HOW WIDESPREAD IS ELECTRONIC EAVESDROPPING?
Although telephone taps and room bugs were widely used by everyone from government agencies to organized crime for many years, prior to 1960 the general public paid very little attention to Electronic Eavesdropping. This complacency was shattered when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge revealed the existence of a very sophisticated microphone used by the Soviet Union to spy on our Ambassador to the USSR. The microphone actually consisted of a resonant chamber installed in the Great Seal of the United States which was hung directly in the Ambassador’s office. This resonant chamber acted as a diaphragm that vibrated in response to the spoken voices in the area. These vibrations were then monitored via an ultra-high frequency beam transmitted from, and received by, a van parked near the building. The worldwide publicity that this story received was quickly followed by articles in virtually every major publication detailing various acts of Electronic Surveillance committed by everyone from
