I doubt it is bugged. It’s probablyu just teenagers looking for loot.
But there’s a slim possibility its a bug plant I suppose. hmmm … well, you could take a portable radio out there and see if there’s any interference. Sweep the frencies up and down AM and FM. If you have a radio that has other bands, like police and aircraft band, even better.
Beyond that, you need some special equipment that businesses who do this for a living have. It’s the same idea as using a radio, but it sweeps all the frequencies and is more sensitive.
I did a quick Google on it.
“We Can Find Any Bug/Tap in Phones, Homes, Businesses, Vehicles & More!”
Seriously now, you can’t sweep the spectrum with a radio to see what you’d hear. True bugs are not the boxes with big flickering red clown nose lights on them they mount under a bumper, like in the movies:
Listening around with a radio, you’d hear random spurs pretty much everywhere from RF sources all around us. They could be coherent with the transmitter you’re looking for but who would know? There are several modes of communications and what’s the likely hood you’re in the same mode?
It could transmit in a totally spectrum you are capable of listening to.
The transmitter could be a burst radio, just bleeping packets of data, randomly or on command. Maybe it only bleeps when moving, for instance.
You’d never find it, even with the right radio, unless you happen to listen to the right frequency and mode when it happens to be transmitting.
If the radio is encrypted (an easy thing to do nowadays), you won’t even know what you’re listening to. You’ll hear thousands of spurs in just a couple of MHz of spectrum - they can’t all be buggers…
… wait, maybe they are!!
Modern surveillance equipment actually employs a method called ‘spread spectrum’ where frequency changes at a predetermined interval that the transmitter/receiver agree on. The resulting signal subsequently is buried near the noise. You’d never see it, even with a pretty sophisticated spectrum analyzer. Some ‘pro’ with a sniffer certainly won’t find it.
I’ve worked with that sort of RF technology but google if, if you don’t believe me. The sky pretty much is the limit and a lot of modern RF technology has been applied to surveillance equipment you can buy in specialized stores.
This is where the movies are actually right:
The only way to get rid of buggers is to dunk them in a glass of water.
Since a car doesn’t fit in any practical glass I’ve ever seen, maybe just drive it off a river bank and dunk it.
Maybe I’m being Captain Obvious here . . . but shouldn’t you just go to the state police or detectives on the case for which you’re going to give testimony and alert them to your suspicions or ask them if they were aware of any warrants for such wiretapping. If it’s them they have to tell you and if it’s someone else they may have the resources to find it (the bug) and prosecute the illegal bugging. Make sense to anyone else? Rocketman
Do the police really have to tell you that they are wire-tapping you, if you ask?
I am a bit doubtful that they have to reveal this to you, and this may be just one more bit of urban folklore. For instance, it is “common knowledge” among many drug dealers and prostitutes that, if they ask, “Are you a cop?”, an officer has to admit this to them. In reality, they do not have to reveal that they are police officers, as that would likely impede their investigation.
Once evidence against you is gathered, your attorney has the ability to see it as part of the “discovery” process, but until a police agency is prepared to use this information against you, they don’t have to reveal it.
What the OP should do is provide some more info. Maybe a basic reason as to why they’re giving testimony in court, how in the world they determined 2 people were involved, and so on.
If this was an attempt to place a bug then it’s a pretty slipshod effort.
My guess is either a random petty theft or this court case involves some juveniles who are just trying to get even for the testimony. There a lot of assumptions about this on my part though.
If the guy was to give testimony, and if the car was broken in to, I think I might not have started the car as in KABOOM. Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard anything. Thanks for the lesson Rem . . , I’ve got to go out and get a new box of aluminum foil now.
The government is taking advantage of outdated law on privacy and technology to track Americans like never before. As long as it is turned on, your mobile phone registers its position with cell towers every few minutes, whether the phone is being used or not – and mobile carriers are retaining location data on their customers.
Michigan Police Use Device to Download Cellphone Data; ACLU Objects
And I keep thinking of the Oxymoron government works, I mean it would take a mega computer the likes that are at present unknown to handle all that data, plus face recognition software being used etc. for airports, not impossible, but not probable.
Maybe the DED devices can be programed to barf up all the information it collected just to make it easy and cheap to see what they are doing.
I don’t want to sound paranoid but you have to realize Homeland Security has a lot of money that they pass around to local police agencies. They really don’t know what to do with all of it except buy all these gadgets. In Minnesota, just drivers license information alone was accessed some 5000 times by undisclosed individuals for undisclosed purposes. Even a Sheriff was targeted and was unable to find out who was checking his records and why. A lawsuit for somewhere around $1 mil was won by a female officer who had her information looked up hundreds of times for personal purposes. License plate data is being collected and saved everytime you drive by a police car and the information was available to anyone who asked for it. In one case it was used by and ex to track down where his ex was. Drive by a police car on the side of the road and it has scanned your plate and the information is stored under guard of a $10 clerk.
You let them go too far and they will. That’s just the nature of the law enforcement game and we shouldn’t tolerate it just because we aren’t doing anything wrong or no one cares today where we are.
I just read an article in Popular Science (or a magazine like it) while waiting for lunch. It was about this topic. A couple bought a computer from Aaron Rents and somehow paid it off early. There was a screwup at the Aaron Rents accounting department so their last payment wasn’t recorded. Aaron Rents has a software program in the computers they sell that allows them to turn on the camera to track the buyer so they can find them and repo the computer.
Apparently, once Aaron Rents activates the software, anyone can view what is on the camera and needless to say, what was on the camera was not what this young couple wanted to share with the internet. Anyway, it is in court now. I’m glad I have this old laptop that doesn’t even have a camera on it.
According to this article, there are so many ways that your smart phone can be tracked that I’m glad I don’t have one of those. Getting a little worried about my old fashioned cell phone.
BTW, those tinted license plate covers, do they foil the license plate readers? I see a lot of those around lately, is that why people buy them? Up till now I just thought they were another waste of money.
I think they can probably do some amazing things, if they put their minds to it.
Long story:
For instance, here in Fairfield County CT, most intersections with lights have cameras. They are not used for traffic enforcement to give people tickets and you wonder what they are used for. They aim in all four directions. They just suddenly quietly appeared. I doubt they have a bunch of people monitoring them. Why have these things?
Computers certainly have the ability to record plates that pass them and track them, if that’s what they want to do but they can do a lot more:
About 14 years ago, I was part of a startup company and were busy creating a positive ID hand held or wall mounted device. Getting an ID on someone where you don’t have a central database is a huge problem. The premise was that you store a person’s data on an encrypted indestructible card he carries with him. He puts the card in the reader, reads his fingerprint that’s stored on the card and it positively identifies the person. In countries where there isn’t a central database or infrastructure, this would be a good way to get an ID of a person when he walks into civilization, right out in the jungle and says he wants to vote or says he has insurance.
It could also find its way to a bar application, being able to tell who is not of age. The uses are endless. The card depends heavily on data encryption so presumably it cannot easily be faked.
We had fingerprint ID working but were looking into using facial recognition as well.
A company at that time had the ability to crunch facial pictures down into minutia data (basically making certain points of a face into recognizable points) and, using a database of these facial minutia, it was able to find hundreds of faces within a crowd within seconds on a simple PC.
It worked quite well. It was impressive to have this thing track people’s faces as it walked by the camera in our lobby.
We were limited to using a low power embedded processor so couldn’t use their technology but they got involved with a test program in London, recognizing people of interest on the street using pole mounted cameras.
From what I hear, that program is now real - no longer in beta.
I wouldn’t doubt that it found its use elsewhere, maybe in all those street cameras in my area that aren’t used for traffic enforcement. We’ll never know but you can extrapolate what they are doing:
Just knowing what a couple of guys in a basement could do with some PCs, a soldering iron and a scope makes me believe the alphabet soup agencies can do a lot better.
Make no mistake about it: big brother is here.
Is it a good thing? Maybe/maybe not. To track known morons that want to hurt people is a good thing.
Can it be abused? No doubt.
It is creepy they have the ability to track you if they want to but I don’t do anything that would interest them. I don’t break the law so it doesn’t worry me all that much.