in the COTS.

Thinking that anyone, any person or organization, doesn't have the ability intercept emissions or communications and to make use of them is dangerous.
Sometimes, it's just a signature, not a decode. Even Vietnam War era gunships could detect and get a bearing on a single spark plug firing a generator under a triple canopy of jungle from miles away. Do you want drug running boats to see that a DD-250 is lurking on the horizon from the unique electronic squeaking of the Cisco routers in its network? All I need is the signature, I don't even need to decode it. Elemenary TEMPEST interception is something that any two guys with EE degrees from Mogadishu U could do easily. Give me a 36 inch log periodic antenna disguised as a golf club bag plus a broadband receiver with hard disk storage disguised as a beer cooler and I'm in. Decoding what I pickup could take months or years, but I'd get better with practice. It's a capabiity that any drug cartel of any size could buy. So, there are TEMPEST interception threats from many sources. It isn't THAT hi-tech.