This method of on-site computer cracking is safer than most because it involves no trespassing at all to get at your target computer. Van Eck has reported that he was able to use his invention to view the contents of computer screens from dis-tances over a kilometer away. His working group housed the device in a van which they parked on the street, usually right in front of a target's home, without incident.
These devices give us hackers the opportunity to do what we always say we want to do - innocently look around in computer systems without hurting, without changing, without destroying. But Van Eck and Britton machines also deprive us of freedom of direction, of choice. We can only use it to see what the user himself sees; there is no chance for us to hack, only to spy. Very rarely do pass-words appear on a computer screen, so we most likely won't even be allowed the opportunity to use a bit of learned knowledge to coax what other excit-ing information we can from the system unless the user chooses to allow us entry into those secret realms.
Seeing the contents of a forbidden computer screen from a kilometer away is marvelous in and of itself when one is discussing, as we were, pulling flutters of distant radiation from the ether. But tra-ditional hacking methods - through the telephone - allow us to delve into the forbidden from much further away than a
kilometer. In the following section we will start looking at how a hacker can roam through all the confidential computer systems of his neighborhood, his country, and, if he chooses, the world.
