Do-It-Yourself Espionage

By Richard Lacayo

Pssst. Want a briefcase that conceals a tiny video camera? How about a mini tape recorder that has a pinhead microphone disguised as a tie tack? You don't have to buy this stuff in a back alley. Just head over to your local CCS Counter Spy Shop, a chain with retail outlets in New York City, Houston, Miami and Washington that specializes in high-tech snooping gear. According to Tom Felice, sales manager for the New York City store, clandestine recording devices are the biggest sellers. "The more discreet they are, the more popular," he says. "There are a lot of paranoid people out there." Enough for the industry to claim total sales last year of $200 million.

Counter Spy is not alone. Other big electronics retail chains and smaller mail-order outfits are also bringing elite snooping into the mass market. New Jersey-based Edmund Scientific sells an electronic microphone for $625 that it claims can "pull in voices up to three-quarters of a mile away." Life Force Technologies in Colorado sells a briefcase with a hidden tape recorder for $1,195. "Invading someone's privacy has become as easy as walking into your local electronics store," complains Morton Bromfield, executive director of the American Privacy Foundation, based in Wellesley, Mass.

Many of these products can be used in ways that are not just obnoxious but illegal. For instance, federal law prohibits the taping of telephone conversations unless at least one of the parties on the line knows that the conversation is being recorded. But so long as retailers remain unaware of -- and don't ask about -- the potentially illegal purposes that a customer may have in mind, they cannot be held liable. Nine years ago, Radio Shack's parent company, Tandy Corp., was sued by Elizabeth Flowers, a South Carolina woman whose husband used a miniature recording device to secretly tape her phone calls after she filed for divorce. Lawyers for Radio Shack successfully argued that the company had no responsibility in the matter because it did not know what her husband planned to do with the device. "There would be nothing left to sell if we withdrew all the products that might be used illegally," says Robert Miller, a Radio Shack vice president. Besides, he adds, with unintended irony, it is not the company's business what customers do with the products "in the privacy of their own homes." But if the use of such devices becomes widespread, there may not be much privacy left at home -- or anywhere else.

With reporting by Thomas McCarroll/New York