To quote:

Also on the SETI front is the Planetary Society’s dedication of the first telescope exclusively devoted to optical SETI (OSETI). The Harvard-based observatory includes a 72-inch primary mirror that is larger than any U.S. optical telescope east of the Mississippi. Performing one trillion measurements per second and expanding existing optical searches by 100,000-fold, the new installation will search for laser signals that can far outshine the light of a nearby star even with today’s technology.

Here’s more on just how visible such signals might be (via the Princeton Optical SETI project:

Light coming from a star alone filtered to one part in 10,000 amounts to 4 Joules of energy every nanosecond. Therefore, a laser signal coming from near the star must exceed 4 Joules within a nanosecond in order for it to outshine the star. Modern lasers designed for nuclear fusion can exceed this power requirement by some 300,000 times… Even if the exact frequency of transmission is unknown, such a laser would still outshine the sender’s star by 30 times during the nanosecond pulse without any filtering.

Full article here:

http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=620