7. A HERF Gun In Frith Street - page 42
7. A HERF Gun In Frith Street - page 42
page 42
Bigend was telling a story, over drinks i a crowded Frith Street tapas place Hollis suspected she'd been to before. A story about something called a "herf" gun, high-energy radio frequency, in Moscow, to erase someone else's stored data, in a drive, in an adjacent building, on the opposite side of a party wall.
Stored data is not usually at risk from a HERF attack, unless the computer is crashed as it is actually wring to a magnetic disk etc.
Dr. Carlo Kopp, a former Royal Australian Air force F111 "Wild Weasel" electronic jamming and countermeasures pilot, famously published a paper on
The Electromagnetic Bomb - a Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction which explains most of the principles of military weapons.
"post" Cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson, featured a truck mounted HERF weapon in Cryptonomicon
Remember that all such effects are proportionate to a a power squared law i.e. the effect tails off rapidly with the square of the distance between the device and the target.
See also Tempest NATO code word and standard for the hardening of military electronic equipment against either the Electro Magnetic Pulse effect caused by detonating a nuclear weapon in the ionosphere (or a nearby lightening strike) or the similar but more esoteric Teapot, which includes snooping on the back scattered emissions from electronic equipment, which is being blasted with high frequency radio waves (which tend to be able to jump even open electrical switches etc)
Here is a Frith Street Tapas bar (genuine Andalucian hams etc.) south of Old Compton Street
There are a couple more chrome and glass tapas bars on Frith Street north of Old Compton Street
Blue Ant HQ location ?
After Clammy had decided to go back to the studio, her white plastic bottle of Cold-Dx wedged precariously into a back pocket of his Hounds, departing the Golden Square Starbucks during an unexpected outburst of weak but thoroughly welcome sunlight., Hollis had gone out to stand for a few moments amid the puddles in Golden Square, before walking (aimlessly, she'd pretended to herself) back up Upper James to Beak Street. Turning right, crossing the first intersection on her side of Beak, she'd found Blue Ant exactly where she remembered it, while simultaneously realizing that she'd been hoping it somehow wouldn't be there.
There used to be a Starbucks at 37-38 Golden Square, the north east corner shop unit, however this is now occupied by a different coffee chain: vida e caffè
The prototype upon which the Blue Ant headquarters is seemingly based, appears to be the London HQ of the famous British advertising and Hollywood film directors, Sir Ridley Scott (whose film credits include Alien and Blade Runner and Blackhawk Down etc. and , the TV maths genius / FBI crime action series Numb3rs, which was co-produced with his younger brother Tony Scott (whose film credits include Enemy of the State
RSA Films and Black Dog films are based in London at 43-44 Beak Street, with a side entrance in Bridle Lane.
As this view of Beak Street westwards towards RSA Films shows, the building is typical of those in Soho, so Blue Ant's fictional HQ could not be too dissimilar.
Note the creepy Westminster Council "Big Brother" WiFi connected CCTV surveillance camera "death star", at the top right of the photo, at the corner of Beak Street and Lexington Street
Presumably Oliver Sleight would be able to intercept and de-cipher the Cisco WiFi video streams from such cameras, at least those within a few blocks of the Blue Ant HQ roof.
