Electronic and Audio Surveillance
The intricacies of electronic surveillance make it a specialty all its own. This section will attempt to cover the high points of this most important subject. Legality is of the utmost importance, and you need to know the laws in the states in which you work.
Bugs, Taps, and Wiretaps
The term bug usually refers to a microphone placed somewhere in a room which picks up conversations and transmits them by radio frequency, either wireless or through power lines, to a receiver outside of the room. A tap usually refers to a device that has intercepted the lines of your phone and is recording the conversations. Many taps of this kind are available online and even at Radio Shack.
A wiretap placed on your phone by law enforcement is neither of these things. When a police wiretap is instigated, the phone company runs an extension of your line to the particular law enforcement office. In other words, with a wiretap in place, when the phone rings at your house, it also rings at the detective's office or FBI, just as if it were another extension. A wiretap isn't put in place lightly. A search warrant is necessary to place a wiretap, one that cannot be obtained without probable cause. It's highly unlikely that the police or federal government is tapping a citizen's phone. If they are, the citizen is suspected of something. It's more likely that a nonpolice tap may be on the citizen's phone.
Title III Law
Title III, the federal wiretap statute, makes it illegal to intercept any wire, oral, or electronic communication. A business owner can use an extension phone to monitor employee conversations during the business day. Any criminal conduct found in this way is admissible in court, yet the moment the conversation becomes personal, recording must stop.
Title III also permits the recording of telephone conversations as long as one party to the conversation is aware of it. This is called one-party consent, and it means that if the investigator records conversations on her phone or uses a recorder on her person, it's a legal recording because one party to the conversation is aware of it (the investigator herself). The other party doesn't need to be informed of the recording in order for it to be legal.
What is criminal eavesdropping?
Criminal eavesdropping involves the intentional use of any device to over-hear or record communications, whether the eavesdropper is present or not, without one party's consent.
All but twelve states are one-party consent states. The all-party consent states are:
California
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Illinois
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Montana
New Hampshire
Pennsylvania
Washington
There are some exceptions to all-party consent. In California, one-party consent applies when one party is involved in criminal activity, including extortion or blackmail. This means that if someone is blackmailing you in California, you can record that person in order to prove the criminal activity, even though the state usually requires that all parties to a recorded conversation give their assent. Another exception occurs in Arizona, where telephone conversations can be recorded by telephone service providers with no-party consent when criminal behavior is involved.
In states with all-party consent, verbal notification of the recording must be provided and a beep must alert the parties that recording continues. In the case of cell phones and wireless phones, the federal one-party consent standard applies. Scanners that can lock in on cell phone conversations are no longer legally sold, but they're still out there. Many have been sold over the years, and it's impossible to halt their use or know who uses them. Therefore, be aware that these scanners exist, and act accordingly.
Calls across state lines are tricky. Federal law normally supersedes state law, especially if the action in question crosses state lines. Yet in this case, the stricter all-party consent applies — sometimes. Judicial discretion has been different in the past. This causes a problem concerning a call made from a state with one-party consent to a state with all-party consent. Can this call be legally recorded? Judges tend to handle it differently, but it's safer to assume that the stricter law applies. When calls involve Canada and the United Kingdom, be aware that both these countries, as of now, allow one-party consent.
If you don't need to record the conversation but merely want to know the numbers dialed, you can obtain this information in a few different ways. Pin registers capture the phone numbers dialed on outgoing calls, and trap and trace devices capture numbers dialed on incoming phone calls.
Children's Tracking Device Phones
Fitting children's phones with tracking devices is a debatable strategy. All a child has to do is turn off his phone, “forget” to take it with him, leave it with a friend or in a car — you get the idea. He can even plead interference or that the phone didn't ring at all. What's worse, if the child is abducted, the first thing the abductor will discard is that phone. Realize that if you're aware of those types of phones, abductors can be also. Even if the child gets a message to the parent, he and the abductor can be far away in short order.
Can I tap my children's telephone conversations?
Parents may pay the phone bill, yet they have no legal right to listen to their children's conversations. If you tap, you can't count on judicial leniency — you may get the one who's tough on these laws. Besides, most kids use cell phones!
GPS devices for locating children are promising, but they must be placed in something that cannot be discarded easily. Researchers are working on these now — bracelets and necklaces that are difficult to remove hold promise, but they are also dangerous if the abductor tries and becomes frustrated with her inability to remove them.
