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The DIY spy

Posted on 11 Feb 2009 at 15:03

But Spooks said...

The garish document scanners and plug-ugly eavesdroppers may be effective, but they're not exactly the sexy devices you see in TV shows such as Spooks. I'm in Walthamstow at the showroom of Lorraine Electronics and Craig Benn is shaking his head ruefully at the mere mention of the "S" word. "People come in here, they've just watched an episode of Spooks and they've got all these ideas of what they can do, and how easy it will be. We have to sit them down and explain the reality."

So, just what are those Spooks myths? The big one is personal tracking, according to Benn. People have been conditioned to believe that a tracking bug is something that can be lost under a fleck of dandruff. It isn't true. Most bugs require a battery and GPS chip, and at best they're going to be the size of a matchbox. It's impressive, but it isn't going to sit in the lining of a cheating partner's suit without them noticing. The best chance of tracking a person, says Benn, is to track the vehicle or mobile phone. The Mambo tracking device, for example, has built-in GPS and ships with a magnetised case. You pop the device into the case, plant the device under the car, and a few minutes later you're watching a tiny green splodge that represents the vehicle moving around on Google Maps. It's accurate to around 3ft, and given that it can wake itself up from sleep mode when it feels the car rumble into life, the battery can last up to five hours.

"A pizza firm contacted us once; the balance sheet wasn't adding up," a representative for Mambo manufacturer Falcom tells us. "There was CCTV, but it wasn't showing anything suspicious. They put a tracking device in the delivery vehicle. Turns out the driver was making extra pizzas but delivering them to places that weren't in the orders."

For anybody who doesn't have £300 to spend, a cheaper option is GSM mobile-phone tracking, a service now so easy to purchase that it's actually a little alarming. A quick Google search will bring up a rash of sites offering parents the "peace of mind" of knowing where their children are at all times, or offering businesses a chance to keep an eye on staff working out of the office. I decide to try FollowUs.co.uk, for no other reason than because I like the name.

Signing up is a five-step process that requires an email address, UK billing address and credit card. After typing in my address, and the mobile phone number of the person I wanted to track - don't worry, they knew what I was doing - a PIN code is sent to whichever postal address you entered. Entering this PIN code activates your account, and from there it's simply a matter of clicking the "Locate Mobile" button. Five minutes later, the tracked phone will buzz with a text message asking for consent. This is a legal requirement, but it's no stretch to imagine a jealous husband borrowing his wife's phone for five minutes, consenting and then erasing the message. There's also no hard and fast rule on how long that consent lasts.

The service itself is patchy. GSM tracking offers only an approximate location of the phone, and the accuracy of the service depends on the density of mobile basestations in the area. In a populous area, you're probably looking at an accuracy of around 150m, but out in rural areas it could be as wide as 5km. As my test subject wasn't hiking through the valleys this wasn't a problem, and when I rang her to ask if she'd really spent the day at the Millennium Stadium she was suitably unnerved to ask me to turn it off immediately. Which, of course, I did. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?

Author: Stuart Turton