HOW DOES IT WORK?
Active surveillance requires a team of at least two people. More likely, you are facing a team of between six and nine. Each member of the surveillance team will have training in breaking and entering, the use of surveillance equipment like hidden cameras and laser microphones, and the techniques of both foot and vehicle tails.
The members of the surveillance team will be of average height and weight, though they may be unusually fit, as they will probably have had some military training. They will dress in clothes appropriate for the situation, avoiding bright colors. They will drive common cars in nondescript hues. If you see them, they will be operating in teams of two or three, but never the same two or three.
This kind of surveillance is set up like an onion, with you at the center. The first layer of the onion is inside your house in the form of remote surveillance devices. The second layer starts on your lawn and extends to the end of the street. In that layer, people crouch in parked vans or behind the dark windows of other buildings, pointing sophisticated and expensive equipment at your windows. The final layer—the one that makes you cry—is the operatives themselves, who will follow you everywhere
you go.The first thing you’ll want to worry about is the technology deployed inside your home. Telephone taps have been addressed elsewhere in this book, and are probably not something you need to concern yourself with unless it’s a law enforcement agency that’s got you under surveillance. What you should be on the lookout for are hidden cameras and microphones.
Cheap (between $100 and $300) and easy to install, hidden cameras or microphones come built into a number of common household objects from smoke alarms to screws. They can be installed in books or stuffed animals or behind mirrors, hidden in a bouquet of flowers or a lamp, plugged into an air freshener, or duct taped to the bottom of a chair or table. Typically, cameras will be motion activated and microphones will be sound activated to avoid wasting battery power. They will be wireless, transmitting any information they capture by radio to a computer in a remote location nearby. If they are installed in an object that plugs into the wall, they will draw their power directly from your home’s grid, otherwise they’ll be running on batteries that can last weeks on standby.
Your observers may also hide cameras around the exterior of your house, possibly in emergency lights mounted under your neighbor’s eaves or drilled into the bottom of a Pepsi can stuck in a hedge. These exterior cameras are intended to catch your comings and goings. Your appearance on an exterior camera will signal the surveillance team to begin a tail.
Just down your street, either in a parked vehicle or another building, members of the surveillance team will be set up with some sophisticated and expensive gear. If you watch football, you’re familiar with the parabolic microphone—it’s the big, plastic bowl the ESPN interns point at the action on the field. Thanks to the parabolic mike, we get the full football audio experience, complete with grunts, muttering, and the sounds of 600 pounds of flesh colliding at twenty-five miles per hour. Parabolic mikes work on sound the same way radar dishes work on radio—they gather the sound waves in front of them and focus them on a receiver suspended above the center of the dish.
If you’re having a meeting with your cohorts, a parabolic mike can pick up the entire conversation without difficulty, but it’ll also pick up any ambient noise like music, birds, or a blender. For isolating an individual voice or picking up both ends of a telephone conversation, your enemies will also want a shotgun microphone. With a shotgun mike, an observer can focus on a single sound source a good distance away and capture sound with stunning clarity. Used in conjunction, both kinds of microphones are highly effective intelligence-gathering tools. You can buy a high-end shotgun or parabolic mike for about $400 or you can build your own for about $100. Fortunately, neither microphone works terribly well through barriers, so if you keep your windows closed you’re reasonably well protected.
Less conspicuous and with a greater range than either the parabolic or shotgun mike, is the laser microphone. This device fires a laser through your window at some flat surface in your house, reads the vibrations in the surface, and translates those to sound. It can use almost any object in your house as a reflector, including the window through which it is targeted, and can operate at a far greater range than a traditional microphone. If you want a professional-grade one of your very own, expect to spend upwards of $60,000, but you can build one with a shorter range and lower audio fidelity for a couple hundred bucks.
Once you leave your house, the tail begins. Whether you’re on foot or in your car, the same basic techniques apply. A three-man team with each individual operating independently will keep you under observation at all times. One man will serve as the “tail,” a second as the “eye,” and the third as “backup.” The roles played by each member of the team will shift constantly without any detectable schedule, making your followers very difficult to spot.
The tail will be the man closest to you, on the same side of the street about a block behind you if you’re on foot or one or two cars behind you if you’re driving. The eye will be on the other side of the street just behind you on foot or driving next to or just in front of you. The backup will operate parallel to or just behind the tail. As you approach an intersection, the backup man will pass you and turn in the direction opposite the eye. If you continue straight, the backup will become the tail, the tail will become the backup, and the eye will stay in his role. If you turn toward the backup, he will become the tail, the eye will turn and cross the street to become the backup, and the tail will cross the street to become the eye. Turn toward the eye and the backup man becomes the eye, the eye becomes the tail, and the tail becomes the backup. Make sense? Of course not. That’s why it’s hard to spot. Read this paragraph again and try drawing yourself a picture as you do so. If you do it right, it will look like John Madden went apeshit on the replay with his little light pen, but it may help you visualize.