03 November 2016
The Hidden Listeners
One man’s resistance.
By Chin Chin
I always knew that I was being watched but I never knew by whom. Was it an organised crime syndicate? Probably not, because one old computer with the screen cracked would hardly justify twenty-four hours of surveillance from Raffles and Co. After all, they must value their own time at over £1 an hour. What about deviants then? Sex-starved and attractive young women who find retirement-age men enormously attractive? Well I always keep an eye out for those and I have to say that they are less common than one might imagine. Perhaps not them, then. Extra-terrestrials? What do you think I am? Some sort of lunatic? No, they can be eliminated too. What was it Sherlock Holmes said? “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Well there’s only one category left, spooks.
It makes sense really when you think about it. We read in the papers that MI5 is recruiting a whole lot of extra agents. Presumably the KGB, the CIA and the Sûreté are doing the same, as no doubt are the bizarre collections of mad monks one typically meets in a Dan Brown novel. What are all these people to do with their time? If they just sit around they will find their budgets cut so they need to be active. I think that one of the things they do is to spy on me.
So far, so obvious, but I have always wondered exactly how they do it. There are certain tests you can use, of course. For example, note carefully the last piece of rubbish you put in your bin and then have a look after a day or two to see if it is still there. That is splendid fieldcraft in theory – you will note that my interest in this area has resulted my picking up the lingo – but it’s harder in practice. Last week I carefully put the final touch to the contents of my rubbish bin, a seductive little note headed “for your eyes only” annotated in green, which I am told is the colour of choice for terrorists and mad monks worldwide. That night I heard a noise around my rubbish bins. Obviously I did not go out to tackle those responsible. You would have to be a fool to take on a highly trained operative from MI5, the KGB, the CIA, the Sûreté, or the Vatican, unarmed. No, even my recent training in yoga would not equip me to deal with an assassin carrying a silenced Beretta. The safe thing was not to intervene but to wait until morning.
Going out at dawn to look in the bin I felt all the excitement of the big game hunter on his way to examine the traps. Now I would bottom this surveillance game for good. Would my piece of paper have been disturbed or would it still be where I had left it? There were a lot of flies buzzing about the top of the bin and when I opened it I found that it was rather fuller than before. Some old beer cans had been added and someone had been sick in there. How like a secret agent to try to cover his or her tracks in that way. I sniffed the vomit. It smelt of wine. A fifth growth from the Medoc unless I was very much mistaken. That meant the Sûreté.
The task of digging through the top of the bin was not a pleasant one but, sure enough, I came across my piece of paper halfway down. The green ink was very smudged but it was hard to tell whether that was because it had been put through some sort of process, perhaps dusting for fingerprints or something like that, or because vomit reacts with green ink. In the end I had to accept that my test was inconclusive.
It was all rather depressing and, having carefully washed my hands in accordance with NHS guidance, I sat down to read The Times. And, my goodness, there was my answer at page 7. “Smart gadgets with stupid flaws leave homes vulnerable to hackers.”
Apparently the problem is “smart gadgets”. According to the article, a smart coffee maker can be rigged to strip information from the wi-fi and provide financial information and passwords to the surveillance services. So can smart cameras, come to that, and also smart baby monitors. Clearly the last one has to be taken with a pinch of salt. It is one thing for the spooks to fill their time listening to chit chat but to spend twenty-four hours a day listening to the cooing of a baby and trying to deduce secrets of national importance would strain the patience a little. Still, the question was what smart gadgets did I have in my house?
Well, my computer is at least ten years old and has a crack in it, so no one could possibly describe that as smart. The television too has been there a long time and if the spooks can bear to watch the endless repeats which the networks impose upon us nowadays interspersed with moments when the screen goes fuzzy, then they are more patient than I am. No, I must look for something really smart, something with a brand name like Louis Vuitton or Burberry. Okay there’s nothing like that so let’s come down the scale a bit. What about John Lewis or Tesco? Is there anything from them in the house? Then I spotted it. Yes, there was the kettle I had bought from John Lewis two weeks ago. It is an electric one plugged into the mains – and therefore clearly vulnerable to cyber attack – and certainly smart. In fact, I chose it because of its elegant red and grey casing. That had to be the listening post, the weakness which the security services had found in my defences.
What should I do? It seemed a pity to throw the kettle out because it was an expensive one and anyway I use it to make my tea. Was there some other way of defeating it? It was at that stage that my mind went back to wartime spy thrillers, stories where people ran a tap or turned up the radio to prevent the opposition overhearing their conversation. That’s the answer then. Whenever the kettle is on I will turn on my hip hop CD at full volume. That should thwart them. What is more, it’ll be the same CD over and over again. That will do more than thwart them. It will teach them a lesson.
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