Spies’ Eyes and Ears Go Public

The sunglasses are equipped with a fiber-optic video camera. The umbrella is bulletproof. The baseball cap repels bullets and knives. The shirt button is actually a surveillance microphone. The pen pulled from a breast pocket activates a tiny tape recorder.

It’s all available at your local spy shop.

Technologically advanced surveillance and anti-bugging gadgetry, once limited to military and law enforcement personnel, has gone civilian. Specialty shops in Los Angeles say business has never been better. One of the largest international chains, CCS International Ltd., says sales to private individuals rose 30% to 35% last year.

“It’s the Linda Tripps of this world that everyone got nervous about,” said Marsha Pearl, director of marketing for CCS, alluding to 1998 revelations that Tripp covertly tape-recorded telephone conversations with Monica Lewinsky. “It made people very much aware of their vulnerability. Half of America thought, ‘What am I saying on the phone that’s going to be damaging to me?’ ”

What we’re seeing, some say, is the mainstream evolution of the paint-it-blue syndrome, named after the cycle in which military gear, usually manufactured in shades of green, was painted blue and marketed to law enforcement agencies.

So devices designed for espionage, such as night-vision goggles, are now toys for movie stars and moguls. Disguised cameras, hidden in teddy bears and plants, are available for parents who worry about their nanny. Tiny cameras, triggered by motion detectors, now tell wealthy Angelenos who’s keying their car or stealing their newspaper.

In many states, including California, the law does not specifically address whether hidden cameras violate privacy rights. The California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that hidden cameras in the hands of journalists may be invasive. However, the ruling was focused strictly on the news-gathering process; it would not apply to hidden cameras that an employer might use on an employee or in a home, legal experts said. While the law does prohibit civilians’ tapping telephones, there are gray areas about other types of surveillance.

Picking Up on Paranoia

In the pages of spy catalogs, on Web sites and on the shelves of specialty shops, the paranoia of popular high-tech movies like “Matrix” and “Enemy of the State” bleeds into everyday life.

You can purchase a microcamera built into a watch for $395 or a digital voice changer that makes your voice unrecognizable ($300 and up). There are theft-proof briefcases that will punish a would-be robber by triggering a shock of 100,000 volts in the case’s handle. The $795 case lets you zap the thief from as far away as 200 feet.

“Budget and imagination are the only limits,” said Erik Pliner, manager of Counter Spy Shop in Beverly Hills, which competes with three other stores in the Los Angeles area.

Many spy stores cater to businesses concerned about theft or industrial espionage. A Malibu restaurant, for instance, recently solved a problem of money disappearing from a safe by installing a hidden camera.

Much of the gear feeds off concerns--in the workplace and the home--that the people in your immediate environment are untrustworthy. A $900 desktop pen set, for instance, alerts its owner if a concealed bug is transmitting the conversation. (The average room, by one industry estimate, contains 115 possible locations for eavesdropping devices.)

Counter Spy Shop also carries the $2,900 “Truth Phone,” a telephone, microcassette recorder and lie detector all rolled into one. It looks like a normal phone, but it’s equipped with “voice stress analysis,” which covertly analyses a person’s voice for “sub-audible microtremors.”

At Quark, a Manhattan-based spy store, a sign in one display reads: “They may be your employees, but who do they really work for?” (U.S. companies lose $200 billion a year to counterfeiting and more to thefts of merchandise and ideas, according to the International Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition.)

“In most cases, people don’t know how vulnerable they are--I can intercept your fax or computer data and you’ll never know,” said Gregg Graison, vice president of Quark. “If I had five minutes in your computer, I could put in an intercept product and I’d receive everything. Or 30 feet from the monitor, I can get what’s on the screen.”

Spying is human, some experts note. The Bible, after all, tells of Moses sending spies into Canaan. And now, with technological progress, surveillance gear has become cheaper, smaller and easier to use.

“We no longer have to peek through keyholes or listen from the kitchen,” said psychologist Jeffrey Hutter, who teaches about social and cultural issues at UCLA Extension. “We can spy more efficiently and anonymously than ever before.”

At Spy Tech Agency in West Hollywood, the phone system plays the James Bond theme song for customers on hold. For a woman being sexually harassed at work, salesman Jei Wheeler suggested a black halter top with a hidden tape recorder.

Wheeler, clad on this day in jeans and a yellow T-shirt, wears his brown hair pulled back in a Steven Seagal ponytail. Ask him what kind of equipment he keeps at his own home and he deadpans: “I could tell you but I’d have to kill you.”

“I was in government,” he says enigmatically when you ask him about his background. Which part? “I can’t disclose that.” Shtick? Reality? Like the clocks disguising hidden cameras, it’s difficult to tell.

Surveillance cameras have become so prevalent in public places that billboards advertising fashions by Kenneth Cole caution: “You are on a video camera an average of 10 times a day. Are you dressed for it?”

Miniature video cameras, or “sneaky peakies,” with lens openings no bigger than a lentil, are built into teddy bears, plants, ties, sprinkler heads, thermostats--virtually any object. Such cameras are readily available at places like Spy Tech, Counter Spy Shop and the Privacy Connection, which bills itself as a “one-stop spy shop” in Woodland Hills.

Concerned about a drop in his 15-year-old son’s grades, Rick Hornwood, a co-owner of Privacy Connection, started taping his home phone. Eavesdropping on conversations, Hornwood found nothing nefarious. (He learned that his son had decided to ease up on his studies because he was about to change schools.) In California, it is illegal to record calls unless all those using the phone have been informed that they are being taped. But Hornwood said he had previously warned his son that he might one day resort to taping his phone.

“It’s a parent’s responsibility to monitor his kids and make sure they’re going in the right direction,” said Hornwood, a single father.

Most customers, however, worry more about their child’s caregiver--a fear that became immortalized by the specter of British au pair Louise Woodward, who was convicted of manslaughter of the infant she had been tending in Boston. In that case, there was no videotape available. But parents have sought clandestine video cameras for assurance that their nanny is not mistreating their baby.

Abuse of Children Caught on Tape

Not surprisingly, customers are reluctant to be interviewed about their use of spy products. One who doesn’t mind talking is Tony Hernandez of Woodland Hills, who last month started work as a salesman at the Counter Spy Shop.

The way Hernandez tells it, four years ago he hired a live-in nanny for his then-2-year-old daughter, Ariana. As an account executive, he was traveling extensively and his girlfriend had a long commute. The nanny was a religious woman with past experience.

After a year, Hernandez said, he suspected something was wrong. When the sister of his girlfriend dropped off her own son to be watched by Hernandez’s nanny, the toddler screamed and cried.

Hernandez installed a small camera that monitored his townhouse. As soon as his car pulled away, the nanny whom he’d likened to Mother Teresa’s helper was transformed into a shrew who yanked his daughter’s hair, verbally abused both children, telling them they were ugly and bad, and left them unattended for hours, he said. The children were afraid to leave the couch, he said.

“I couldn’t believe it was the same person,” said Hernandez, who fired the nanny. His girlfriend’s parents now tend his daughter.

Hernandez later became a sales manager involved with regional banking. Then he saw an ad for a job at the Counter Spy Shop and he was lured by his infatuation with surveillance technology and a desire for a shorter commute.

It’s cases like his, in which clandestine surveillance is used in the home, that prompt a host of questions about privacy which are both legal and ethical, experts say.

Although the law is clear about taping phone calls, surveillance cameras pose more of a problem because most states have not passed laws explicitly addressing video surveillance, said Robert Ellis Smith, editor of the Privacy Journal, a monthly newsletter.

“It means we’re really vulnerable,” said Smith, who cited the growing number of abuses, including a case involving an Ohio school assistant principal who used a hidden camera to take pictures of cheerleaders changing their clothes. Other incidents include a landlord who installed a camera in a couple’s bedroom and an employer who put a camera in a workplace bathroom, pointed toward the sinks, in an effort to film drug deals.

Michigan specifically prohibits surveillance in places that individuals can reasonably expect to be private, like a locker room. Connecticut imposes restrictions on the workplace and Maryland has rules about hidden cameras in residences, Smith said.

California law affords citizens a general expectation of privacy but does not specifically address clandestine video surveillance, experts say. David Sobel, general counsel for the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, said he believes federal privacy law, updated more than a decade ago to cover e-mail and electronic communication, once again needs review. People should at least be required to inform others when a surveillance camera is being used, he said.

“There’s a notion that a man’s home is his castle, [and that] if your neighbor doesn’t like being surreptitiously monitored, that’s too bad,” Sobel said. “There’s a lack of meaningful protection, legal protection, for people.”

At Los Angeles-area spy equipment stores, employees and owners alike say they inform customers about laws, fully aware that that does not ensure the laws will be obeyed.

“What they do when they get home, I don’t know,” said Jason Allami of SPI in Thousand Oaks. “Do they honor the law? I suspect not.”