Technique gets clear images from light reflected off blank paper
arstechnica.comTotally different concept, but this reminds me of the anecdotes my professor would tell us about the possibility of eavesdropping on a monitor (CRT then) based on the light radiation emitted, and not from seeing the actual image itself
You're thinking of Optical Time-Domain Eavesdropping Risks of CRT Displays by Markus G. Kuhn in Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, Berkeley, California, 12–15 May 2002.
Available here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ieee02-optical.pdf
Pretty amazing that this actually works, just using a high-speed photo-sensor – and doesn't even require line of sight, a reflection off a wall is enough. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work on LCD screens.
Maybe he was talking about project TEMPEST https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST
I don't have a link to the paper, but I recall reading a whitepaper about it as far back as 2002.
Article describing novel way to produce images, yet no images produced in article.
Further investigation finds a few thumbnails an a paywall.
I grabbed the images from the PDF paper and put them here:
Figure 1: http://i.imgur.com/imfvc.png Figure 2: http://i.imgur.com/xKIOv.png Figure 3: http://i.imgur.com/GevEd.png
Interesting stuff!
There's also an article about it on Petapixel: http://www.petapixel.com/2012/07/16/researchers-develop-came...
and the full academic paper is available here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.2078.pdf
At last! Something that comes close to explaining the "seeing around a corner in a scanned picture" scene in Blade Runner...