Cheap Chinese spyware means everyone's playing Big Brother

Gone are the days when cool spy gadgets were the exclusive domain of government intelligence services or debonair spies in the employ of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Thanks to an influx of cheap Chinese technology and a huge media appetite for “sting” operations, practically anyone can have access to high tech spyware. The consequences can often be disturbing warns an article in Open Magazine . [caption id=“attachment_221364” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Cheap technology means everyone can have access to spyware: Reuters”] [/caption] In the article titled “Spyware is Everywhere”, author Mihir Sharma says that spyware devices are tinier and cheaper than ever before. It quotes the owner of a shop selling these kinds of surveillance devices. “You can have microcameras affixed on watches, wall clocks, paintings—Mona Lisa’s sedate eyes can actually be hiding a microcamera with a pinhole-sized lens, panning wide angle, recording and transmitting everything happening in the room. Or the spycam can be hidden in your cap, glasses, earrings, ring, necklace or lingerie, even wrapped into a bandage anywhere on the body… or wherever you can imagine.” This spyware revolution has of course has had its share of triumphs. Sting operations have exposed countless instances of corruption, bribery and general sleaze - ranging from casting couches to spot fixing in cricket.  However Sharma says that events started taking a turn for the worse when spycam users “discovered both the broadcast media’s hunger for suitably scurrilous video clips and the private uses of the sting operation. So, spycams became a tool of blackmail and manipulation, those two staples of petty politics.” And politics aside, these bugs are also pervading social life. The article relates an instance where a suspicious husband once had a spycam fixed on his bedside photo frame. He did this to see whether his wife gives his picture the same peck when he’s not there that she does when he’s around, before she goes to bed. Also disturbing is the fact that the corporate sector seems to be the most eager use of spyware in the country. Sharma says that the IB has reported many instances of unauthorised air-wave tapping devices mounted on vehicles on the streets of Delhi. Their goal is to catch mobile phone conversations though the official use of these voice interceptors (brought in from Israel and China) is permitted only to the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO). The most high profile instance of what appears to be unauthorized recording, is the release of the Radia tapes in to the public domain. The end result, of course, appears to be a situation where everyone is watching everyone else.  And  as anyone in a hall of funny mirrors can tell you, Sharma sums it up, once everyone starts watching everyone else watch everyone else, retaining one’s sanity could become the biggest challenge yet. Read the whole article  .