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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert

Anti-Spying Device  
  Foolproof means of defending against spy beams.  

It was not a large office, but it was quite spy-proof and quite undetectably so. Spy-beams trained upon it received neither a suspicious silence nor an even more suspicious static. They received, rather, a conversation constructed at random out of a vast stock of innocuous phrases in various tone and voices.
Technovelgy from Foundation, by Isaac Asimov.
Published by Doubleday in 1951
Additional resources -

Compare to the cone of silence From Cease Fire (1958) by Frank Herbert, hush corner by Robert Heinlein in Double Star and the Fenton Silencer from an early Arthur C. Clarke story.

The earliest example I know of is the isolation barrage from Wandl, The Invader (1939) by Ray Cummings.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Foundation
  More Ideas and Technology by Isaac Asimov
  Tech news articles related to Foundation
  Tech news articles related to works by Isaac Asimov

Anti-Spying Device-related news articles:
  - Is Privacy Too Expensive?

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Chameleon Personalized Privacy Protection Mask

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