Spies gain the secrets of their enemies through surveillance, and the advantage of eavesdropping on them is that they can obtain information that is worth exploiting and passing on. Eavesdropping can be done with covert tracking activity and cutting-edge surveillance technology.
As long as someone wants to track you, they can do it, no matter where a person goes or what they do, they will definitely leave some traces or digital dust.
For centuries, businesses of all kinds have been doing the same thing, secretly monitoring for intelligence, assessing potential threats, and ending attacks.
Today, some intelligence agencies are equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance equipment when carrying out espionage operations.
From miniature eavesdropping microphones to ultra-small cameras and drone technology.
If a spy wants to control the enemy's movements, the best way to do this may be to find a way to eavesdrop.
Good monitoring results, always rely on the most advanced prior art.
If we look back a hundred years ago, the First World War will find that aerial audio surveillance was at its peak.
It is a huge wiretapping operation, they can eavesdrop on it for miles away;
Being able to monitor aircraft and orient themselves was the most advanced technology at the time.
Today's cameras can accurately locate aircraft about 80 kilometers away.
Audio surveillance is a technique that uses eavesdropping devices, or buggers, to perform clandestine eavesdropping.
Bugging became a common technique for intelligence agencies to monitor in the 1950s and 1960s.
It is usually a wiretap that uses both power and battery, and a small radio transmitter together.
The transmitter's small size and ability to be easily hidden in different objects make it a common device for spies.
The U.S. ambassador became a popular spy
A very creative case of surveillance was invented by the National Security Agency, a Czechoslovak intelligence agency in the 1970s.
They are monitoring the U.S. ambassador and his imported leather shoes;
When the imported shoes arrive, they are intercepted by the NSA and then implanted with a bugging device.
The U.S. ambassador at the time had a maid who managed his clothing, ironing clothes, taking care of shoes, and other chores.
In the morning, before the maid gives him the shoe, she will pull out the switch control needle inside the shoe.
The battery would start the transmitter again, and when he entered the office wearing those shoes, he would start being monitored.
Later, a U.S. anti-surveillance team detected signals from the ambassador while operating inside the embassy.
They quickly determined that the ambassador was equipped with a bugging device, and in the process of checking his clothing one by one;
They eventually found that someone had manipulated the shoe, which had a transmitter and a battery pack inside the heel.
This is a low-tech transmitter that can be detected by a normal wireless receiver.
Soviet eavesdropping technology
This is not the first time that the U.S. ambassador has been the subject of covert surveillance;
An early monitoring device called a passive resonator was invented by the famous Soviet musician and scientist LeonTremen in 1945 specifically for the KGB.
The monitor does not contain any electronic parts and is still breathtaking to this day.
It works by a signal transmitter that emits an UHF wireless signal from an antenna inside a passive resonator, extracts the conversation, and then reflects it back to the receiver.
A passive resonator is basically a device that is activated only by radio waves or microwaves;
Because it does not transmit signals, it is generally not detected.
In August 1945, Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, received a gold-lip bugging device hidden inside a special gift.
It was the Young Pioneers of the Soviet Union who presented the American ambassador with a beautifully carved wooden American national emblem;
Harriman proudly hung it in his office, and only Soviet agents needed to be nearby, within a few hundred meters to launch specific microwaves, the golden lip bugging device could be activated, and all the conversation in Harriman's office would be overheard.
For seven years, every sentence in the office was captured by a Soviet eavesdropping station across the street.
The golden lip was later discovered by accident, when they took apart the U.S. coat of arms and found a disc about 1.25 centimeters thick as a coin.
That was the microphone, and inside was a thick metal wire about 30 centimeters long connected to the microphone that was placed behind the bald vulture position on the plaque.
The thick metal wire was the antenna, and the Soviet agent across the street would receive the signal as soon as the wireless signal was transmitted, and the antenna in his office would be strong enough to power the microphone.
Then the sound in the room is transmitted back through signals of different frequencies.
The use of wireless eavesdroppers by ambassadors was common, and Soviet intelligence agencies, who had been navigating surveillance for years with skilled technology, had a very complete system for gathering U.S. intelligence.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, microphones were found in many places inside the U.S. Embassy.
Whenever a KGB is found, it will continue to install monitoring devices in the next place.
In the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, people found that some typewriters were also passive;
Inside the typewriter is a part of an aluminum structure that extends from one side of the typewriter to the other.
What the Soviet agents did was take the typewriter apart and replace the aluminum strip inside with one that looked exactly the same but had been processed, ostensibly solid.
In fact, it was already stuffed with a bunch of electronic devices.
These electronic devices work in such a way that every character typed out by the typewriter is stored in a small buffer in an aluminum strip.
As soon as the cache was full, the contents were transmitted to a neighboring Soviet listening station via an RF signal.
This form of surveillance lasted for at least a decade, and the typewriter incident became known as the "Gunner Project."
The United States finally found a total of 16 such typewriters at its embassies in Moscow and Leningrad.
In today's technological conditions, we can only imagine that the gunner of the typewriter of the past is equivalent to the software and hardware installed in your laptop, but the operation is much more complicated than the typewriter.
In the late 1970s, Soviet laborers in Moscow used Soviet building materials to build a new embassy.
Before they began to build the wall, the American side conducted various inspections of the beams and columns and found that almost every beam and column had "special gifts" from the Soviet Union.
Microphones filled the building's façade, and the only way to ensure the safety of that building was to demolish the entire building and throw it away, using American labor and building materials from the United States.
U.S. intelligence surveillance
Not only was the Soviet Union spying, but U.S. intelligence agencies also had wiretapping programs against the United States.
The operation, code-named "Octopus," was designed to target the Soviet ambassador in Washington.
At the head of the Soviet embassy building was a huge flat roof, with some pipes laid outside for roof drainage.
The NSA made a section of pipe the effect of visual illusion;
When you look at it, you will feel that it is empty, but in fact the middle of the pipe wall is thicker.
In that section of the pipeline the United States placed a radio receiver and a small explosive device.
And the spool that circled hundreds of meters of wire, in this way they connected all the microphones in the building through the walls, and then connected them through this drainage pipe.
The key is how do you get the wires out?
Until it rained heavily in Washington, U.S. agents were already waiting for the opportunity near the embassy.
In the instant of lightning and thunder, they detonated a small explosive device.
Falling debris will bring one end of the telecommunications into the sewers, and the agents can connect the telecommunications in the sewers.
Surveillance work sometimes takes place in remote and dangerous places, and a program code-named "Operation Ivy Bells" operates at 120 meters underwater.
Soviet troops once installed an unencrypted communications cable on the seabed of the Sea of Okhotsk to connect their most important naval base, to the Kremlin.
They thought the cable was absolutely safe, but the U.S. Navy found a way to crack it.
First of all, the United States has a gas mixture that allows divers to stay underwater for quite some time.
Navy divers are transported to the vicinity of the target site, and then they will hike to the underwater cable on a pitch-black seabed,
They found that they could place a sensing clamp around the cable, and it could replicate everything that passed through the cable
A large logger is built into the clamp as long as the disks are changed periodically.
Operation Ivy Bells proved to be an intelligence gold mine;
It provided the United States with a wealth of information about the Soviet Union's naval operations over the next decade.
Resourceful planners of espionage can even provide innovative solutions for the implementation of surveillance when targets are unapproachable.
The United States once went to great lengths to spy on two Soviets in Mexico City.
Two Soviets were in the heavily guarded area of Mexico, so someone came up with such a concept;
Put the microphone and transmitter into a projectile like a bullet, fire it by firing it, and the bullet will be embedded in a tree near their talking point.
This allowed the conversation to be collected and teleported; they really succeeded in designing a device that could withstand the impact of a shot and the blocking force when entering the tree.
Modern high-tech monitoring
Today, eavesdropping devices can be hidden almost anywhere and have become more difficult to detect.
The most famous tool is the Nagra Credit Card, one of the most effective and sophisticated listening devices on the market.
The Nagra Credit Card Recorder is a device developed by a Swiss company in 2013;
It can only be used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and it can be printed with any pattern on it, or used as a special access control card.
Imagine how efficient it would be to replace your work id around your neck with Nagra.
Wherever you go, the digital information you record is stored in that card forever.
Once you've left the workplace, simply download it to your computer or upload it to the cloud, making it a particular threat to intelligence work, a high-tech listening device that collects human voices, stores signals digitally, and relays them.
The most common and easily monitored device in the world is the mobile phone, as long as you use the mobile phone, you can theoretically be monitored.
But it's a great tool to use from the perspective of spying on others.
In addition to listening devices, surveillance devices have become the tool of choice for modern spies.
It can be hidden from spies or in their belongings, and has been miniaturized.
The most common of these is a regular pen with a miniature camera.
You can put it in your coat pocket and no one would have thought that it was actually a surveillance device.
Now some ultra-small cameras are only a few hundred yuan, so small that you can put it anywhere and connect via WIFI everywhere.
These are the several types of surveillance devices that we are working with today.
They provide a whole new way for espionage with the ability to eavesdrop on enemy secrets and are the main strategy of espionage.
However, obtaining a bird's-eye view or direct eye monitoring is crucial in the tracking of targets, military personnel, and enemy weapons.
This is the air surveillance and the collection of surveillance intelligence which is everyone's wish, "I wish I had the ability to see a bird's eye" or "I wish I had an eye in the sky".
Because then I could see that side of the mountain, or see what was going on in other towns
Today's artificial satellites are basically the efficient eyes of the sky.
However, their disadvantage is that sputniks are difficult and expensive to move
Now they are replaced by drones.
The endurance of the human aircraft can be up to 40 to 42 hours
They can hover in one place, providing you with the mobile Sky Eye you deploy to provide you with information you can deploy it anywhere.
There's no need to risk losing your life, so modern drones are likely to be the ideal eye of the sky in a tactical posture
Very small drones have been developed by different agencies and have made great strides in appearing in airborne surveillance systems
The use of wide-angle moving images has greatly improved the military strength of drones.
This ensures that it straddles the city from front to back while tracking thousands of moving targets
A system called the Banshee's Gaze is the ultimate version of the Eye of the Sky, a $15 million military surveillance drone built by the Pentagon.
Designed to prevent terrorist attacks, it can record all other information at the same time when zooming in on the picture of any area of the ground,
What's even more remarkable is that it can shoot high-resolution images of 1.8 billion pixels, making its image resolution 150 times more powerful than mobile phones.
The secret information gathering process, led by the National Security Agency, was leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013, revealing that the scope of surveillance involved not only national security and espionage but also civilians.
Today's electronic surveillance gives intelligence agencies inside information about enemy call plans and expectations.
But because of the sheer volume of information transmitted over the Internet, algorithms and other search methods have been developed to process the vast amounts of information collected in order to find out
Specific intelligence objectives, such as predicting terrorist attacks, have the upper hand in foreign policy planning against enemy countries.