6 Ways of Knowing If You are a Target of Technical Surveillance
Often, when operating in a hostile environment the threats you might face are not simply of a physical nature sometimes, the threat of technical surveillance might be a challenge as attempts are made to monitor your activities and communications in a covert ways therefore, it is important to be able to establish if you are under surveillance and what counter measures you can adopt.
Here are six indications that you might be the target of technical surveillance:
- Your home or office premise has been burgled, but nothing of value has been stolen.
- Your land line telephone or mobile phone may make strange noises and you can hear a tone when the telephone in hook.
- Interference on television, car radio or AM/FM radio can be heard and appears to be detecting static from a nearby transmitting device.
- Delivery vehicles parked overnight in the street outside your residence could be a listening post for technical surveillance. Covert cameras in the vehicle would be powered by batteries with electrical cable wired from the trunk or passenger foot well.
- Telephone or electrical engineers arrive at your work or domestic premises insisting that they need to check service lines or telephones in your building. Such personnel rarely turn up unannounced without a prior arrangement.
If you have been place under surveillance, but realise that you are no longer being watched, it is likely that hostile forces have already planted and are using clandestine and monitoring devices.
Given the prevalence of audio, visual and mobile surveillance, as well as a number of devices that can be used, you need to have a basic understanding of technical counter measures and the type of equipment you can use.
Whilst it is easy and cheap to purchase covert monitoring devices online or in spy and security shops technical counter measures equipment is best purchased from a professional manufacturer.
Today’s professional equipment is operator friendly and has a menu driven tool kit an variety of probes. The system is automatically configured as each probe is connected, so that you can concentrate on the search itself. Professional equipment should have a frequency range of 10 kHz to 8GHz and will be capable of detecting all types of transmitters – AM, WFM, NFM, sub-carrier, carrier-only and single and double side band. Depending on the equipment chosen you should also be able to scan for audio devices using scrambled, burst, frequency hopping and other spread spectrum transmitters.
Using your equipment to conduct a routine sweep, you could also create a static or tracking transmitting detection system to monitor an area on a permanent or semi-permanent basis.
This system will allow you to detect mobile RF and GPS transmitters placed in a room or in a vehicle. The Ideal unit for conducting technical surveillance counter measures (TSCM) sweeps is to use equipment that will work in any environment to detect a variety of transmitters. This is achieved by using various probes which will be attached to the RF receiver control unit.
The type of probes that you should use during a TSCM sweep including:
- A radio frequency (RF) probe to detect room , telephone and tracking transmitters
- Telephone Analyser probe
- Laser or infrared probe to detect transmitters and other devices operating on infrared frequencies
- The mains power carrier and camera probe is used to detect devices that use the mains power circuit as main power source
- The microphone probe detects both active and non-active microphone which are a favourite method for long term surveillance.
If you are concerned that you are under technical surveillance or suspect that your room, office or vehicle is under technical surveillance learn how to detect the most basic and more sophisticated surveillance devices.
The TSCM sweep equipment we recommend must be designed to detect a range of devices both audio and video with the automatic reconfiguration of the control unit when using the probes you can detect both static or mobile transmitters and create a means of permanent area guarding to counter any hostile technical surveillance.
