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A regular looking cigarette carton that doubles up as a spy camera. An ordinary computer mouse that not only points and clicks but also eavesdrops on conversations and transmits them over the air. A little phone clip-on gizmo that alters the tone and timbre of your voice to disguise it. A remote controlled, free-roving security web camera that beams out a video and audio stream of the going-ons in your house or office over the Internet… No, these are not celluloid figments conjured up by the fictional Major Boothroyd from the Q Branch of the British Secret Service for an upcoming gal ’gadget loaded, Double-Oh-Seven Bond movie. These are just some overt, off-the-shelf gadgets for covert real-life operations. That’s right: Spy gadgets that you can really use.
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Cigarette Box Spy Cam
Never in their wildest dreams could Philip Morris, the makers of the macho Marlboro cigarettes, have thought that their iconic pack of ciggies would metamorphose into camouflage-wear for a spy camera. The camera inside comes with a wireless hand-held transmitter/ receiver and digital video recorder (DVR) which allows you to watch all the action from approximately 20m away. You can plug the receiver into a TV or an LCD monitor and watch video footage live or record save to an SD memory card. It boasts of four available transmission channels to bypass interference. The innocuous looking faux Marlboro pack that can even be mistaken for a pack of cards and can be placed anywhere — in the corner of a room, under a table or chair, atop a pile of books or bookshelf — and not look out of place at all.
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Night Detective Night Vision Binoculars
Snoopy the hound just acquired a pair of cat’s eyes. Equipped with an infra-red illuminator, this pair of night vision binocs is touted to bestow upon your set of peepers the power to see through complete darkness. The multi-coated, all-glass lenses work towards enhancing image sharpness and reducing blinding glare in lit up areas. To bring objects closer to you or for examination, these Night Detectives feature 5x optical magnification (which really translates into five times magnification). And no, they are actually not meant for fun at all. These professional sleuth specialists are intended for serious hunters, campers and of course detectives, police officers, and private eyes on shady missions.
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Covert Wireless Spy Camera Alarm Clock
It looks like an absolutely ordinary Hickory Dickory Dock alarm clock. It even functions like one. But its raison d’être is to serve as an indoor covert surveillance device. A tiny camera concealed in the face of the clock transmits video imagery of whatever’s happening in the room to a wireless video receiver. The receiver displays the video on its 2.5-in LCD screen. While no details of the exact operating range between the transmitter and the receiver have been made available, at this price tag one can presume that the range will not exceed 15m-20m at the maximum. The clock looks durable and given its humdrum appearance, it easily blends in with the surroundings without arousing any suspicion. So you can deploy it with impunity as a thief catcher or a ghost buster.
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RF Spy Detector
With so much sly gumshoe equipment floating around, how do you protect yourself? To ferret out any sods poking their sneaky snouts into your life you need some counter surveillance gadgetry in place. There’s all kinds of equipment available: bug detectors, hidden camera locators and RF (radio frequency) detectors. This RF Spy Detector, for example, notifies you about all RF wireless frequencies in your vicinity. So, if you sweep the room with something like this you can’t be peeped at or tapped. With a working range of 10m, the Detector unearths frequencies between the 100MHz to 300GHz range and is powered by a 23A battery. The device even helps you flush out the location of the impinging implant as you move around in the room. Maybe before the next top deck board meeting happens, this is what you should acquire, sir ji!
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Spy Pen Camera
Lace up your James Bondish Oxfords, straighten your tie, don a black bowler hat, clip this pen into your Harris Tweed blazer’s breast pocket and you are all set to play a super sleuth. The pen is fitted with a tiny camera that can capture both still photos as well as moving images. While its video resolution at 640 x 480 pixels may not sound much on a specifications sheet, the pen can prove to be mighty useful when it comes to intelligence gathering on the sly. Audio is recorded though a mini in-built microphone. All videos carry time and date stamping. Its 2GB of internal storage stores over an hour of video footage. Pop it open and you’ll find a USB connector for recharging and PC connectivity. You need to charge it for an hour and a single charge lasts 90 minutes. And no, it’s not a decoy. It actually writes like any normal pen and even comes with three ink refills!
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WiFi Spy Finder
Quite similar to the RF Spy Detector, this one protects your privacy by locating any wireless cameras, eavesdropping gizmos or monitoring devices that use WiFi. It is simple to use and being compact makes it pocket-friendly in terms of size. And not just spy-catching work here: it also serves a dual function of finding you wireless hot spots (2.4G, 802.11b/ 802.11g wireless Internet access points). Therefore, you can use it to detect a WiFi hot spot even without wasting time and effort to switch on your laptop.
Spy Mouse
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On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, or not, this little mouse can really rat on you. Concealed inside its otherwise utterly innocent prim, proper, plastic mousy exterior is a condenser microphone capable of listening in on ambient conversations as well as a GSM SIM card for transmitting all the audio it picks up. This USB Spy Mouse works like any normal mouse, but let’s you silently eavesdrop on conversations once you dial-in. And yes, you can listen in as long as you like too. It has a listening range of 8m-10m but you can expect it to reduce if someone is using the mouse — the palm of a hand is bound to muffle the mic to an extent. So, beware when that demure system’s lady with green licence-to-kill eyes switches your mouse. She could be the spy who secretly loved you!
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Pen Drive Camera
You could never imagine that a ubiquitous, plain vanilla-looking (though a mite oversized) pen drive could really be an incognito camera now, could you? Available in capacities of 16MB to 256MB (no, not GB) this 2-in-1 pen drive stick doubles up as a tiny 2 megapixel handycam. It can give you 1,600x1,200 pixel resolutions on the imaging front and can be hot plugged into a PC for data transfers. And don’t think that carrying a camera in its innards makes it fragile. The puny decoy drive can withstand about one kilo of weight. You need batteries to power the camera and it is not just Windows but also Mac and Linux compatible.
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Ajoka LED Flashlight Camera
Another interesting example of surreptitious spy craft. It appears to be a handsome looking torch. But in actual fact it conceals an in-built pin-hole camera that is capable of recording High Definition video. The recording starts at the mere press of a button. The AVI format videos are captured at 30 frames per second at a resolution of 1,280x960 pixels. It can even snap up still images at 1,600x1,200 pixels. A microSD slot that can hold an upto 16GB card serves as the memory bank. Audio is recorded at 192Kbps. There’s a USB port for transferring the video and still image files on to a PC. Quite obviously, there is no LCD viewing panel on the torch itself. Besides, the recording time is only two hours and you can record only 30 minutes per session.
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Wrigley’s Chewing Gum Camera
Could you ever think of concealing a camera inside a chewing gum wrapper? The camera carries a microSD slot for up to 8GB cards, provides 640 x 480 resolution clips at 15 frames per second, records up to an hour in a single session and has a 2-hour battery life.
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Plug Socket Spy Camera
Never trust a plug point! It could contain a spycam like this 640x480 pixel, 30 frames per second device. This lithium ion backed power outlet camera can record up to five hours of video and support up to 4GB microSD cards so you can playback the video even on a cellphone.
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Wowwee Rovio
This amazing security webcam on wheels can be controlled via the Internet to send you streaming video and audio of any location in your house or office that you wish, for days on end. Low battery? Baah! Rovio finds its charging dock on its own and recharges itself!
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Voice Changer
Yes, like the moniker says, the contraption can grant you anonymity by altering your voice over the phone. The cheaper ones only work with conventional wired landline handsets, not even with cordless ones. The $100 gizmo can take on cellphones as well.
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GSM Voice Transmitter
Tuck this tiny GSM SIM bug away in a room and dial the card number to eavesdrop on conversations. The triband (900, 1800, 1900) device has a listening range of 10m, standby time of seven days and an active listening time of 40 minutes on a single charge.
