THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (LONDON) April 04, 2001, Wednesday
Unlocking secrets of spy plane
By Roger Highfield, Science EditorNOVEL "magnetic microscopes" are among the tools that may be used by the Chinese to unlock the American spy plane's secrets.
The EP-3 is a potential intelligence treasure trove. Underneath the plane's ageing exterior lies electronic warfare equipment enabling it to act as a "sponge" to absorb and analyse communications and electronic data and study radar signals to develop jamming capabilities.
US navy officials said the 24 crew members were trained to destroy equipment and classified material in such circumstances. Diplomats in Beijing said yesterday that the Americans were confident that this had happened as planned.
Specially configured grenades, and even hammers and axes, would be used. John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the Chinese would be able to draw conclusions from the hardware on the aircraft: the antennae and signalling process would shed light on what the Americans were studying, such as Chinese air defence radars.
The Chinese may also be able to recover some of the information erased from the computers using specialised microscopes that can recover erased and overwritten data from magnetic media, even fragments, or from random access memories in microchips, particularly if the chips are cooled soon after removal.
Magnetic force scanning tunnelling microscopes, for example, can produce images of the raw data held on magnetic media. Another tool is the magneto-resistive microscope, which scientists now use to recover data from mangled tapes or other storage media.
In one test, this type of microscope was used to recover data from a fragment
of flight recorder tape typical of what is left after a major accident.
Copyright 2001 Telegraph Group Limited
