A U.S.A online gun retailer, has published an excellent article explaining the differences between each generation of night vision gear.
Here’s your crash course in NVGs. Night vision technology is broken up into different levels. Gen 1 night vision is the gear you buy at Wal-mart for $500. Gen 2 costs a lot more and is widely used in the law enforcement sector. Gen 3 is what our military uses. Gen 4 is scary cool and the price of a Rolex.
While this article is about night vision devices for military use, the description of the characteristics of each generation and their associated costs is good background information for the Investigator contemplating the purchase of a night vision device for surveillance use.
Investigators observe to gather intelligence.
Yelling a child’s name in public when trying to get them off the playground, out of the store, or into the car will identify a family member by name. The same is true for anybody else hailed in this way by the subject. Knowing the person’s name makes it easy to strike-up a conversation about the subject to gather further information.
Parking permits, school stickers, and vacation magnets on the subject’s car, team shirts and other personalized items are a wealth of information to any Investigator who cares to notice. In minutes an Investigator could know the the names of the subject’s kid and school, along with the subject’s favorite beach and what sport he likes. This is excellent life-style data.
On Wednesday, October 14, a global alliance of those covertly targeted by covert mind and body manipulation technologies believed to be emanating from intelligence agency sources, are holding a worldwide protest against the use of these devices on nonconsenting individuals. The technologies used are capable of remotely accessing and adversely affecting the human brain and body functions so therefore raise serious privacy issues for all who value freedoms in modern society.
Most Private Investigators have encountered people who believe they are being “watched”. Most need the kind of help only provided by certain types of doctors.
Organized Stalking
Organized stalking sounds plausible, that is why it feeds the delusions of susceptible people. (You will sometimes encounter this along with the tin-foil hat stuff mentioned above.) Do a Google search for organized stalking (American spelling) or gang stalking, or group stalking, and examine some of the sites in the search results. It is easy to see how all this stuff can seem plausible to a susceptible individual.
This falls in the category of:
What They Don’t Teach at Detective School.
Flâneur (feminine, “flâneuse”) translates literally as a loafer or a person who loiters, but the poet Charles Baudelaire defined it as a passionate observer.
“There is no English equivalent for the French word flâneur. Cassell’s dictionary defines flâneur as a stroller, saunterer, drifter but none of these terms seems quite accurate. There is no English equivalent for the term, just as there is no Anglo-Saxon counterpart of that essentially Gallic individual, the deliberately aimless pedestrian, unencumbered by any obligation or sense of urgency, who, being French and therefore frugal, wastes nothing, including his time which he spends with the leisurely discrimination of a gourmet, savoring the multiple flavors of his city.” (Cornelia Otis Skinner, Elegant Wits and Grand Horizontals, 1962, Houghton Mifflin, New York)
The essential elements of the flâneur are also the essential elements of being a good investigator, reporter, researcher, and any other job that requires a well-developed ability to observe and report.
By ROCCO LaDUCA, Observer-Dispatch, Posted May 29, 2009 @ 04:29 PM, Last update May 29, 2009 @ 07:27 PM, ANNSVILLE —
Unfortunately, Wehnke never took the time to confirm that what he was shooting at was in fact a turkey, investigators said. Instead, Wehnke shot a 26-year-old private investigator from New Jersey named Matthew Brady.
But this was no ordinary investigator. Brady had been sent to the Mohawk Valley to investigate Wehnke concerning matters of worker’s compensation, investigators said.
An excellent article about the “recent discovery of Chinese cyber warfare attacks on foreign computers, on communication computers of visiting dignitaries, and espionage activities to assist a friendly country is building weapons of mass destruction (WMDI)” entitled China’s Silent Warfare at BLOg Source INTelligence reveals a lot about China’s espionage and cyber attack strategy.
Camcorders & Investigators
A great deal of research is done by investigators to select just the right camcorder to get the highest quality for the best money.
Sony’s new HDR-TG5V, a high-definition (HD) camcorder with 10x optical zoom, is equipped with a GPS receiver that can geotag recorded videos and still photos. This is also the smallest HD camcorder. It has built in support for Navteq digital maps. Maps can be viewed on the camcorder’s 2.7-inch LCD and you may also find geotagged locations on a map. Sony includes software to view geotag information on a map.
Is GPS and geotagging a feature we can look forward to or just an expensive novelty?
Your mobile phone can become a slave bracelet if it is compromised by malicious software.
Under certain circumstances, if you lose sight of your mobile telephone, then you may reasonably assume it has been compromised. These circumstances are more common than you might think. Here are two cases of this that I have encountered over the last year or so. Continue reading ‘Mobile Phones & Tin Foil Hats’
The Tuesday Zits cartoon in my morning paper got me thinking about how much things have changed.
In another life, I was assigned to a surveillance team that concentrated on the subjects who commuted by underground and train. Of course this required extensive training. One whole day was spent on how to use the newspaper as a prop. This was essentially teaching us how to fold it like a lifelong commuter so we wouldn’t look out of place. I guess PDA’s, iPod’s, and all manner of similar gadgets might make that unnecessary today, but if it isn’t, there’s a web site to teach anybody that arcane skill.
Weeks were spent memorizing all the lines, schedules, and stations. Then came memorizing where all the station payphones were located and learning to constantly look for and remember the location of the nearest public telephone. Today’s cell phone makes that unnecessary too. Many cell phone cameras are better than the small format cameras we were given as is, or as part of certain props. I do wish I had been able to keep one of the Rollei 35 B or later Rollei 35 S cameras though.
Surveillance Book
This book’s title is deceptive: (It appears on our Books page)
Every surveillance operative should read this book for its description of what one can learn from proper observation. It is also a must-read for IT security people for its description of these attack methods. This book is about compromising somebody’s security through surveillance and deceit. It also includes many tips for improving what you observe and report as an Investigator.
According to a news article in the Summit Daily News, a private investigator from Glenwood Springs, CO, was arrested Thursday after placing a tracking device on a car. The tracking device was for a divorce case the investigator was working. A witness saw the investigator crawl under an SUV and then drive away. The witness called the police who found the device attached under the SUV. The police treated the unknown device as a bomb, evacuating the area and calling in the bomb squad. Read the whole story Click Here See also Denver TV News
In Canada the use of a vehicle tracker requires a warrant pursuant to CCC S. 492.1.
Doing surveillance was once how I made my living. I’ve always enjoyed watching people as they go about their everyday lives. Of course you must learn to carefully look for the unusual details, to look at faces, walking gate, and peculiar habits. The sense of accomplishment from observing things most people would miss is something hard to describe. Unfortunately, as city traffic turned homicidal, doing a surveillance became a survival ordeal. The old habit of constantly looking around and watching for unusual behaviour has remained and sometimes adds amusement to my dull life. Continue reading ‘The Shopping Mall Chameleon’
Andre Ramshaw, Financial Post Published: Saturday, March 01, 2008
The closest I came to executive protection during my tenure as a private detective was keeping a takeout coffee from spilling onto the floor of my boss’s minivan during a particularly dull stakeout.
For most of Canada’s private investigators, keeping CEOs safe takes a distant back seat to tracking insurance claims. No femme fatales in dimly lit alleyways, no Maltese Falcons, no Ferraris — just hours squatting in the back of an anonymous van fitted with tinted windows, sipping coffee from a flask, videocam at the ready.
In other words, surveillance, surveillance, surveillance…
Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological “dirty bombs” and nuclear weapons.
Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach. Fischbach is working with Jere Jenkins, director of Purdue’s radiation laboratories within the School of Nuclear Engineering…
Tiny solid-state radiation sensors are commercially available. The detection system would require additional circuitry and would not add significant bulk to portable electronic products, Fischbach said.
The mobile telephone has become a modern-day slave bracelet for so many people, now it might also become a national security appliance.