Covenant Eyes: God isn't the only one watching you...

Churches are using invasive phone-monitoring tech to discourage “sinful” behavior. Some software is seeing more than congregants realize.

GRACEPOINT is (an) evangelical Southern Baptist church... when Grant Hao-Wei Lin came out to a Gracepoint church leader during their weekly one-on-one session, he was surprised to learn that he wasn’t going to be kicked out. According to his church leader, Hao-Wei Lin says, God still loved him in spite of his “struggle with same-sex attraction.”

But Gracepoint did not leave the matter in God’s hands alone. At their next one-on-one the following week, Hao-Wei Lin says the church leader asked him to install an app called Covenant Eyes on his phone...

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar ecosystem of so-called accountability apps that are marketed to both churches and parents as tools to police online activity. For a monthly fee, some of these apps monitor everything their users see and do on their devices, even taking screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdropping on web traffic, WIRED found. The apps then report a feed of all of the users’ online activity directly to a chaperone—an “accountability partner,” in the apps’ parlance. When WIRED presented its findings to Google, however, the company determined that two of the top accountability apps—Covenant Eyes and Accountable2You—violate its policies. more

Priest Fleas After Spycam Discovered in Chuch Bathroom

OR - Father Ysrael Bien logged on to a spy-gear website and paid $295 for the hidden camera that was discovered last spring in a Sherwood church bathroom, according to information turned over to police this week.

The camera, designed to look like an electrical outlet, came from the online retailer SpyGuy Security based in Dallas, Texas. Police served a search warrant for transaction records there Monday after the business tipped them off.

A Washington County judge signed a warrant Tuesday for Bien's arrest on misdemeanor charges of invasion of privacy, tampering with evidence and initiating a false report, but police think the priest may not be in the U.S.

They did not find him at his last known address in Sherwood. Another priest there told them that Bien had left the country....

A 15-year-old St. Francis parishioner found the hidden camera affixed to a bathroom wall on April 26. The device looked like a power outlet placed at waist-height near the toilet. Thinking that was odd, the teenager pulled it off the wall and brought it to the priest.  more

Rabbi Accused of Planting Mikvah SpyCams... Bails Out

Moving trucks are scheduled to show up at the Georgetown home of Rabbi Barry Freundel, according to signs posted in front of his home on O Street, not far from the Kesher Israel synagogue that provided the house for its longtime religious leader.
 
Freundel was arrested October 14 and charged with six counts of voyeurism for allegedly hiding video cameras in the synagogue’s mikvah, a ritual bath, to record women as they undressed and showered before entering. Police officers were seen carting computers and hard drives out of Freundel’s house on the day of the arrest.

Freundel, 62, pleaded not guilty and was released on his own recognizance, while police and prosecutors investigate videos and forensic evidence. (more) (back story)

Spouse Spying a Sin... unless, of course, you have a good reason.

Kuwaiti religious scholar has said that checking a spouse's cell phone or computer without his or her permission amounts to committing a sin.

Ajeel Al Nashmi, the head of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Scholars' League, said that from the religious perspective, a spouse must not access his or her spouse's mobile phone or computer without his or her authorization, Gulf News reported.

He added that neither the wife nor the husband may spy on each other or check each other's emails or messages without a proper permission, and whoever does it is a sinner. 

The only exception is when there is strong and reasonable suspicion about unacceptable behavior, he said. (more)

What Corporations Can Learn from the Vatican

Contrary to a widely circulated report, the US National Security Agency (NSA) could not have eavesdropped on the conclave that elected Pope Francis, a veteran Vatican journalist has reported.

Andrea Tornielli of La Stampa writes that the Vatican had deployed sophisticated anti-bugging technology in the Sistine Chapel and throughout the apostolic palace in the days leading up to the conclave. The anti-bugging measures were already in place during the general congregations at which cardinals exchanged ideas prior to the opening of the conclave. Reporters who were in the building testified that internet connections were interrupted and cell-phone signals lost when the system was activated. 

Vatican security experts take pride in their ability to foil espionage, Tornielli reports. (more)

The Taliban's Ultimate Bug? - A Bomb in a Microphone!

A bomb planted inside a mosque killed the governor of Afghanistan's eastern Logar province as he was delivering a speech Tuesday morning to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha, officials said...

Tuesday's explosion took place as Jamal was speaking inside the mosque to worshipers gathered for one of Islam's holiest days, said Logar's deputy police chief, Rais Khan Abbul Rahimzai.

The bomb was apparently planted inside a microphone in the front part of the mosque, said two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media. (more)

Thus, making all other PIs reach for a Kleenex®.

Two private investigators claim David Miscavige, the leader of the Church of Scientology, paid them $12million over the course of 24 years to spy on his former rival, along with other enemies.

The top-secret program gave Paul Marrick and Greg Arnold about $500,000 a year and sent them across the world in pursuit of Pat Broeker, who was briefly head of the church before being forced out, the men say. They are now suing the church after the paychecks stopped rolling in. (more)

Business Espionage - Bugging at Feed the Children

Oklahoma City police have begun an investigation at Feed The Children after a private investigator found evidence three offices had been illegally bugged.

The investigator "found remnants of wiretapping devices above the ceilings” during an almost six-hour sweep Wednesday evening of the charity’s Oklahoma City headquarters, according to a police report.

Officials with the charity would not identify what three offices were bugged. The Christian relief organization is widely known because of its heart-wrenching televised appeals for funds to feed starving children. It claims to raise more than $1 billion in donations a year. The charity has been in turmoil for months because of a lawsuit over who was in charge there. (more)

Confessing? Don't phone it in...

Bugging fears thwart sinners' confessions
Egypt's Coptic pope has banned the faithful from confessing their sins to priests over the telephone because intelligence agents might be listening in... The leader of the Coptic minority also said confessions over the Internet were invalid because they might be read by web surfers... The Vatican does not recognise confessions by telephone or over the Internet. (more)

SpyCam Story #499 - Is Nothing Sacred?

TN - A Bartlett church is now at the center of a police investigation. Bartlett Police say a man planted a camera in the women's restroom. They say it happened at "That Church," located at 6001 Bartlett Center Drive...

"His whole goal was to get video of her, because he was in love with her and she didn't want anything to do with him," says Youth Pastor Corey Force. Force says a church member hid a camera in two of the women's restrooms to videotape a woman he had a crush on...

Eyewitness News was told the camera was found in a plant on top of the toilet. Force says the tapings took place on Thursday's during youth services. (more)

The Original Hollywood Wiretapper

By Will Vaus
The trial of private detective Anthony Pellicano, who is charged with 110 counts of racketeering, wiretapping, conspiracy and other federal charges, has been capturing headlines for quite some time. No wonder. Its connections to the mob, eavesdropping on Hollywood conversations and the revolving door of movie industry personalities make for a good read. However, for me and my family, it is déjà vu.

Why? Because my father, "Big Jim" Vaus, was the original Hollywood wiretapper. He launched the practice of listening in on the stars in the 1940s and gained the same sort of notoriety then that surrounds Pellicano now. He was written up in the L.A. papers, and his story has been featured in Time, Life, Reader's Digest and in a 1955 movie, "Wiretapper." (more)

Will Vaus, author of My Father Was a Gangster: The Jim Vaus Story

Recordings of Jim Vaus talking about his life.
More stories about Jim Vaus...
The Hollywood Vice Queen (1948)
Wiretapping in Hollywood (1955)
Why Jim Vaus Quit Wiretapping (1946)

Pew! What's that smell? A progressive spying technique?

The head of one of the leading insurers in non-standard, high-risk personal auto insurance apologized on Thursday for some substandard behavior - spying in church on people who had the sued the company.

Progressive Corp Chief Executive Glenn Renwick apologized for the use of private detectives, who went undercover to join an Atlanta church group in order to discredit a couple suing the insurer. (more)

Eavesdroppping as a Plot Thickener

Sometimes it works, as in The Conversation.
Sometimes it doesn't, as in...

"Here's how bad "License to Wed" is:
Even the outtakes at the end are lame.








And so Ben and Sadie can't have sex before the wedding, which Frank (Robin Williams) monitors by bugging their apartment, then eavesdropping on them in the back of a van with the choir boy in tow, which is just wrong." (more)

...thus, obtaining full control of one's head-quarters.

Iran - The Islamic Republic’s Telecommunications Ministry has been empowered by the ayatollahs to eavesdrop on any and all mobile phone calls in the state’s relentless quest to drive out dissipated utterances, debauched SMS and dissolute video messages. ...

Meanwhile, as an adjunct to the crackdown on SMS and MMS traffic, barbers across Iran have been ordered to stop offering men “Western or other unconventional haircuts” on pain of closure of their business and possible imprisonment. (more)

Masons hit by bugging

Ireland - Police have launched an investigation into suspicions that meetings at one of Northern Ireland's largest Masonic Halls was bugged, the Belfast Telegraph can reveal today.

It is understood that the PSNI launched the probe after recordings were received in the post by Masonic officials at the headquarters of the Provincial Grand Lodge of Antrim at Rosemary Street in Belfast.

Police are investigating if the recordings are of secret rituals held in the building which is the main meeting place of freemasons in Co Antrim, one of the largest lodges in Ireland. (more)

Polish archbishop resigns in spying row

Poland - The newly-appointed archbishop of Warsaw resigned on Sunday after admitting he spied for Poland's former communist regime, in a major embarrassment for the Vatican and the powerful Polish Catholic Church.

Archbishop Stanislaw Wielgus read out his resignation, which came at the request of Pope Benedict who appointed him just a month ago, at a special mass in Warsaw Cathedral replacing a formal ceremony that was to have sworn him in. (more)