actor meet him at a remote place on a beach and wear only bathing trunks. The actor complied but a machine-gun mike a few hundred feet away in the dark was able to pick up enough of their talk to provide incriminating evidence.
Still a third type of long-range mike is produced by Electro-Voice, which specializes in developing microphones for broadcasters. Recently it developed a single-barrel mike about seven feet long. All major TV networks have used it to pick up the voices of questioners at presidential press conferences . . . to pick up the sounds of distant bands in parades . . . and to pick up—from the side lines—the voices and sounds of body impact of players at football games. The National Football League now has banned it because it was picking up and broadcasting too many obscenities. Electro-Voice has had inquiries from—and made sales to—a number of customers who may well have been investigators, but it has no knowledge of how many are actually being used in investigative work, since these users keep pretty quiet about their methods of operation. Its big mike costs about $1000. A simpler non-electronic way to eavesdrop on distant conversations—if the eavesdropper does not need recorded evidence—is to employ a lip reader with binoculars.
One of the most prevalent forms of bugging is a concealed mike-transmitter on the body. Miniaturization has made this feasible; and unfortunately there is little reason to fear prosecution.
Many experts favor placing the mike behind the tie, fairly low down so as not to pick up interference from the heartbeat. Tape recorders are now small enough so that there is little chance they will be detected if taped to the body.
However the experts prefer concealed transmitters rather than recorders. The transmitter will broadcast to a tape recorder that can be several hundred feet away, and even a fairly powerful transmitter can be made much smaller than a good concealable recorder. Also it can operate without reloading longer than a tape recorder. And even if a person is caught with it during a frisk the information obtained up to that point cannot be destroyed, and if necessary help can be dispatched. The transmitter can be carried on a coat pocket with its antenna going up to the armpit and down the sleeve. One of the best places to put either a transmitter or small recorder, according to a man who has submitted to police frisks to test his theory, is just above the coccyx. Another favored way of concealing a transmitter and mike is to pack them inside a king-size cigarette package designed to feel, to the touch, soft as a package of cigarettes.
To complete our rundown on bugging devices, there are a variety of tailing aids that can be attached to an automobile. One simple transmitter broadcasting a pulsing tone signal is mounted on four magnets and can be attached to any clean metal surface under the car in a matter of seconds. It can be heard for a mile.
The “art” of wiretapping—which is at least technically a more illicit form of eavesdropping—has also seen some advancements in recent years. One is a miniature transmitter that can be attached to the tapped listening post. This is not only more convenient, but has the advantage of reducing the chance the tapper can be traced if a tap is discovered.
Tappers frequently pose as telephone repairmen, and some who engage in tapping on a large scale even buy or build imitations of the green telephone-company trucks.
Tools for the more elementary kinds of direct wiretapping cost less than $25. And for $4.25 one can purchase a little device that feeds a telephone conversation into a tape recorder. It can be installed in three seconds by pressing its suction attachments against the back of the telephone receiver.
However, when one gets into transmitters, automatic recorders, and many of the microphoning tools that we’ve discussed, the prices soar. A professional eavesdropper is likely to require an expensive bag—or truckload—of tools. An examination of four catalogues issued by producers of surveillance equipment (Mosler, Tracer Electronics, Inc., W. S. J. Electronics, and R. B. Clifton Electronics Surveillance Equipment) gives some idea of an eavesdropper’s overhead. Here are some sample prices:
—Transmitters for wireless wiretapping. Prices range from $65 to $200 depending upon whether signal must be broadcast one block or three.
—Picture frame transmitter, $215.
—General-purpose transmitter to be planted inside room, $95 to $137, presumably depending on quality.
—Transmitters for concealment on body, $150 to $220.
—Device for automatically starting tape recorder when conversation begins on tapped telephone line, and stopping when conversation stops, $76 to $105.
Since a few states ban even the possession of wiretapping equipment by private parties, the Clifton catalogue states at the end of its price list: “Caution—in many parts of the world there are certain laws which prohibit using some of the items above. It is the sole responsibility of the buyer (and not the seller) to ascertain through legal counsel how these laws may apply to the use of each item purchased.” Tracer Electronics simply notes after some of its items: “Sold for use subject to pertinent regulations.” And the proposed FCC regulations restricting use of radio transmitters for electronic eavesdropping, if and when promulgated, will in no way affect the selling of such devices, but will only make the users warier of their legal position.
A quite different kind of electronic surveillance—and control—has become possible through the development of the giant memory machines. Each month more and more information about individual citizens is being stored away in some gigantic memory machine. Thus far, the information about individuals is usually fed into the super-computers to serve a socially useful or economically or politically attractive purpose. But will it always be? This might especially be asked concerning those memory machines that are building up cumulative files on individual lives.
All the storing and accumulating of information makes one wonder. Dr. Robert Morison, director of Medical and Natural Science for the Rockefeller Foundation, has commented: “We are coming to recognize that organized knowledge puts an immense amount of power in the hands of people who take the trouble to master it.” It may be significant that increasingly it is those who hold the office of comptroller in U.S. corporations who rise so frequently to the presidencies. Their control of the computers gives them an edge on information over their competitors.
If information is power, Americans should be uneasy about the amount of information the federal government is starting to file on its citizens in its blinking memory banks. There are, for example, the gigantic memory machines that the Internal Revenue Service is starting to use to check data from our tax returns against data accumulated about us from other sources, such as employers and banks. The computers also watch for unlikely patterns. Obviously these memory banks are useful tools for fair and efficient tax collecting. But what are the implications for two decades from now, in 1984? If future bureaucrats choose, they can build up so-called “cum,” or cumulative files, on each taxpayer over decades, and thus will have, instantly recallable, a vast amount of personal information about the living habits of every adult in the realm.
One computer maker, Bernard S. Benson, bluntly concedes that concentration of power in the form of accumulated information can be “catastrophically dangerous.” He suggests that individual privacy ultimately may be at the mercy of the man in a position to push the button that makes the machine remember. At an international conference on information processing sponsored by UNESCO in Paris, he reminded his colleagues that it was “high time” they started devoting part of their conferences to discussing how to insure that any new accomplishments will be beneficial to mankind.
Whatever the benefits, the marvelous new electronic devices with memories or ears or eyes are serving to push back the boundaries of each individual’s privacy. As we shall shortly see, the electronic eyes and ears are being put to a host of ingenious uses for the purpose of people-watching.
These five forces that are at work in the society
