Spycam News: So far in April...

ID - Deputies have arrested a Jefferson County man for allegedly using a home security camera to secretly record a woman and a teenage girl in the shower. Daniel J Hendrickson, 38...told a Jefferson County Sheriff’s detective his “stupidity” and “curiosity” led him to place a wireless camera in a bathroom to record the woman and the teenage girl. more

Singapore - While at a church camp, he heard a woman showering in the toilet and took a video of her. The 20-year-old, who was 16 at the time, kept and watched the video repeatedly afterwards. He also took voyeuristic videos of three others - at an MRT station, a school toilet and a school canteen. more

UK - A consultant radiologist who was twice convicted of voyeurism after hiding his mobile phone to film women in toilets has been struck off the UK medical register...he admitted to covertly filming people using the restroom at his places of work as well as at his family home. more

Canada - Shawn Nickerson, a former basketball coach, has been sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading guilty to 32 charges – including voyeurism...Through the years Nickerson used a handful of “spy cameras” hidden in washrooms and changerooms to record unsuspecting boys – often when naked. There are 21 known victims. Nickerson took the images he captured to the dark web where...the images where “traded like cards.” more

FL - A South Florida restaurant employee is behind bars accused of taking video of a customer who was using the bathroom. more

UK - Business owner Scott Ennis secretly filmed her in the bedroom, recorded her work conversations with a hidden microphone and deployed a member of his staff to spy on her. Louisa Ennis had no idea what was going on until she spotted a mystery device showing up on her wi-fi router and discovered it was her husband’s spy camera. more

Canada - Al Young, a long-time real estate agent and property manager from New Minas, N.S., was charged with voyeurism after a modified mirror was discovered in a building bathroom at the Blomidon Terrace in Wolfville, N.S.... Police say it was an elaborate set-up. more

Japan - Nagano Prefectural Police have arrested a civic employee for Nagano City over the alleged trespassing into a female acquaintance’s residence... According to police, his purpose for entering was to retrieve a hidden camera that he had planted inside two days before. more

WA - A Trilogy employee reported to the Walla Walla Police Department that Rosales had an iPad Pro tablet recording in an office restroom when he asked her to go into the restroom and try on two shirts while not wearing a bra. The employee later said in a statement to investigators that the request from her boss was ostensibly to give an opinion if the T-shirts being sold as part of a fundraiser were too “see-through” to be appropriate. more

Japan - Police have arrested a 28-year-old female high school teacher and her 29-year-old ex-boyfriend on suspicion of violating the child prostitution and pornography law after they took voyeuristic images of girls in the changing room at a hot springs facility in 2016. more

UK - Female nudists demand new security measures on Brighton naturist beach after men were caught secretly taking photos. more

MI - A Michigan man has been arrested after police say he was caught on a hidden camera poisoning his co-worker's water bottle with anti-freeze. more

FL - A former Tampa teacher has pleaded guilty to more than 300 counts of video voyeurism after being accused of secretly recording 124 students and an adult teacher undressing over a two year period. Mark William Ackett, 52, taught fashion design and coached girls track at Bloomingdale High School. more

OH - The suspect facing voyeurism charges has turned himself in. Armani Martin, 21, is the suspect in an investigation into someone recording people inside business bathrooms, according to Fairfield Township police. Martin is being charged with voyeurism, police say. more

SC - A 78-year-old Summerton man was arrested on March 8 for allegedly placing a fake smoke detector containing a camera inside a neighbor's home. more

UT - Jarom Brown, an adjunct instructor in the theater department, stepped down after police arrested him on charges of voyeurism and harassment. Brown released a video of the two engaged in a “romantic encounter” in hopes of exoneration but was instead arrested on several counts of voyeurism and harassment. Sue claims that in both the photo and the video she was entirely unaware she was being recorded. more

WA - A Whatcom County man is suspected of using a camera disguised to look like a cellphone charger to capture video and images of four children between the ages of 12 and 17 undressing, using the bathroom and showering. All four victims were known to the man. more

You don't have to be a victim. Learn how to spot spycams.

Recording Calls Without Consent Still Illegal, California Supreme Court Rules

California’s prohibition on secretly recording phone calls applies to both parties on the call and not just third-party eavesdroppers, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The court’s unanimous decision reverses the Fourth Appellate District’s opposite interpretation from 2019 that the law applies only to nonparties and does not forbid those on the call from recording each other without consent.
California’s penal code Section 632.7 makes it a crime to record or intercept a phone call “without the consent of all parties.”

This was the basis for a 2016 lawsuit by Jeremiah Smith, who claimed the loan provider LoanMe Inc. recorded him without his consent during an 18-second call in violation of Section 632.7. more

Spy History: The CIA Heart Attack Gun

You can say that the gun looks like a toy at best, especially with that ridiculous scope, but from the descriptions of the American senator Franck Church, the weapon is scary, to say the least, even to today’s standards.

The CIA needed a weapon to take care of the targets on their blacklist without living any sort of trace that would bring up suspicions in the media. One of the hot targets was Fidel Castro, the Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976. Killing people from a distance was the go-to choice, but every bullet can be traced back. Getting too close to the target would risk the agent being compromised.

This is why the CIA gave the task of creating a new secret weapon to Mary Embree. Embree started working at the CIA as a secretary in the audio surveillance department. With time she got promoted to the technical services department where she was asked specifically to research a new poison that would induce a heart attack on its victim but undetectable in a post-mortem verification.

The technical team came up with a gun that would shoot poisoned projectiles that would dissolve inside the target and induce a heart attack which would be undetectable upon post-mortem. Embree wasn’t able to confirm if the gun was used to assassinate someone, but she did confirm that animals, as well as prisoners, were used to test the weapon.

To explain the strange scope on top of the weapon, besides being a pistol, the gun had had the ability to shot the poisoned projectile from 100 meters with good accuracy, hence the scope. more

Nanny Cam Catches Home Inspector with Elmo Doll

A home inspector caught ... with an Elmo doll has been charged with two misdemeanor counts in a Rochester Hills district court. 

Kevin Wayne VanLuven, 59, was arraigned on charges of aggravated indecent exposure and malicious destruction of property under $200. Bond was set at $2,500 cash or surety. 

The charges stem from a March 12 incident in Oxford Township, when homeowners asked to have their property inspected at request of the buyers. A nursery camera detected movement, the news release said, so the 22-year-old homeowner checked her phone and caught VanLuven in the act. After he finished ... he returned the doll to its original place, the release said. more

Coca-Cola Trade Secret Theft Underscores Importance of Early Detection

The trial of Xiaorong You is set to begin today, April 6, in Greenville, TN. She is accused of trade secret theft and economic espionage after allegedly stealing bisphenol-A-free (BPA-free) technologies owned by several companies, including her former employers Coca-Cola and Eastman Chemical Company. 

The value placed on the development of the stolen technologies is $119.6 million. Other affected companies include Azko-Nobel, Dow Chemical, PPG, TSI, Sherwin Williams and ToyoChem.

Two actions could have stopped the theft or lessened its impact:

• Real-time alerts and processes designed to prevent sensitive and protected data from exiting the corporate environment.
• Prohibiting personal and non-authorized electronic devices, including smartphones, from proximity to trade secrets or sensitive installations. 

Using the smartphone’s camera to copy documents and workspace is a throwback technique of espionage days of old, when miniature and subminiature cameras would be used to copy documents from within restricted spaces. more 

See Murray Associates - Recording in the Workplace Recommendations

Electric Aircraft Start-Up Accuses Rival of Stealing Its Secrets

The age of electric planes may still be years away, but the fight for that market is already heating up.

Wisk Aero, a start-up developing an electric aircraft that takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane, on Tuesday sued another start-up, Archer Aviation, accusing it of stealing trade secrets and infringing on Wisk’s patents.

The lawsuit brings into public view a dispute between two little-known companies in a business that has become a playground for billionaires. It also entangles giants of aviation and technology. Wisk is a joint venture of Boeing and Kitty Hawk, which is financed by Larry Page, who co-founded Google. Archer’s investors include United Airlines, which is a major Boeing customer and plans to buy up to 200 aircraft from the start-up...

Filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the lawsuit accuses two engineers of downloading thousands of files containing confidential designs and data before leaving Wisk to join Archer. Wisk accused a third engineer of wiping history of his activities from his computer before leaving for Archer. more

Spy History: KGB Spy in 1961 Used X-Ray to Crack U.S. Top-Secret Lock

In late 1961 [Robert Lee Johnson] received the top-secret clearance and was admitted into the vault as a clerk. At long last the KGB was in. […] Over the following weeks the infiltration began in earnest as he successfully copied the vault keys using clay molds supplied by KGB operatives. 

In October of 1961 he received a specially manufactured X-ray device from Moscow that he was instructed to place over the final lock in the vault; KGB technicians could then deduce what combination unlocked the vault by studying the cogs inside the locking mechanism...

On 15 December 1962, Johnson accessed the vault for the first time and looted its contents. The operation, extensively rehearsed beforehand, went exactly as planned and by 03:15 the following morning some of America’s most sensitive cryptographic and military information⁠—some of it classified higher than top secret⁠—was on its way to Moscow. more

Lawmakers: Fund Tech to Thwart Telco Spies

Lawmakers want Biden to fund technology they say could secure American telecommunications companies from spies.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is urging President Biden to include $3 billion in funding for technology it says would reduce American reliance on Chinese telecommunications equipment that could provide a back door for spying.

The money would go to funds established by Congress last year to encourage more American companies to switch over to Open Radio Access Network (OpenRAN) technology. The technology is essentially the software version of the hardware components needed to connect phones within 5G networks. more

Does 5G create new cybersecurity risks?

5G will be able to accept millions of devices per square kilometer on its network, which will allow it to adapt to ever-increasing nomadic uses, such as the autonomous car generalization or remote surgical operations via robots located on the other side of the planet. 

The real promise of 5G will come in September 2021, with the third phase of 5G specifications. These are the data centers located a few kilometers from each branch, which will allow operators to process massive amounts of data and set up new applications for businesses.

 

However, increasing the number of connected devices means that this technology will become a major security issue for governments, people and businesses around the world. Indeed, it also multiplies the entry points of attack for cyber criminals. more

IKEA France Accused of Spying on Employees – Call for Prison Sentence

In an ongoing court case, a prosecutor has demanded IKEA France be fined some €2 million - and for a prison sentence for a former CEO - with the company accused of spying on hundreds of employees.

After five days of the sometimes stormy trial, the Versailles prosecutor's office demanded an “exemplary” sentence be passed down, to send a “strong message” to “all commercial companies”."

The issue at stake in this trial is "the protection of our private lives in the face of a threat, that of mass surveillance", prosecutor Paméla Tabardel told the court.

Fifteen defendants took the stand during the case, including former Ikea France executives, shop managers, but also police officers and the head of a private investigation company. more

Privoro Launches Audio Masking Chamber & RF Shield for Mobile Devices

(Press release) 
Privoro, today revealed its latest product, Vault, a first-of-its-kind defense against remote data capture. The Vault case is a two-in-one portable Faraday enclosure and audio masking chamber for smartphones, providing unsurpassed protection against not only wireless attacks and location tracking but also eavesdropping and spying.

Vault eliminates smartphone signals more effectively than portable, fabric-based Faraday products, delivering a minimum of 100 dB of radio frequency (RF) attenuation – 10 billion times signal reduction. When a smartphone is placed in the Vault case, the smartphone can no longer be reached via cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, near-field communication (NFC) and radio-frequency identification (RFID).

In addition to RF shielding, Vault's user-controlled audio masking prevents the extraction of intelligible speech up to voice levels of 90 dBA through independent noise signals. Users will have the assurance that conversations in the vicinity of Vault cannot be deliberately captured by bad actors through the enclosed smartphone's cameras and microphones.

Privoro developed Vault to meet the requirements of nation-state customers seeking to tackle the long-standing unique and critical security risks that mobile devices pose. more

 

Criminal Group Accused of Wiretapping State Officals & Companies

The Sverdlovsk Region law enforcement officers apprehended several members of a criminal group over a case of illegal wiretapping of state officials and lawmakers...

"On March 30, police officers carried out a series of searches at residences of members of a criminal group as part of a case ‘on illegal wiretapping.’ The searches took place at 13 locations simultaneously. The wide-scale operation was triggered by an attempt of a key suspect to hide abroad. He was apprehended on March 27 during an attempt to cross the border with Kazakhstan," the source said.

According to the source, the wiretapping of city administration officials and city Duma deputies, as well as regional authorities and representatives of major companies took place in the fall of 2019. more

Spy-turned-TV Host Anna Chapman Urges Russians to Get Vaccinated

Anna Chapman, the Russian intelligence agent busted for spying in the Big Apple in 2010, has now taken on a new mission – persuading vaccine doubters in the Motherland to be jabbed against COVID-19.

The flamed-haired former femme fatale told viewers on REN TV that “the health of your loved ones depends on your decision.”

Chapman, who had been working in real estate in New York, made headlines in 2010 when she was revealed to be part of a Russian sleeper cell.

She was deported to Russia shortly after along with nine other spies as part of a massive prisoner swap and is now a TV presenter. more

Intel Sued Under Wiretapping Laws

FL - A class-action suit in Lake County, Florida, alleges that Intel unlawfully intercepted communications without user consent. The claim is backed by the usage of analytics technology on Intel’s company website. Intel capitalizes on session-replay software to capture the interactions of people visiting the corporate homepage, a violation of user rights.

According to the lawsuit, Intel is violating the Florida state wiretapping law by capturing keystrokes, mouse movements, and other similar session-replay tech. more

G. Gordon Liddy, convicted Watergate conspirator, dies at 90

G. Gordon Liddy, the political operative who supervised the Watergate burglary, which brought down President Richard Nixon, died Tuesday, his family said. He was 90.

Liddy's family said in a statement that he died Tuesday morning at his daughter's home in Mount Vernon, Virginia. It did not give a cause of death. His son, James, said that the cause was not related to Covid-19, and that he had been dealing with Parkinson's disease.

Liddy was one of the organizers of the 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the office building with the name that would forever be linked to one of the biggest political scandals in American history...

Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and wiretapping in 1973 and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Years later, he declared, "I'd do it again for my president."...

In an interview with WHYY "Fresh Air" in 1980 after the publication of his autobiography, Liddy described unusual ways of overcoming fears as a child, including rats.

He went to the waterfront to confront the rats, but they would swim away. When his sister's cat killed a rat, he decided to eat it. "And so I cooked and consumed part of the rat. And thereafter, I had no fear of rats," Liddy said. more