[downandout]

Well that's pretty scary. I can see one application of this already: casinos in the US are legally prohibited from recording audio on their floors, but have perfectly positioned cameras everywhere. Beyond that, I'm guessing every spy agency on earth will be buying solutions based on this.

It would be interesting to know what the genesis of this project was - for example if the NSA or CIA was involved in suggesting to a professor that MIT take a look at this area. This is a very mission-specific technology.

[otakucode]

This same researcher has been working in this area for awhile, and this is not an unexpected extension of things he's developed previously - like how to take standard video and determine the pulse of any people present (search on 'non-eulerian video magnification'). He's been working in what you can recover from the variations present in video which others have written off as 'noise' for awhile. I wouldn't be surprised if he just stumbled upon the effect sound had while doing other analysis.

I haven't looked, but if the NSA was involved with this, its usually easy to find out. Just look for any grants involved and look up the source of the grant. They don't usually hide their involvement in funding research. Pretty much any study done in the past 10 years about manipulating social graphs was funded by the NSA.

[Anechoic]

This is a very mission-specific technology.

No, it's really not, there a ton of engineering and scientific uses where it may be useful to measure acoustic emissions off a vibrating surface, but it may be infusible or too resource intensive to attach/deploy conventional acoustic transducers. For example, characterizing sound sources in moving vehicles like trains (which currently require microphone arrays and a lot of post-processing) or wind turbines (which require expensive sound intensity measurement equipment).

If the cost of high-speed cameras come down, this could be a valuable alternative.

[lnanek2]

Spy agencies already have a laser they can put on a window to recover audio from the vibration and other similar devices. This isn't really that different. It seems behind current spook hardware, honestly.

[deutronium]

But this is passive, which would undoubtedly have advantages to spies