Vatican can beat bugs for £150

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April 13, 2005
Times
Vatican can beat bugs for £150
By Joe Bolger



THIS will be the first conclave to be held in the age of easy electronic bugging and the ubiquitous mobile phone. Yet anti-surveillance technology has also moved on since the cardinals appointed John Paul II in 1978 and should allow the authorities to guarantee confidentiality.

At the top of the Vatican’s shopping-list could well be a £150 device, known as an acoustical jammer, which would interfere with undetected surveillance bugs. It would also ensure that anybody using a long-range microphone or tape recorder would hear nothing of the discussions.

It generates white noise — soundwaves varying in amplitude and frequency. This ensures that anyone able to get close enough to the chapel — difficult in itself — to listen in would be unable to filter the conversation from the additional noise. The white noise is undetectable by the human ear, but interferes with sound heard through electronic devices.

The cardinals could opt for a jammer to interfere with use of a mobile phone in the area. Such devices have, more mundanely, been used to ensure peace and quiet in French cinemas and New York restaurants. The problem is that users outside the cinema or restaurant — or in this case the Sistine Chapel — could also be affected. The signal emitted can in some cases reach for miles.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,172-1566756,00.html

So...not a cockroach story after all...although in 1970 the Soviet Union admitted that its spooks had experimented with trying to implant micro-transmittors into roaches, to use in surveillance ops....