He was a private investigator in San Francisco, and chief investigator for Sam Dash on the Senate Watergate Committee...
Francis Ford Coppola considered the implications of the professional eavesdropper when he made
The Conversation...
It should come as no surprise that Hal Lipset was hired as technical consultant for the picture.
Lipset spoke in Congress using the famous
"bug in the martini olive" and other secret surveillance devices that he and his staff pioneered...
In 1964, Time Magazine wrote, "Hal Lipset, a seasoned San Francisco private eye, maintains a laboratory behind a false warehouse from where his eavesdropping ‘genius,' Ralph Bertsche, works out new gimmicks such as a high-powered bug that fits into a pack of filter-tip cigarettes..."
His first chance to go public on the national scene occurred the previous year when he was invited to testify before the Senate Constitutional Rights Subcommittee... "First I thought I’d dazzle them with an array of miniature devices they had never seen before; then I would surprise them by playing back my own testimony from a recorder I had hidden before the hearing."
The great idea worked too well. Lipset’s appearance was seen as a clever but ominous sign of snooping running amok.
... the next time he was invited to Washington to speak before a Senate subcommittee - this one in 1965 to hear testimony specifically on eavesdropping - he renewed his efforts...
"We came up with the "bug in the martini olive" idea, it didn’t seem all that unusual. The martini glass was simply another example of how ingenious these devices could be."
The glass held a facsimile of an olive, which could hold a tiny transmitter, the pimento inside the olive, in which we could embed the microphone, and a toothpick, which could house a copper wire as an antenna. No gin was used - that could cause a short.
It was the bug in the martini olive that made Lipset "the real star of the day," as UPI reported. Hardly an ominous indication of private snoopers taking over the world, this little olive with its toothpick antenna became a "playful" and charming toy.
---
This is the very condensed version of his story. The full story is here, as excerpted from his biography, "The Bug in the Martini Olive," by Patricia Holt, Little Brown, 1991 ~Kevin
It wasn’t until the nondescript package was removed from the small Newport Avenue business by burglars that its secret ingredients went to work.
Chief Allen Park tells The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review that Churchill police charged the 14-year-old Woodland Hills High School student with violating Pennsylvania's wiretap law earlier this year.
issued guidance to help stakeholders account for security in the development, manufacturing, implementation, and use of IoT devices.
James Johannes pleaded guilty in Federal Court in San Antonio on Thursday to sneaking around outside the homes of his neighbors, and using his smart phone to take videos of little girls who were undressing, peeking through their windows and open doors.
UK - Politicians have exempted themselves from Britain's new wide-ranging spying laws.
... the next time he was invited to Washington to speak before a Senate subcommittee - this one in 1965 to hear testimony specifically on eavesdropping - he renewed his efforts...
“possibly desperately resorting to illegal and corrupt methods to abolish the traditional socio-cultural practice of live-finch capturing from the Maltese islands,” claiming that BirdLife had been using electronic devices to eavesdrop on private mobile phone conversations. 
and learning that she was planning to “fleece him”, a court heard yesterday.
There's a new tool that promises to help you do just that — by essentially deleting yourself from the internet.
To be more precise, he feels there are multiple local companies affected by espionage, which could significantly hurt their business if these details fall into the wrong hands...
According to a criminal complaint, Tara Lenich, 41, forged judges' signatures to authorize the wiretapping of the aforementioned unidentified cop's cell phone, as well as a phone belonging to an unidentified woman. Lenich, who was in charge of the Violent Criminal Enterprises Bureau at the DA's office, may have been romantically attached to the cop, and tabloid reports speculate the wiretapped woman was his new love interest. 
A German spy fell in love with a Latvian woman in Riga and lost his job for violating policy. He has lost a legal battle against the BND intelligence agency. 
Masaaki Imaeda, 66, installed hidden cameras into his rental properties so he could spy on tenants having sex or undressing...
Ricci Arcari, 33, was at the Starbucks in Vauxhall when he spotted the device hidden in an air vent directly above the unisex toilet.