What do wiretaps look like

More often, though, when business is dull they pick up calls from restaurants, poolrooms, and other places which they suspect may be criminal hangouts. Professional wire-tappers have learned how to work quietly.

Given the proper apparatus, almost anyone could tap a telephone wire. A simple tap involves scraping the insulation from a segment of the two wires required to make a telephone circuit. A receiver is attached to the exposed portions with metal clips and extension wires.

The tapper thus is in the position of a gossip silently cutting in on a rural party line. Schultz have necessitated many refinements in technique. New York is the centre of wire-tapping activity, at least in this country.

In one instance, while Dewey wire-workers were listening in on the bakery racket, they accidentally picked up a conversation bearing upon a case entirely outside their province. They turned the information over to Special Prosecutor Todd, who was handling that matter, and he used it in securing the conviction of the Drukman murderers in Brooklyn.

A hint of further activity by Dewey wire men has come out in the case of Jimmy Hines, the Tammany leader accused of having conspired with Dutch Schultz, Dixie Davis, and George Weinberg to establish lotteries in New York. With customary legalistic caution, however, he refused to venture a guess as to who might have ordered this tapping, though he did refer significantly to a statement made by Mr.

Later in the arraignment proceedings Mr. Stolen conversations thus can be preserved and played back when the occasion requires it. A Speak-O-Phone with recording attachment costs about five hundred dollars. They cut in everywhere. Just before the ransom money was passed, as they were listening on Dr.

They were stunned when their man emerged. It was Lindbergh. Wire-tapping got its start in New York in when a former telephone worker who had joined the city police suggested that it might be a good idea to listen in on wires used by criminals. William L.

Strong, who was Mayor at the time, gave the project his blessing and for years after that wiretapping flourished secretly. Lines were usually tapped right in the cellar of the house or at an outside wall box.

There was an uproar when people got wind of the prevalence of wiretapping. An investigation of public utilities in called attention to it. Those, of course, were war days and eavesdropping of all kinds was widely encouraged. The government was tapping thousands of lines. A complete central-office switchboard had been set up in the New York Custom House, with taps running into it from all parts of the city. Every time a suspected alien lifted his receiver a light showed on this board and a stenographer, with headset clamped on, took a record of the conversation.

Drawing itself up to its corporate height, it assumed a haughty manner toward detectives and since that time the company officially has refused to assist in tapping. To make matters worse, the wiring system grew more and more complicated. Today there are nearly 1,, telephones in the city, and even an experienced wire-tapper would be unable to find a particular circuit if he did not know the right people in strategic telephone posts.

That is why most police wire-tappers, following the precedent of the man who introduced the science in the department, are former employees of the Telephone Company. They have not only the background of an inside view of the system, but friends in the organization upon whom they count for surreptitious assistance. Moreover, an experienced wire-tapper who is familiar with the trade terms used by Telephone Company workers is able to pose convincingly as an employee when he wants to learn the location of a particular set of wires.

With the necessary information he can go out, find the circuit, make his tap, run his extension wires to an empty flat or office, and prepare to listen. Wire-tappers are seldom caught at their work. Detectives are aware of this routine and, when the five-day period has expired hook right in again. Foreign noises on the line are more apt to be caused by worn-off insulation, dampness in the cables, or some other natural disarrangement. Wherever possible, he fastens the wires of his instrument to nut-and-washer connections found in panel boxes, the terminals from which extension lines are run.

Such connections are practically swing-proof. Police wire-tappers are a peculiar, clannish breed, jealous of the good name of their calling. They bridle at the slightest implication that their trade is not altogether manly and sporting.

Swayze when, as general counsel for the Telephone Company, he condoned the practice during the wartime investigation. Some bugs transmit their signal to an external listening post. Video cameras can also be a type of bug.

Video cameras can be as small as a dime, but you usually do not see the actual camera. What you see is the lens, or the hole it sees through. Most wireless cameras are powered by a 9-volt battery, so the battery is often larger than the camera. While some cameras can easily be found, others are so cleverly hidden that they can only be found via a thorough search. Although video cameras can be hard-wired, they usually are wireless. They are frequently installed in the bathroom or bedroom.

All hidden video cameras have a watching post with a monitor or recorder. If the camera is hard-wired, you can simply follow the wires. Use a flashlight to find hidden video camera lenses. Every eavesdropping device has a power source. Wiretaps sometimes use the direct current that is already in the telephone line or sometimes they use a battery as the power source.

Bugs also have a power source. They use either a battery, or the house wiring or vehicle wiring. This is why, when checking a vehicle for bugs, always look at the battery first. Any strange wire attached to the battery should be followed.

Knowing that bugs, wiretaps, and GPS units need a power source is very important, because you sometimes find the power source before you find the listening device. Often, such as in a 9-volt battery, the battery is larger than the bug. When looking for GPS units, search the entire vehicle including the glove compartment, under the dashboard, under the seats, the bumper, under the belly of the car. GPS units are often enclosed in a black plastic box attached by magnets underneath the car.

In homes, most bugging is pretty simplistic. Radio Shack has an inexpensive phone-recording device that can be attached to a telephone line and recorder to record both sides of the conversation on any phone in the house that is on the same line. Some electronic eavesdropping equipment is so simple that it can be put in place in seconds. For instance, a voice-activated recorder can be dropped in a plant or behind furniture.

Then, the next time your ex-spouse picks up the kids for his visitation, he can quickly retrieve it. Inspect toys such as teddy bears that your spouse bought for your children. Look for u nknown cell phones. Cell phones are the biggest bugging devices used today. You can purchase them on the Internet for a few hundred dollars. They do not ring when they are called. The caller can then listen in to all the sounds in the room. Then, the tapper plugs the other end of the wire into the phone and attaches the exposed wires to an accessible, exposed point on the outside phone line.

With this connection, the wiretapper can use the subject's line in all of the ways the subject uses it. The wiretapper can hear calls and make calls. Most wiretappers will disable the tap's microphone, however, so it works only as a listening device.

Otherwise, the subject would hear the tapper's breathing and be alerted to the wiretap. This sort of wiretap is easy to install, but it has some major drawbacks if you're a spy. First of all, a spy would have to know when the subject is going to use the phone so he or she could be there for the call. Second, a spy would have to stay with the wiretap in order to hear what's going on.

Obviously, it's quite difficult to predict when somebody's going to pick up the phone, and hanging around a phone company utility box is not the most covert eavesdropping strategy. For these reasons, spies will typically use more sophisticated wiretapping technology to eavesdrop on a subject.

In the next section, we'll look at the main types of wiretapping equipment to see how spies listen in without blowing their cover. In the last section, we saw that the simplest wiretap is a standard telephone hooked into the wires of the outside phone line. The main problem with this system is that the spy has to stay with the phone in order to hear the subject's conversation. There are several tapping systems that get around this problem.

The simplest solution is to hook up some sort of recorder to the telephone line. This works just like your answering machine -- it receives the electrical signal from the phone line and encodes it as magnetic pulses on audio tape. A spy can do this fairly easily with an ordinary tape recorder and some creative wiring. The only problem here is that the spy has to keep the tape recording constantly to pick up any conversations.

Since most cassettes only have 30 or 45 minutes of tape on either side, this solution isn't much better than the basic wiretap. To make it functional, the spy needs a component that will start the recorder only when the subject picks up the phone. Voice-activated recorders , intended for dictation use, serve this function quite well. As soon as people start talking on the line, the recorder starts up. When the line is dead, it turns off again. Even with this pick-up system, the tape will run out fairly quickly, so the spy will have to keep returning to the wiretap to replace the cassette.

In order to stay concealed, spies need a way to access the recorded information from a remote location. The solution is to install a bug. A bug is a device that receives audio information and broadcasts it through the air, usually via radio waves. Some bugs have tiny microphones that pick up sound waves directly. Just as in any microphone, this sound is represented by an electrical current. In a bug, the current runs to a radio transmitter , which transmits a signal that varies with the current.

The spy sets up a nearby radio receiver that picks up this signal and sends it to a speaker or encodes it on a tape.

A bug with a microphone can pick up any sound in a room, whether the person is talking on the phone or not. But a typical wiretapping bug doesn't need its own microphone, since the phone already has one. If the spy hooks the bug up anywhere along the phone line, it receives the electrical current directly.

Often, the spy will hook the bug up to the wires that are actually inside the phone. Since people very rarely look inside their phones, this can be an excellent hiding spot. Of course, if somebody is searching for a wiretap, the spy will be uncovered very quickly. This is the best sort of wiretap for most spies. Bugs are so small that the subject is unlikely to discover them, and once they are installed, the spy doesn't have to return to the scene of the crime to keep them running.

All of the complicated recording equipment can be kept away from the phone lines, in a concealed location. But since the radio receiver has to be within range of the transmitter, the spy must find a concealed spot near the wiretap.

The traditional receiving spot is a van parked outside the subject's home. Of course, hanging out in a van and listening to someone's phone conversations is completely illegal for a civilian. But the law for the government is a little murkier. In the next section, we'll look at the history of government wiretapping and find out about the issues involved in wiretapping today. Even in the earliest days of telephones and telegraphs, people were concerned about wiretapping. In the s, before the modern telephone was even invented, many state courts in the United States enacted statutes that prohibited anybody from listening in on telegraph communication.

By the s, the modern telephone was in widespread use -- and so was wiretapping. From that time on, it has been illegal in the United States for an unauthorized person to listen in on somebody else's private phone conversation.

In fact, it is even illegal to record your own phone conversation if the person on the other end is not aware that you're recording it. Historically, the law has not been as strict for the government.