Eavesdropping may not be nice, but it gets niftier all the time. From gleaming electronics factories and grubby back-street workshops has come an ever-subtler array of "surveillance instruments" to penetrate the individual's privacy. The devices are now so easy to plant and so hard to detect that their likely victims—lovers or diplomats, criminals or key executives—can seldom be wholly sure any more that confidential conversations are not being overheard or recorded. Private eyes have become private ears, and they have never been more prosperous. They snoop with "bugs" hidden in hatbands or ballpoint pens. They wire executive suites, washrooms, bedrooms. They tail cars, listening from a safe distance to every word spoken inside them.
Many police forces have elaborate electronic departments. Clandestine eavesdropping has featured increasingly in big-time legal battles, including the Bobby Baker hearings in Washington and Frank Sinatra Jr.'s kidnaping case. Not too unhappily, Andrew J. Palermo, chief investigator for Boston's Central Secret Service Bureau, allows: "Nobody is safe anywhere."
Scientific snooping is not new, but it has been virtually transformed in the past decade by the transistor and its relatives, which can be made almost invisibly minute. A practical radio transmitter with battery and microphone today may be as small as a lump of sugar and yet powerful enough to send a message several hundred feet.
Anything for Anyone. Thanks to the cold war, corporate rivalries and Big Crime—not to mention old-fashioned marital jealousy—curiosity has built a fat-cat industry. The Federal Government alone is believed to buy about $20 million worth of bugging gear a year. Moreover, this total does not include all purchases by the bug-infested CIA, which likes to shop through dummy agencies. No manufacturer admits selling to hoods or pleasure snoopers, but most of them believe that their competitors do. Says Fred East, Los Angeles County district attorney's investigator: "Anyone can buy any kind of bugging device if he's got the money."
The classic snooping device is the tap, which diverts some of the current flowing in the wire of a telephone. No direct connection with the wires is needed; a small induction coil placed ,beside them repeats fluctuations of the current, which an amplifier and earphones turn into intelligible sounds. Though highly sophisticated and still widely used, the wiretap has one big practical drawback. It has to have a wire leading to the investigator or his tape recorder, thus risking his detection by a trained countersnooper.
Antennas in Bushes. Bugs, the small, easily hidden radio transmitters favored by most supersnoopers, are much safer. Usually they have a battery, a microphone to pick up sound waves, and FM circuitry, and they commonly broadcast on 50-100 megacycles, penetrating walls and other obstructions. Their range may be half a mile or a few feet. The electronic eavesdropper, who may be a blackmailer, a divorce detective or an FBI agent, sets up his ultrasensitive receiver in a rented room or a car parked close enough so that bugged voices come through loud and clear.