Eavesdropping bugs are as difficult to detect as skin parasites. As tiny as a match head, they can be put in pens that write, disguised as aspirin tablets or as the olive in a martini, worn as an earring, or even embedded under the surface of the skin. They can pick up a whisper in a room and transmit the voice a quarter of a mile [.4 km] away.

And these bugs can be harder to exterminate than their pesky little namesakes!

Private! Keep Out! No Trespassing!

MAN goes to great lengths to protect his privacy. Some will build high walls around their domain to ensure their privacy. Others will situate their homes on mountaintops or in deep forests or miles off main roads in order to be left alone. City dwellers may rent apartments on the highest floors, have unlisted telephone numbers, and conceal identities by using aliases or by wearing disguises.

Privacy means different things to different people. A wife may wish time alone from her husband. Husbands, too, at times may insist on their own “time and space.” Even young children desire their privacy. Often a room of their own represents a haven of privacy.

There are those who would put a tap on your telephone and listen to your most private and intimate conversations in your home or office. Your every move can be monitored in locker rooms of schools, factories, and offices and recorded on videotape. By the use of laser beams aimed at the outside of your windowpanes, your conversations within can be picked up and recorded by eavesdroppers down the street. Computers are now being used to monitor your activities in the workplace. What you write on your office typewriter may now be read on a monitor miles away by those who would hold against you the things you write. Neither is the cover of darkness a guarantee of privacy. With cameras that function effectively in the dark, your every move can be tracked while you walk around outside at night. If you resent your spouse opening the mail addressed to you, what would be your reaction to those who would trespass on your privacy by reading your mail without opening it?

You may resent being asked to take a lie-detector test in order to secure employment. But a similar test may be given you across the desk by an interviewer​—without your being aware of it—​through the use of a voice analyzer, which supposedly can recognize if you are not telling the truth.

Businesses and giant corporations are losing top secrets through an invasion of privacy by unscrupulous competitors. As a result of high-tech surveillance systems developed in recent years, nations and world powers find it almost impossible not to have their national privacy invaded by other nations worlds away. Spy-in-the-sky satellites equipped with high-resolution cameras can photograph from outer space as small a thing as a baseball and can identify a man in a crowd merely by the shape of his beard.

It is obvious that man’s privacy, “the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men,” could rapidly be a freedom in jeopardy, as the next article will show.

Electronic Eavesdropping​—It Is So Easy!

WHEN is a bug not a bug? Today the world is rapidly becoming familiar with the term “bug.” The growing popularity of the term, however, is not an inordinate concern and interest in those pesky little insects that creep and crawl into our homes or onto our clothes. A dictionary of any ancient vintage may clearly define “bug” as one of these creatures. Only the newer dictionaries, however, may define “bug” as being an eavesdropping device, a tiny microphone “hidden to record conversation secretly.” Many of those who have been so infested have found extermination of them costly indeed.

The recent development and miniaturization of electronic components have made these eavesdropping bugs often as difficult to detect as skin parasites. As tiny as a match head, these devices can be put in pens that write, concealed in cigarettes and cigars, inserted in tiny holes in walls or ceilings, and even embedded under the surface of the skin. They have been disguised as an aspirin tablet or a martini olive. Others have been worn as earrings.

Behind light-switch plates, in telephones, and in the ground-wire openings of electric outlets are more likely places to hide these electronic eavesdroppers. These latter ones are called parasite bugs because they obtain their ability to transmit from electrical power rather than short-lived batteries. When telephones are bugged, they can be made to transmit voices whether the phone is in use or not. Thus the technology to invade your privacy by means of electronic surveillance has been developed and established. Where to hide such equipment depends merely on the wild imagination of the eavesdropper.

Although the sale and use of various types of electronic eavesdropping devices are prohibited by law in many states and countries, including the United States, they are readily available for those who would surreptitiously invade your privacy. They are easy to buy from a variety of shops, electronic stores, and mail-order houses. A simple bug the size of a postage stamp, one that operates on a standard nine-volt battery and that can transmit voices to a receiver 400 feet [120 m] away, retails for as little as $35.00 (U.S.). For about the same price, a Japanese company retails a more powerful transmitter that is the size of a fingernail and that has a broadcast range of a thousand feet [300 m].

Some of the devices, however, are not built by the manufacturers as bugs. For example, at a retail price of a mere $24.95, a nationwide electronic-store chain in the United States sells a wireless room-monitoring system for a child’s room. Just plug it into an electrical outlet, and sounds can be transmitted from one part of the house to the other. Others are simple wireless microphones smaller than a cigarette pack. These have legitimate uses, but in the wrong hands they can be reduced in size and concealed in a very tiny space.

Bugs are easy to buy, and they are almost as easy to build. With as few as nine tiny components, costing less than $10.00 (U.S.), a person with an elementary knowledge of electronics can build a wireless device that can pick up a whisper in a room and transmit the voice a fourth of a mile [.4 km] away.

The most prevalent means of eavesdropping is by the use of telephone wiretaps. The subject’s phone need not be seen for this to be accomplished. If, for example, the target’s phone was on the tenth floor of an office building or in an apartment, a wiretap may be placed on the subject’s phone from the phone’s trunk line in the basement. Voice-activated tape recorders placed by illegal wiretappers have been found under homes. When the phone is lifted for use, conversations are taped. Posing as a telephone repairman, a person often finds it easy to gain access to the victim’s phone line.

Under most circumstances and in many countries this form of eavesdropping is illegal. Yet, according to one expert whose business it is to find and remove bugs and phone taps, “Twenty-five percent of our testing results in identifying a wiretap.” Since bugging is considered widespread in the business world, executives of large corporations are cautioned by another expert, “Beware of any gifts that plug into the wall.” Your electric clock or radio could have a bug in it. It could take an expert with expensive equipment to find it. Why, though, this growing infestation of electronic bugs?

Is Your Privacy in Jeopardy?

IT CANNOT be known how the last half of this 20th century would have been affected had certain crucial events been known well in advance​—the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 by Japan; where Adolf Hitler would strike next in Europe; if Hitler had known that Britain, France, and the United States would enter the war; the intentions of Fidel Castro in Cuba after overthrowing its ruling power in 1959; the intentions of the rulers in northern Korea in June 1950 and those in North Vietnam in 1957, to name a few. Because these schemes were kept secret, the world was caught by surprise.

History has shown that nations do not like surprises from other nations. Since the electronic technology is now available to eavesdrop on the intentions of other powers and keep costly surprises to a minimum, a clandestine surveillance war is being waged by the majority of nations to spy on one another. It is reported that “53 lesser world governments” daily sweep their government offices with expensive detecting devices that can locate hidden listening bugs.

As far back as 1952, it was claimed that the American embassy in Moscow was being eavesdropped on by means of an unusual type of bug planted inside the American Seal located behind the ambassador’s desk. In 1985, U.S. officials reported that the Soviets had planted a large number of bugged typewriters in the U.S. embassy in Moscow.

The Russians, for their part, say that they have found many electronic bugs. These are said to include a brick wired with a transmitter, discovered at the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. Also, their UN representative claims that a socket for his master television antenna was bugged. So the spying continues on an international scale.

Spying in the Workplace

“One gets the feeling that it’s open season on human privacy,” lamented one lawyer. “What I see is a horror,” commented another. “We have become a nation of spies.” In truth, we have become a world of spies. The swift advance of communication technology​—computers, miniature radio transmitters, telephone linkage via microwave and satellites—​has contributed to making it so. The new technology has outpaced the laws protecting individual and corporate privacy.

For example, by installing additional computer software on an already existing computer system, employers can now monitor practically every move a user of video-display terminals makes​—secretaries, airline reservation clerks, postal workers, and those who work at grocery checkout counters. The list is endless. Experts estimate that more than 13 million Americans alone who work on such terminals are monitored, and the number is growing. By the year 2000, they speculate, there will be 30 million to 40 million video-display terminal users, and as many as 50 to 75 percent of them will be monitored. As the system becomes more sophisticated, says the magazine U.S.News & World Report, “even engineers, accountants and doctors are expected to face electronic scrutiny.”

Already there is deep resentment between management and labor over the loss of personal privacy due to this electronic eavesdropping. One manufacturer of the software that makes this surveillance possible says: “It permits total surveillance of all users, all of the time.” Reports coming out of the workplace indicate that the boast is not an idle one. “I can’t even go to the bathroom without being watched,” complained one telephone operator. Said a director of a national association of workingwomen, “Many employer practices are an outrageous invasion of privacy.” “You’re a nervous wreck. The stress is incredible,” said another enraged worker. “It’s a very oppressive way to work. To be plugged into that boob tube and not be able to move gets under your skin sometimes,” adds another. Is it any wonder when the “boob tube” you have been working with turns on you, berating you with the flashing words, “You’re not working as fast as the person next to you.” Is privacy in the workplace slipping through labor’s fingers?

Corporate Spying

All is not serene with corporate management either. One tiny miniature microphone concealed in its office or conference room can mean the difference between millions of dollars coming in their tills or perhaps massive layoffs. When a major defense contractor lost a two-hundred-million-dollar contract to a rival firm by just a few thousand dollars, a debugging team was called in. A sweep revealed a planted microphone concealed in the ceiling of the conference room. Every word was picked up by a tape recorder in the men’s room down the hall.

In the corporate world, electronic spying has become so prevalent that it has been estimated that 100,000 bugs have been planted in the last five years by rival companies to eavesdrop on everything from contract bids, trade secrets, and new products to secret labor negotiations. It is reported that “hundreds of Fortune 500 companies” daily sweep their offices and conference rooms with spy-detecting equipment. “I think there is a real paranoia in corporations today,” observed the vice president of a large New York debugging firm, “a feeling that there’s no place that’s safe.”

Are you, as a private citizen with little to do with the corporate world or government, likely to have your privacy invaded by some form of surveillance system? Here are some facts to consider. Reports indicate that seven out of ten instances where illegal wiretaps were discovered involved private parties. Prevalent among these were situations within families, usually marital discord. Many times, private investigators were hired to gather evidence of adultery, proof of being an unfit parent, or some evidence of betrayal. According to one report, “Eighty per cent of the devices that telephone companies discover each year are in residences.”

Then, too, one writer said you may be eavesdropped on by a telephone company itself, and he characterized telephone companies as “the biggest offenders of telephone privacy.” Said one former CIA analyst: “Telephone cops, during the only five-year period for which statistics are available, listened in without a single warrant on 1.8 million telephone conversations, ostensibly for the purpose of catching toll cheats.” These eavesdroppers, he notes, had a close relationship with local, state, and federal police officers with whom they sometimes exchanged information.

There are also the law-enforcement agencies themselves. Either with or without a warrant, your phone may be tapped. It was discovered that police in one U.S. city had illegally wiretapped more than 3,000 people in just a few years. There have been similar accusations of illegal wiretapping by police in many other cities. Said one writer, “It wasn’t just bigshots or radicals or crooks who were tapped, but ordinary people.” It was lamented that even the Lutheran Church was among those wiretapped. Other churches have also come under electronic scrutiny.

Finally, one sociology professor made this far-reaching observation: “With a different government and a more intolerant public, the same [eavesdropping] devices could easily be used against those of the ‘wrong’ political ideology, ethnic groups, religious minorities, or those with lifestyles that offend the majority.”

If you are among those who treasure your privacy, who like to be left alone, enjoy it now. There are many who believe it is an endangered freedom.

[Picture on page 7]

Her computer screen says, “You are not doing as much as your fellow workers”

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Boardroom meetings are sometimes bugged