The same technological advances that make computers and telephones better and cheaper also make it simpler and less expensive to eavesdrop on business competitors, spouses or just about anyone.
Whether more people are actually spying on one another is debatable, but people certainly are more concerned about it, said James Ross, president of Ross Engineering Inc., of Sterling, Va., which provides privacy-protection services and publishes a newsletter on the subject.
Ross recently spent a week presenting a course in electronic eavesdropping to employees of Ken Leb, who runs a communications business from his Skokie home.
Leb, who installs and repairs phone systems, said he has received so many customer questions about detecting electronic surveillance that he decided to get training for himself and his staff so they could serve what apparently is a growing market.
Ross, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, is a grandfatherly man given to blunt statements and folksy stories about his 17 years in the counterspy business.
For $20 or $30, Ross said, one can buy a radio transmitter/microphone smaller than a cigarette lighter from any consumer electronics store.
“You can toss one into a potted plant in someone’s office and hear everything that goes on there,” Ross said.
It costs about the same to buy a device that will pick up and transmit a person’s phone conversations. Indeed, eavesdropping gadgetry has become so popular that a chain of shops selling the devices goes by the name Spy Shops International Inc., headquartered in Miami.
Many new features built into today’s telephones actually enhance their usefulness for eavesdropping, although the phones’ designers didn’t intend it, Ross said.
“It used to be that phones had bells that made them ring,” he said. “But now they come with small speakers that chirp and chime. Well, it’s the simplest thing in the world to make a speaker into a microphone and use it to listen to what people are saying, even when the phone is on the hook and out of use.”
Another boon to spies, Ross said, is the automatic answering feature available on cellular phones, along with the ability to turn off the ringer.
“Suppose you’re in delicate negotiations with someone and you get to a point where the other side needs to talk among themselves,” Ross said. “You leave your briefcase cellular phone in the room and tell the other guys you’re going to the cafeteria for coffee and give them 30 minutes to talk privately.
“You leave the room, find a pay phone and call your own cellular phone, which doesn’t ring and answers automatically. Then you listen to every word being said, and when you return, you know exactly what their negotiating strategy will be.”
People who look for bugs and taps in a business shouldn’t expect their clients to be pleased if their search turns something up, Ross cautioned the novices gathered in Leb’s living room.
“There was one company that started having financial trouble because it was losing contracts to a competitor who kept underbidding them,” Ross said. “The security chief persuaded a dubious chief executive to bring me in to look for bugs.”
When Ross and the company security man found bugging equipment in a utility closet, they made a tape from the chief executive’s own office to demonstrate to the man that his conversations were not as private as he thought.
“The boss was really angry, and he fired his security chief,” Ross said. “Instead of praising him for being smart enough to figure out there was probably electronic eavesdropping and calling me in to find it, the executive was mad because somebody got past security to plant the bug.”
A lot of people become suspicious about electronic eavesdropping when business competitors start besting them consistently, as if they had inside information, Ross said.
But another source of suspicion, the sound of clicks or static on their phone line, is usually misplaced, he said.
“Anyone competent who taps your line won’t cause anything you can hear to tip you off,” he said.
One exception Ross recalls involved a client who spotted two men working at a phone pedestal near his home. He asked the men if his phone line was in there and they told him no, his line was attached to a unit some blocks away.
Later, the man noticed static on his line and asked Ross to investigate. Ross found a tap attached to the man’s line at the pedestal where he had seen the men working.
“But the screws weren’t tightened and the wires were loose and that’s why he heard static,” said Ross. “Evidently, he’d scared the guys as they were installing the tap, and they left before doing the job right.”
A competent counterspy can probably find most bugs and taps that the average business person might use in gathering information on a competitor, but it can be tedious and time-consuming to search for spy gadgets.
And even the best counterspy cannot and should not guarantee that an office is absolutely bug-free, Ross said.
“I tell clients that they have to look at this work the same as you look at going into surgery,” he said. “There is no guarantee that you’ll be cured, but you know that the better trained and more experienced your doctor is, the better your chances for a good outcome.”
Instead of guarantees, Ross provides clients with detailed written reports of what he does to look for bugs and what he found.
One reason he won’t guarantee that an office is free of surveillance is the possibility of a legal wiretap, Ross said. If a government agency gets a court order totap a phone, the phone company will provide the tap, and no amount of electronic line testing will spot it, he said.
“There are ways that legal taps can be discovered,” he said, “but you can get into trouble doing it.”
As telephone systems change over to the digital language of zeroes and ones common to computers, it will become more difficult to tap phone conversations, Ross said.
People who are really concerned about the privacy of their phone conversations can go beyond digital communications and get phones that encrypt conversations, making them all but impossible to bug, Ross said. Encryption systems can cost about $1,200 for each phone, he said.
Ross’ training course for Ken Leb and his employees consisted of lectures on technical electronics equipment sprinkled liberally with anecdotes and much hands-on training in planting bugs and then spotting them.
“This is really a lot more complex than I anticipated,” said Leb. “I really thought it would be a lot simpler than what it’s turned out to be. You’ve really got to get down on your hands and knees and work to look for taps.”
Despite the complexity, Leb said he still plans to add privacy protection to the services his business offers.
“I think there’s big business out there in this,” he said.
