I and my friend once walked to a illegal landfill to see what's there. We saw a CRT TV there. We pry it open and took the parts we needed. At some point we saw an old video camera in the place of one loud speaker. The camera could watch trough the speaker grill easily. If I remember correctly the camera had its power transformer directly hooked into the mains power pins of the TV PCB. I think my friend still has that camera (after about 15 years). I remember it was all analog. I really need to ask him about it.
+Ilja Sara Not a bad hiding spot. I wonder where the video camera was sending the images. Was it to a storage device or over a wireless link to a someone watching? Interesting find.
Skinny R&D: It was very old at the time we found it. I belive the TV was thrown away because a new one was to replace it. And the camera was from about the same time. If I had to guess the TV was from early 80's. If I remember correctly the signal went via a short wire to the antenna socket. So the actual TV signal and the camera signal used the same cable. How it was monitored is only guessing. Also what's interesting was that the TV was thrown into illegal landfill (a trench in woods near city). That pretty much rules out any city or government public places where it might have been for surveilance, since city/govenrment here would not use illegal landfills. Also maybe worth of mentioning, back then I lived in Helsinki the capital of Finland. I think that kind of surveilance here is a rare thing. I'll ask my friend to send pictures of the camera if he still has it.
Skinny R&D. Well. Got mail from my friend. Unfortunately he had get rid of it ten years ago. :( But he told me some interesting note about it... The cable from the camera was indeed connected to the antenna socket. But there was something extra added in between the TV signal receiver PCB and antenna socket - a signal band-block (low-high-pass) filter. It made sure that whoever was using the TV couldn't accidentaly tune in to the frequency of the camera's monitoring signal and expose the hidden camera. That's a clear evidence it was indeed made with the intention to spy someone. The rest is only guessing.
Pretty cool. Does that phone pre-date sim cards? I wonder if they would request a location from the phone, or if it was just automatically spamming the GPS location. Funny that it has a Piezo speaker in it. You would think that would never be used unless you're trying to freak out the driver of the vehicle.
+SeanHodgins so my thoughts on this are: - It's a pretty old (2005?) verizon phone, so it's probably from before they had SIM slots. - regardless of that, the phone certainly has a 2G internet connection, and being powered by the car battery, it can "spam" the location information every time the receiver calculated it (usually once every second). the fact that it's using a serial port suggests that it's using a very common protocol known as NMEA, and NMEA messages are very small (something like 100 characters/message). Even with extra data to say which phone it was coming from, you can get that connection speed practically anywhere. it's also light to store on the phone for a few hours (100 bytes/second end up being 360 KB/hour), in case it doesn't have a persistent connection. - it can ALSO be that it's using plain SMS messages for it, but in that case I guess it would need to be much less frequent (like once a minute, which is probably fine for investigation reasons, you can't really send a plain old text message every second). if it is indeed SMS-based, it just needs to send it to a number which will recognise the number the text was sent from, and add it to the map/alert the investigator if it approaches a certain area/etc. - the piezo sounds like an awesome way to scare the people you're tracking, especially if combined with custom ringtones. P.S.: Jason, it's good to see a new video from you!
+João Andrade I'm assuming this ran using the SMS method, although I'm not sure. As you said, there definitely is no need to have real time, second-by-second tracking in most cases. As far as the piezo speaker, since you have the car long enough to wire this thing under the dash, why not wire the ringer to the actual speakers of the car. Talk about a heart attack! Thanks for watching guys!
Why was this person targeted. Also, if it took them 6 years to find it, and they found it because they were suspicious from being followed, I assume they were followed/tracked for 6 years? Thats an awful long time to follow someone and not find what ever it is your looking for.
+pugs2300 The video is edited there are many info that he talked about redacted to protect the source. Like in 5:47 "Lo and behold they have found these extra goodies?" My guess is they probably found a lot more stuff aside from the gps tracker. That he cant cant talk about to protect his clients confidentiality.
what other things would have been hidden in the car? I mean if someone were gonna try to have listening device i would imagine they would have built it into this existing device since all the required bits are there. wouldn't make much sense to have several separate devices to do what this one device could itself.
+pugs2300 The target was completely unassuming. To the vast majority of the public, the possibility that someone could be tracking you via technical means seems so ridiculous as to be impossible. It's the stuff of James Bond films. Furthermore, there are many reasons to keep a tracker in place over the long term. The longer an aggressor wants to have the device in place, the quieter and stealthier that aggressor needs to remain. In this particular instance the person doing the tracking was playing the long game.
+pugs2300 I believe you are on to something there. When I said in the video that I thought it was possible audio could be transmitted with this device, my thoughts migrated to the phone's inherent feature options to autoanswer. The phone could have been setup to autoanswer and allow the caller to listen in on what was occurring in the car. However, the audio would have been absolute crap as the microphone would have been inside the black box and under the car's dashboard. I would have expected to see the microphone remoted away from the box and put in a position to extract the best audio. If the installer had enough time to take the whole dashboard off, one would have suspected that they would have had the time to install a mic as well. Perhaps audio just wasn't a priority.
I wonder if these were ever found due to the parasitic drain they may have caused. Would your car be oddly sluggish when starting after it sat a few days?
Thats an outdated unit real time from tracking products of Colorado, it ran on the amps network, it was basically a gps engine blowing data through a cut up cell phone on verizon or another carrier. they were big and heavy but worked well as with software and dial up or a cell modem one would dial directly to the device through the software. they cost around 1500.00 in the day, plus a monthly fee to the carrier. They worked well, the mapping sucked but it was a good product in its day.also it was so expensive to buy and maintain not many folks would spring for it. the only thing good about that device compared to today's gear is that device was as close to real time as it could get with no delay.
+Rick “Wireman” McGyver You are right about the big and heavy part. Felt like a brick. Had no idea about the software side. Thanks for filling in the blanks!
