A hacker has created a laser-based surveillance system that can pick up virtually everything typed or spoken in a room

Hacker Samy Kamkar plans to unveil a laser-based spying setup at Defcon security conference.

He says he can point a laser invisible to the human eye at a faraway laptop, through a window, and detect the computer's vibrations to reconstruct virtually every character typed on it.

The trick works even without a view of a computer's keyboard, so long as the hacker has a line-of-sight view of any relatively reflective portion of the target laptop.

Kamkar also created a laser microphone, a tool that bounces a laser off a room's window to detect its vibrations.

Samy Kamkar created the first laser microphone that's actually modulated in the radio frequency domain.

Kamkar 's laser microphone worked well enough for detecting keystrokes, in fact, that he also tested using it to record audio in a room more generally, by bouncing his infrared laser off a window.

Security researchers have demonstrated for years that keystroke audio, recorded from a nearby microphone, can be analyzed and deciphered into text that a surveillance target is typing.

Kamkar hopes his Defcon talk will inspire the conference's hacker audience to think more broadly about how information resonates through the real world in unexpected and exploitable ways.

“The physical world screams secrets, and we have the ability to listen,” he says.