SPY-TECH
Are your shoes listening to you? Is your lamp watching? Could be.
Eavesdropping technology is now in the hands of the
jealous spouse, the nosy neighbor, and the prying executive.
By Doug Stewart
Discover Magazine March 1988
It's a quiet Thursday evening in Brooklyn. Ray Melucci, private eye, is home alone with his wife. He ruffles through the day's paper. He paces around the house, opening and shutting doors, clearly uneasy about something. "He probably didn't get through yet," Melucci mutters to his wife. She says nothing. In the background, a singer on the radio is making a racket to electric organ accompaniment. It sounds awful.
I know it sounds awful because I'm eavesdropping from 200 miles away, thanks to a device attached to the telephone wire in Melucci's living room. The gadget is called an infinity bug (since you can trigger it from any distance as long as you have a phone). I turned it on by dialing Melucci's number and quickly playing a sort of tape-recorded electronic birdcall into my phone's mouthpiece. In response the bug obediently switched off the ring mechanism in Melucci's phone and switched on the bug's microphone. Melucci's telephone is still resting innocently on its hook, but the phone line is now live. (My snooping would be illegal, except that Melucci planted the bug himself to show me how it works. He's uneasy because he can't be sure if I'm listening or not.)
The infinity bug, which sells on the black market for about $1,000, is only one small part of an arsenal of insidious items that people secretly use to watch and listen to one another every day. Once upon a time, hidden microphones and concealed tape recorders were strictly for cops and spies. Today such gadgets - and a host of elaborate and expensive measures to counter them - have filtered down to the jealous spouse, the nosy neighbor, the high-level executive, the local politician.
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