Secret Agent Plan of Action at Laguna Shop

Get ready to break out the credit card, spy fans.

Movie posters highlighting James Bond’s greatest moments hang along the walls of Eye Witness, a new “spy shop” in Laguna Beach that sells surveillance gadgets for serious and amateur snoops.

Launched this summer by private investigators Charles Perez and Tom Turner, the store offers an array of technological toys, from fingerprint kits and discrete motion sensors to books telling how to build microelectronic devices. Its specialty, however, is tiny video cameras hidden in the most mundane objects--wristwatches, pagers, lamps, clocks, radios.

Over the past couple years, clandestine recorders have been creating a buzz among the public. The case of the Boston au pair Louise Woodward boosted sales of “nanny cams,” or tiny video cameras concealed inside teddy bears and other innocuous objects. And security experts have noticed a boom in their surveillance business ever since Linda Tripp’s clandestine tapes of her conversations with Monica Lewinsky hit the news.

Though some civil libertarians fear the proliferation of surveillance equipment may erode privacy laws, the duo at Eye Witness note that strict laws already exist to prohibit the sale of wireless covert audio devices to the public.

“People have become very concerned about watching over their loved ones, even when they can’t physically be standing in the room,” Perez said. “These aren’t toys. We think these cameras help people keep their peace of mind.”

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.