Engineers at the University of California say they have demonstrated how easy it would be to snoop on biotech companies making synthetic DNA…. The researchers demonstrated their spying technique on the Applied Biosystems 3400 DNA Synthesizer, a widely used older model…. “Acoustics for this particular machine was the problem,” says Mohammad Al Faruque, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of California Irvine whose team developed the algorithms. But any type of emission from a machine can potentially be analyzed, he says.