Real Private Investigators helping you take care of your real problems yourself!
Section V
The citizen has only three options here
Option 1: A careful physical search of the premises may expose a listening device. You must carefully examine curtains top to bottom, window sills, tops of ceiling fans, all sides of furniture, behind framed hanging artwork, inside lamps and their shades, inside vases, on top of shelves, behind books stored on shelves, under beds, behind headboards or beds and on and on. Hopefully you get the idea.
What you are looking for is usually a small rectangular device that can be 1/2 inch by 1 inch to 1 inch by 2 inches with what appears to be an electric wire about 1 or 2 feet long that is the antenna. This particular device would be a wireless transmitter.
Another thing you are looking for would be any small hole in a wall or ceiling. Above a ceiling is a good place. Drop type ceilings are excellent places for both cameras and listening devices and are easily checked. Simply lift up a panel, scan all areas with a good flashlight and any unusual devices should be easily detected. If any holes are detected in walls, simply examine what is behind the wall. The most common types of devices should be pretty easily detected with the search. Pay attention to new clocks, lamps, artwork, flower arrangements and smoke alarms. These objects can contain either cameras or listening devices. Due to the advances in recording devices using digital recorders, they are becoming smaller, more compact and more difficult to locate, but not impossible to do yourself. It should be mentioned at this point that a good, bright, concentrated flashlight beam when pointed at a camera lens causes the lens to reflect back toward you. Test this with a camcorder to see what it looks like so you will know what to look for.
If you talk to a professional in counter measures, he may take exception to my statement that these devices can be easily found. The truth is that unless a government agency or law enforcement is looking at you and their technical people placed the devices, they are not going to be embedded in walls, furniture or woodwork where walls are re-plastered and metallic paint becomes the antenna. These devices will be the type that can be placed quickly without disturbing the location a great deal and if you are careful in your search you stand a better than average chance of finding them.
Cameras come in all shapes and sizes and can be placed in virtually any household item. We've discussed the types of devices to look for and there is another tell tale sign and that is the video cable that runs from the camera to
The Do It Yourself Detective
the television monitor or the recording device. If you examine that new painting, vase, smoke detector or clock and there is a power cable and a video cable running from it, guess what? It's probably a good idea not to do anything in front of that device that you wouldn't want someone else to see you do. The cameras that have wires are usually less expensive, but don't give off transmitting signals and the operative doesn't have to worry about batteries.
There are cameras that are battery powered and use wireless transmitters. These are quite expensive and require a receiver for the transmitter. They must have an antenna for wireless cameras as well as all the other devices mentioned in this website, the foundation for finding them is the physical search.
There are electronic counter measure services that can help with the general location of a device, but even professionals are reduced to the same physical search of the premises. If an electronic search indicates a device you may, in the most serious cases, have to tear down a wall to retrieve it.
