167 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
167 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
|
||
|
||
RADIO SURVEILLANCE (BUGGING) IN THE U.K.
|
||
|
||
By Nigel Ballard 28 Maxwell Road, Winton
|
||
Bournemouth, Dorset,
|
||
BH9 1DL ENGLAND
|
||
|
||
I suppose to most laymen, the word bugging, produces up visions of secret
|
||
agents clambering up foreign embassy walls in the dead of night. This
|
||
could not be further from the truth. Firstly anybody, and I mean anybody
|
||
can get involved in bugging. And secondly, our respective security
|
||
services have mostly moved on from the days when bugs were hidden in
|
||
hollowed out books and secreted on some poor sods bookshelf. And from then
|
||
on in, every time he/she passed wind, it was faithfully reproduced by the
|
||
man down the road, hidden in the back of a van bearing the trademark
|
||
'THE ACME WIDGET COMPANY'.
|
||
|
||
If I were to categorise the users that joe public would have for
|
||
bugging, then the two popular choices would have to be in divorces and
|
||
industrial espionage. The hard done by wife seems unhappy with just the
|
||
8 by 10 glossies, she now wants to hear the moans of passion coming
|
||
from either the home wrecking harlot or the husband who has yet to know
|
||
the financial pain of a Californian divorce.
|
||
|
||
LOAD'S OF MONEY TO BE MADE AND LOST
|
||
Industrial espionage on the other hand, opens up a whole new sphere of
|
||
intrigue. Boardrooms are where the really big corporate decisions are
|
||
made, and this is where the bugs quite naturally find their way. Large
|
||
corporations employ companies to 'SWEEP' their offices either at regular
|
||
intervals, or when they get a sniff of the dreaded 'HOSTILE TAKE-OVER'.
|
||
There are a great number of companies involved in this lucrative trade.
|
||
At the bottom of the heap you have the sharks who will plant a bug on
|
||
the first sweep, only to discover it on the second sweep. You, the
|
||
customer feel's it is money well spent, and the shark could care less
|
||
whether Walter Cronkite is listening on the other side of the wall. Other
|
||
sharks have been known to turn up with piles of unrelated, but none the
|
||
less impressive hardware, pile the table high with valve rejuvenators
|
||
marked 'BUG HUNTER MARK TEN' etc etc, and then proceed to fool you into
|
||
thinking that they have brought along the latest in bug smashing
|
||
hardware.
|
||
|
||
CONFLICT OF INTEREST?
|
||
Some companies sell bugging equipment and will even supply the personnel
|
||
to plant them. On the other side of the hall they have a division that
|
||
solely deals with customers who think they have been 'TECHNICALLY
|
||
PENETRATED' (ouch! sounds painful). Now it strikes me as a conflict of
|
||
interest if you are burning the bugging candle at both ends. And what
|
||
happens if you are employed my Mr 'A' to bug Mr 'B', then two days later
|
||
you are approached by Mr 'B' who wants to check out of he is being
|
||
bugged by Mr 'A'. Sure you know not only that he is bugged, but where
|
||
they are hidden, but you can't tell him can you? Or can you? It is a
|
||
case of who's paying the most. Or is it like in the case of a lawyer,
|
||
'Sorry buddy but I am already working for Mr 'A'. No, that would blow
|
||
the cover and guarantee that no monies would be forthcoming from either
|
||
Mr 'A' or Mr 'B'. And after all we're not a registered charity are we?
|
||
Far from it in my experience.
|
||
|
||
WHO WOULD I USE TO GET THE THOSE DARN BUGS OUT OF THE HOUSE
|
||
I have found that the companies most reliable in the field of
|
||
eradicating technical penetrations (there goes that word again) are
|
||
those that don't advertise openly, they are quiet, professional, and
|
||
could, if they were not so discrete, show you a very impressive list of
|
||
past and present clients.
|
||
|
||
WHERE WOULD I BUY BUGS
|
||
Well, crystal controlled or shove it, that's my motto. There is nothing
|
||
worse than going to the great personal risk of planting a device, only
|
||
to return hours later with your super sensitive scanner to find the bug
|
||
gone! Has it failed? No, it's just on a trip up and down the frequency
|
||
band. One minute it's sat on the local FM radio station, the next it's
|
||
hovering around a MUCH used coast guard allocation. Is the whole
|
||
neighbourhood listening in I ask myself?
|
||
|
||
OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
|
||
RANGE:
|
||
The greater the range, the greater the chances that somebody else will
|
||
home in on your bug. You only need enough output to get down the street,
|
||
or round the corner. The lower the power, also means the greater the
|
||
battery life. Also, if you are employing a very high powered VOX device,
|
||
the target may wonder why his bedside light flickers every time he
|
||
speaks! You're kidding right? Yes of course I am.
|
||
SIZE:
|
||
The smaller it is, the harder it is to find.
|
||
FREQUENCY BAND:
|
||
The lower in frequency, the greater the range. Just remember to stay off
|
||
well used allocations such as the public broadcast areas. Or worse the
|
||
Police allocations in your area.
|
||
TELEPHONE: If attached to the phone, either in serial or parallel, make
|
||
sure the bug does not hold the line open or interfere with any
|
||
attachments the target may have in his/her home. The local TELCO man
|
||
will get called in if the targets phone goes screwy, and your possibly
|
||
expensive and embarrassing bug will get found in minutes.
|
||
VOX: Vox is a very good addition, if the extra space taken permits it's
|
||
use. A bug hunter will still locate it, as most professional hunters put
|
||
out a specific audio tone, and a fast tuning receiver filtering out all
|
||
but an active carrier with that exact tone, will locate your bug VOX or
|
||
not.
|
||
REMOTE ACTIVATION: You are getting hi-tech now, these bugs have a
|
||
built in mini-receiver and can be remotely turned on and off. Very tasty
|
||
and very expensive. This method will thwart most detection methods
|
||
except hunters using the likes of an NLQ, or non linear junction
|
||
detector. These out of interest are what retail shops use to detect
|
||
those annoying bloody clothes tags that always leave a wapping great
|
||
pin-hole in your new cashmere sweater.
|
||
BURST TRANSMISSION: Well they certainly do exist. To be honest I have
|
||
never seen them advertised, but I do know they are in use. Basically,
|
||
the bug stores up say five seconds of speech, compresses it and then
|
||
puts out a half second digital burst. Very hard for a spectrum analyser
|
||
to get a good fix.
|
||
ENCRYPTED BUGS: Once again they are in use. But this king of James Bond
|
||
technology is normally made in house for in house use. It would just not
|
||
be cricket to let the opposition see how advanced and small your latest
|
||
listening devices had got.
|
||
SPREAD SPECTRUM: Still in the area of exotic species, they are around,
|
||
and are being used safe in the knowledge that all the knob twiddling on
|
||
an Icom R-7000 would not reveal one's existence. A good spectrum
|
||
analyser though would show it up a treat.
|
||
|
||
THE LAW (or EVENING ALL..WHAT'S ALL THIS THEN YOU ORRIBLE LITTLE MAN?)
|
||
In the UK, you can go to the Tottenham Court Road in London, and from
|
||
perfectly respectable shops you may purchase transmitting pens,
|
||
calculators, ashtrays. Telephone bugs etc etc. Even a healthy yet
|
||
expensive range of crystalled controlled variants. All made in Japan by
|
||
the likes of CONY (producers of sales leaflets proclaiming 'SMALL BUT
|
||
WITH GIANTS POWER'), and a lesser known company called RUBY to name but
|
||
a few. Perfectly legal to buy one or all of the models on sale. But as
|
||
soon as you put a battery into one, it starts transmitting R.F. Well the
|
||
DTI who licence ALL frequency use in the UK, do not have an allocation
|
||
for bugs, so you are now breaking the law. If it is a telephone bug, as
|
||
soon as you connect it to the phone lines, you have now broken a
|
||
different law. British Telecom who virtually control the UK monopoly on
|
||
the phone system, only allow you to connect approved items to the phone
|
||
line, they must have a BT GREEN CIRCLE on the product. And yes you've
|
||
got it, BT do NOT put green circles on bugs.
|
||
|
||
Then there is invasion of privacy, if they find it a sticky prosecution
|
||
on either of the afore mentioned regulations, you can be sure they will
|
||
get you on this one.
|
||
|
||
A recent case involved a national electrical retailer trying to take
|
||
over a larger competitor, somebody employed these two berks who located
|
||
the home address of the opposing financial director, shimmied up his
|
||
telegraph pole, clagged a pair of bell wires to his line. These wires
|
||
were run down the pole and buried in the ground. They ran to a metal
|
||
biscuit tin hidden in a bush (REAL CIA STUFF EH?). Inside the tin was a
|
||
vox operated tape recorder. A TELCOM worker came across the wires up the
|
||
pole by accident as he was connecting a new subscriber. The police were
|
||
informed, and a trap was set. Everyday one of the men would come to
|
||
refresh the batteries and swap the tapes. The next day he came, there
|
||
was an unexpected welcoming party waiting in the bushes. The case
|
||
continues.
|
||
|
||
Once again that's if for now.
|
||
Messages or general abuse directed at me on this BB please.
|
||
|
||
Stay lucky
|
||
Nigel.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
<00>b S3HELP HEX <00><><EFBFBD><12><10>I LASTFILEDAT 5^g<13>
|
||
FRECOVERIDX' <00>R<EFBFBD><14>( G8COMP TXT <00><>><14><10> S3SNRAD7CAL <00>f<EFBFBD><14><10>@ FRECOVERDAT! <00>R<EFBFBD>< <00> QDOS LOG S<>O<11>( FRECOVERBAK! <00>R<EFBFBD>U <00> LPV EXE <00>x<EFBFBD>`((<28> |