Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 12, 1990 TAG: 9006120023
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CARL S. KAPLAN NEWSDAY
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
There's a black-leather attache case with hidden microphone and hideaway tape recorder - perfect for covertly taping conversations and promises that might otherwise be lost.
For women on the go: a recording purse that resembles a sleek designer bag. At $600, it can be used for documenting sexual harassment on the job or to help prove spouse abuse. "We originally built this at the request of a client who was referred to us by a divorce attorney," says Sklar, the president of Spy Tech. Pulling other gadgets off the shelves, the snoop maestro explains the uses of wiretap detectors, telephone-recording equipment, and something called the "Electronic Stethoscope," an under-$300, amplified hearing device that can detect faint sounds - and voices - behind walls.
"Let's go to covert video surveillance," the designer and vendor says cheerfully, pointing to a cuddly teddy bear. This $1,200 stuffed animal contains a tiny video camera that peeks through the belly button - good for monitoring baby sitters.
Once upon a time, espionage devices such as the all-seeing bear were the stuff of James Bond fantasies and, perhaps, a government or industrial spook's arsenal. Not any more. Selling for consumer use is the new trend in surveillance gear, creating by one estimate a $100 million industry - and a host of concerns about privacy.
"Maybe the '90s are going to be the spy decade," said Steve Brown, a buyer for The Sharper Image, whose catalog is expanding its spy gadgetry. "We're doing it because it's fun, different and [will] cause excitement in the stores."
Privacy advocates are excited, too, but for a different reason. They claim that although some surveillance equipment is against federal law, legal loopholes, lax enforcement and a new social acceptability for spying allow the proliferation of equipment to go unchecked. "When people talk about Big Brother, they mean the government. But Big Brother is not the government - it's each of us," said Rudolph Brewington, a privacy advocate who says he was bugged - electronically - by his spouse after she filed for divorce. "The James Bond syndrome . . . people think of [spy gadgets] as romantic, wonderful. But they are despicable," he said.
Professionals such as Sklar, taking advantage of lower prices for the sophisticated wares and popular interest in electronics, say they are marketing to upscale retail stores, glossy catalog companies and directly to shoppers and small-business owners.
For example, The Sharper Image will list three spy gadgets in its August catalog: the Electronic Stethoscope, a phone-tap defeater, and a wireless transmitter-receiver kit, for listening to sounds at a distance.
A particularly intrusive gadget is among those in Sklar's office: a seemingly conventional television set. "This TV watches you," he says. "It has a built-in video camera behind the speaker."
It works like this: If you think your spouse is cheating, bring the $1,500 set home as a gift, put it in the bedroom, then go away on business. Upon return, check the videotapes.
Demand for sophisticated audio and video surveillance devices is fueled by many factors, including yuppie toy lust, the desire to gain an advantage and high divorce rates - which promote spousal suspicion, according to experts.
Spy gadgets are "epidemic" among warring or litigating couples, said Maureen Gawler, a Maryland-based private investigator. "I see over and over, men and women using different types of bugging devices, including video surveillance . . . just to find things out, for legal blackmail. They want to know what their spouses are doing," she said.
Raoul Lionel Felder, a New York divorce attorney for Robin Givens and Nancy Capasso, said he shuns "slimy" information from amateur spouse spies. But Felder acknowledged that evidence gathered by illegal eavesdropping might be used by some lawyers. "It's never so crude as using illegal surveillance as the evidence," he said. "They work backward. A husband taps a phone and finds out his wife is committing adultery. He takes the tape and destroys it, then [hires someone] to watch the `Hotbed Hotel' " and gather legal evidence.
"The psychodynamics of it are, you gotta find out, punish, get the edge," Felder continued. "Many people get tap-happy, start tape recording their lawyer. Whenever I see a woman with a large pocketbook, I assume she's taping me."
There are other users, though. Sklar - who founded his firm in Miami four years ago with corporate accounts - said many of his clients are prudent professionals who wish to record oral agreements. He also caters to "people with problems."
"In today's society, with many parents working, the problem of abuse by baby sitters, nannies, is hitting the headlines," Sklar said. "That's generated a lot of interest" in video bugs.
By way of example, Sklar mentioned a notorious "video slapping" case. In 1989, a Chattanooga, Tenn.,couple, fearful that their baby sitter was abusing their 6-month-old baby, secretly videotaped her slapping the child. The sitter pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child-abuse charges, and a judge sentenced her to a year in jail after watching the tape.
The wave of surveillance gadgets also has created a market for response products. Suzanne Harper, vice president of Digitech Telecommunications Inc., a New York-based distributor of security wares to mail-order houses and retailers, said one of her most popular items is "Phone Guard," a $300 phone-tap detector and defeater. Her company also sells various other "bugging" detectors and telephone-voice scramblers - though experts said some "countermeasure" devices give consumers a false sense of security.
One impact of the trend is the creation of spy victims who - through accident or ingenuity - discover they have been bugged.
Brewington, 43, a Washington-based government worker, said he fell into the spy trap in Pittsburgh in 1987. "I was going through a very bitter divorce," he said. "One evening, under the pretext of reconciliation, my wife invited me into her bed . . . I was laying there holding her and she started hollering as if I was raping her. My antennae went up.
"Two weeks later, I discovered a voice-activated tape recorder in a closet upstairs," he said. "It had about 45 minutes of secretly recorded conversations of the two of us." Brewington sued, claiming his wife illegally recorded his conversations without his consent, in violation of Pennsylvania law. The case is pending.
The legality of selling and using some surveillance equipment is a "gray area," according to attorney Robert Ellis Smith, publisher of Privacy Journal in Washington, D.C.
For one thing, while federal law makes it a felony to sell, manufacture, advertise or possess an electronic device that's "primarily useful" for the surreptitious interception of wire or oral communications, there can be different interpretations as to what is "primarily useful," Smith said. Many devices, such as the Electronic Stethoscope, can have benign uses, such as checking for water leaks.
Besides regulating the sale of devices, federal law also restricts wiretapping and eavesdropping acts. But a loophole exists: "It's legal to bug people when you are a party to the conversation," Smith said. That doctrine, called "one-party consent," enables a person equipped with a briefcase recorder to secretly tape a conversation he's included in. Fourteen states, including Pennsylvania, California and Maryland, have adopted the more restrictive "two-party consent" rule, which requires that all members of a conversation give prior consent.
Covert video surveillance, meanwhile, is not covered by federal wiretapping statutes, Smith said. But general principles apply: A bugger can't criminally trespass to place a camera, or put a camera in an area where a victim has a reasonable expectation of privacy, such as a bathroom.
To help curb amateur spying, Rep. Ronald V. Dellums, D-Calif., last year introduced a bill that would amend the federal Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act by requiring two-party consent in non-law-enforcement cases. The bill also would require manufacturers to equip voice-activated tape recorders with beep tones to help prevent misuse.
But Douglas Tillett, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, acknowledged that evidence to prompt an investigation can be hard to get. "As a practical matter, if your neighbor wants to put a device on the wall and listen to you, there's almost no way the government can know that is happening," Tillett said.
The problem of victims not knowing they are victims has caused at least one privacy advocate to adopt a fatalistic attitude toward amateur spying. "I think it is dreadful, but I also think it is hopeless to try and stop it," said Herman Schwartz of American University's Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. "I'm afraid that given the pervasiveness of electronics stuff in society, it's just not feasible to enforce the law."
by CNB