Espionage Team Building | Spymasters Glasgow

With the end of the most recent series of big brother nearing, it brings to mind the ever increasing use of surveillance. After all the origins of the idea of ‘big brother’ as we all know came from George Orwell’s book 1984 and the idea of a big brother type society that watches over everything we do.

The last statistic I remember hearing about how many times we’re filmed per day by cameras in our streets was over 300 times. That’s pretty unbelievable to think that without your knowledge, or at least permission, you’re being watched by someone that many times a day. But this topic has been talked about so many times that there probably isn’t so much left to debate on the matter. People will generally have strong feelings that it provides a good public service and makes people feel safe, or alternatively, will be of the opinion that it is an extreme breach of privacy. This will presumably be an ongoing debate between either side of the fence.

The actual techniques involved in different types of surveillance is really interesting though. There are obviously the static cameras we have all seen for years, evolving into remote controlled ones by some operator in a booth. These are pretty regular forms of surveillance that can capture actual events day in day out, but what about the real, professional stuff? The types the spy’s use to gather their information whilst on reconnaissance, there’s night vision cameras, infra red, heat sensing, motion sensing, laser targeted, hidden in a cufflink, up yer jumper, in your ear, under the table, in your car, the list is as long as a giraffe’s shinpad.

Here are just a few of our favourite espionage surveillance devices that those budding spy’s out there can buy and use when pretending to be James Bond. We would, firstly, like to point out that these devices will not give you charisma, charm, ability with the ladies, respect, kudos, or mass appreciation. They may, however, get you jailed, banged up, on the register, extradited or looked upon as sad.

What ever the case, they’re pretty cool.

Name: Deodorant Camera
Location: Presumably would have to be used in the gym so slightly limited range
Profile: A remote controlled roll-on deodorant with integrated colour camera.
+ : Small and unobtrusive
- : limited use and how long can you pretend to put deodorant on for! Unless of course you just leave it on your desk but that might look suspicious…

Name: Portable Document Scanner
Location: Preferably in an empty office with massive armed guards securing the perimiter!
Profile: No bigger than a normal pen storing up to 200 pages at the rate of one page every 4 seconds
+ : Easily integrates with outlook, word etc
- : What if you only have 10 seconds and three pages to scan..?

Name: Lipstick Recorder
Location: Handbag (see the negative point…)
+ : Ok, so 007 may not be wanting this for himself but it’s something he should be aware of. What if Ms Galore has one of these in her purse! Forewarned is forearmed after all. Failing that, should he be stuck for a Christmas gift for Ms Moneypenny he need look no further.
- : Not easy for 007 to pull off