Is there technology out there that can read a magazine from inside a building from afar?

Question

Im not talking about looking through windows from rooftops. Technology that can read and what you just wrote inside a building with no windows from outside a building. (I got this question from watching Deja Vu)

Answer 1

This would be extremely difficult.

First of all when you say "read a magazine"
are you referring to OCR (optical character recognition).
This is where computer software scans the binary digital
image of each character and translates it into a known
computer character set like ASCII.
OCR goes back 25 years and is now more reliable.
But in those 25 years it only went from 97% to something
better than 99%.
This means for every 100 characters one of them is wrong.
99% sounds good. but if it mistakes a 0 for a 9 and
it's in a dollar amount it could be the difference from
$1,000,000 and $1,900,000.
Obviously banks can't use it.

Another problem with this technology is how it would know
which page of a magazine to transmit back to you?
It would have to give you the contents of the entire magazine.
If there were a lot of printed material, magazines, books, papers etc. it would have to transmit all of it to you.
Then you would be inundated, overloaded with information
that would make it all useless. It would take you a year to go
through it to see if any of it was what you were interested in.

I can't believe that one of your responders implied this
is currently possible.

Think about it, if this technology existed, no government or military would have any secrets from another. That goes for companies as well as law enforcement (FBI, Police, CIA etc.). It goes all the way down to you and me.

Talk about big brother watching you.

Answer 2

Maybe with some extreme infra-red or millimetre wave technology. But I doubt if even the military or the NSA have this technology. Yet.

Answer 3

Of cource it is possible but why do you want to do it? Are there any money in it?