“I felt like I was in the middle of the big woods, but I was in the middle of a hotel room.” This is how a former official described to The New York Times doing business in the ungainly blue tent that's been toted around by traveling presidents and other top officials from mid- to late-'90s onward. The tent, used on trips to both allied nations and less friendly climes, does relatively simple work: blocking top secret materials from view of hidden embedded cameras and blocking out listening devices with the aid of noise-making machines.There appears to be not much more special about the tent than that, and hotel rooms are also checked prior to tent setup for bugs and unusual radio waves. George Tenet, the former CIA director, started using the tent on trips to Israel, a country noted for having some of the most sophisticated spy technology going (and also being a tight bud of the United States). The practice expanded quickly to the rest of America's highest levels, and you can find something like permanent tents installed in official's stateside homes, featuring a bonus a layer of aluminum foil.The privacy tent is ultimately unsurprising. Countries spy on other countries, pretty much as deeply and often as possible. It's not a particularly new thing either; bugging rooms had already reached a sinister level of sophistication during the Cold War, when bugs were regular amenities of hotels frequented by diplomats.A tent, however, doesn't protect cell phone and internet communications. From the Times:“We do operate with the awareness that anything we do on a cellphone or BlackBerry is probably being read by someone somewhere, or lots of someones,” said a senior American diplomat.It's an interesting sliver of context for our current security/privacy debate: snooping is so normalized within the government. It's already so banal to the people charged with making decisions about our privacy as citizens, so taken for granted that not just someone but everyone with the capability is spying all the time. The uneasy sense is that, in a way, we're just catching up.
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