This evening, the Rachel Maddow show starts now. Early for a change. I have something to spend this time doing. Exactly. Thanks, my friend, appreciate it. Thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. Very happy to have you here tonight. Who here is old enough to have ever used a typewriter . I took typing class and it was on a typewriter. Im that old. Typewriters started off with a mechanism that looked like this. You pressed a button on a keyboard for a specific letter, but then a little arm, a little bar would swing up from the guts of the keyboard and smack that letter into the inked typewriter ribbon, and thereby pressed the imprint of that letter on to the paper, right . So that was the mechanism. Each keystroke on the typewriter would cause a piece of metal to fling itself up toward the paper. A different little bar with a different letter on it for each keystroke. That was how they started out. But then in 1961, ibm changed all of that. Ibm invented a whole new kind of elect
typewriters at the u.s. embassy in moscow that were bugged by the soviets, with one of these bugs that could listen into the little arms and pushrods that moved the selectric ball. and for eight solid years, for those eight years, everything typed on those 16 ibm selectric typewriters was beamed directly to the kg. and the only reason the u.s. figured it out in 1984 is because another country that had been bucked this same way by the kgb figured it out in one of their own facilitiefacilities, they were our ally, they tipped us off that maybe that we should check this. hey, you guys using selectric typewriters? particularly at your embassies and consulates in russia? you may want to get them x-rayed and check for this particular sophisticated bug that the russians made up and we have found them using against us. so those compromised those 16 compromised ibm selectric typewriters, those were an intelligence disaster for the
soviet union invented secret small technology that could be fitted inside an ibm selectric typewriter. and they disguised it really well, so the only way you could find this thing was by x-raying the typewriter and knowing what you were looking for. but what their spying device did inside of a selectric typewriter is that it could detect the movement of little arms and pushrods inside the selectric typewriter that pivoted and rotated that ball as you typed the letters and numbers that you wanted to put on the page. they put a device inside selectrss typewriters that could detect the change. if you were sensitive enough to detect the movements inside that
little arms and pushrods that moved the selectric ball. and for eight solid years, for those eight years, everything typed on those 16 ibm selectric typewriters was beamed directly to the kg. and the only reason the u.s. figured it out in 1984 is because another country that had been bugged this same way by the kgb figured it out in one of their own facilities and since they were our ally, they tipped us off that maybe that we should check this. hey, you guys using selectric typewriters? particularly at your embassies and coonsulates in russia? you may want to get them x-rays and check for that particular sophisticated bug that the russians made up and we have found them using against us. so those compromised those 16 compromised ibm selectric typewriters, those were an intelligence disaster for the united states for eight solid years as they broadcast everything typed inside the embassy. but they were finally discovered in 1984.
but it turns out it also changed spying. because starting in the 1970s, soviet union invented secret small technology that could be fitted inside an ibm selectric typewriter. and they disguised it really well, so the only way you could find this thing was by x-raying the typewriter and knowing what you were looking at. but what their spying device did inside of a selectric typewriter is that it could detect the movement of little arms and pushrods inside the selectric typewriter that positioned that ball, that pivoted and rotated that ball as you typed the letters and numbers that you wanted to appear on the page. they put a device inside selectric typewriters that could feel the difference, that could detect the difference between that ball rotated to type a letter x and that ball being rotated to type a number seven.