An expensive problem, a cheap solution

I saw this while watching the news yesterday (CP24 in case anyone's wondering)

Vaughan mayor's counter surveillance-measures cost taxpayers nearly $3,000

Linda Jackson, the besieged mayor of the city of Vaughan, is coming under scrutiny again after it was found that she spent nearly $3,000 to sweep her office for spying devices, a published report says.

Gino and Mary Ruffolo -- two Vaughan residents -- discovered that the mayor's office paid Protech Consult Services $2,730 for "manual and electronic counter surveillance," the Toronto Star reports.

The Ruffolos uncovered the information through a Freedom of Information request. The newspaper also reports that having the mayor's office swept for bugs was a practice used by Jackson's predecessor, Michael Di Biase, as well.

But it appears Vaughan is on its own when it comes to having the mayor's office checked for bugs. The mayors of Toronto, Brampton and Mississauga, among others, told the Star that they have not had similar checks, and they didn't even think about it.

Reports also say the company that performed the security check has links to a company cited for a possible conflict of interest due to links to a city staffer.

Mayor Jackson sent an email to the Star where she acknowledged that her office was checked for bugs, but she wouldn't say why.

Well, While I was flipping through The Star this morning, I came across this article....

$50 solves Vaughan mayor's 'bug' worry

Ursula Lebana has a $50 solution to Vaughan Mayor Linda Jackson's political problems – and 2 cents worth of advice.

"People never believe it, but 90 per cent of the time, it's the person you trust the most," says Lebana, who opened Canada's first "spy shop" back in 1991 and can attest to the fact that Cold Wars are still being waged in offices, marriages and even babies' bedrooms around the world.

And for $50, the embattled Jackson, who spent $3,000 in taxpayers' money last year to have her office swept for listening devices, could have rented one of Lebana's do-it-yourself bug detectors.

Lebana has armed everyone from entrepreneurs to parents with electronic surveillance gadgets since she hung a few Bond posters on the walls of her Yonge St. Spy Tech store and created the first Teddy cam to help parents keep an eye on their child's nanny.

But she's never been asked to sweep for bugs in a mayor's office.

"That's strange, now that I think about it," says Lebana, her thick German accent dropping to a perplexed whisper. "Maybe it's because they're only around for four years and then they're gone."


The revelation about Jackson is bound to be good for business at Lebana's shop, where stories of stalkings, break-ins or bad caregivers always seem to fuel paranoia that translates into the sales of more spy paraphernalia.

In fact, one of her most popular items – next to the $59 CheckMate Infidelity Test Kit – are DIY bug detectors, ideal for almost any office, which sell for $500 or rent for $50 a day.

Even in bad times, business is booming in the surveillance business, as a steady stream of customers line Spy Tech's two glass-enclosed display cases, trying out everything from pen recorders ($99 plus taxes) to baseball caps with hidden cameras ($295 plus the cost of a tiny video recorder).

Surprisingly, only one guy is wearing a trench coat. (let's hope that's not all he's wearing?.. just saying it all...don't tell me you weren't just thinking that!)

Lebana takes the business of spying seriously – well, seriously enough that the door of her cluttered office features two-way glass. Her son Hans, who manages the Ottawa store, walks in wearing Men in Black sunglasses, even on a grey day.

On the other side of the office door, things get decidedly more high-tech, with steady demands for the latest digital devices from business owners looking to crack down on employee theft or spouses launching sting operations against husbands or wives they suspect of cheating.

There's also a fairly constant stream of people seeking hidden cameras that let them keep an eye, right from their office computers, on how their children or elderly parents are being cared for when they aren't around.

When the big boys call – i.e. the banks – Lebana has a secret weapon, retired RCMP security expert Doug Ralph, a good-natured guy with more than $250,000 worth of counter surveillance equipment. The latest is a $38,000 gadget that can sweep a bookshelf-lined room in under 20 minutes and detect a bug hidden in a binding. He admits he's made that rare find just "a few times."

Ralph has seen both sides of bugs, having planted them for the RCMP as part of organized-crime cases, and now hunting for them when corporations suspect competitors of trying to crack into their phone lines or computers.

"I try to stay away from the domestic issues. They can get pretty messy."

But sometimes trouble just finds him, like when he was driving downtown recently. His monitoring devices picked up voices coming from a Bay Street bank.

"It was a financial planner talking to clients, discussing their assets and where to direct (investments), their names, phone numbers and all this other information. I made sure that what I overheard got back to the director of security so that he would know that one of his employees was using a wireless (headset) so he wouldn't have to stay saddled to his desk – and I was hearing it a block away with my equipment."

(Note: When you use a wireless headset, the base keeps transmitting even when you're not using the phone. Ralph drove by City Hall late one night and could hear a cleaner vacuuming an office.)

Lebana considers what she does "regular things for regular people," and laughs that her German accent – she was born in East Germany but grew up near Frankfurt – is always a big hit with first-time visitors to the shop.

"A lot of them joke that I'm KGB or Mossad, because of the accent."

About 50 per cent of the time, when people think they are being spied on, they really are, Lebana contends. And almost always it's by the person they least suspect.

She's got lots of stories to prove her point, the most telling about a women who was terrified after months of stalking and scratching at her apartment door that escalated into death threats. The frightened woman took her brother-in-law to Spy Tech and he helped her install a peephole camera that turned up no suspects, although the harassment continued.

It was only when Lebana's staff installed a tiny surveillance camera in an exit sign down the hallway that the culprit was outed.

It was the brother-in-law. Seemed he quite liked getting her panicked calls for help and rushing in like a white knight.

in case any of you were curious or wondering, Spy Tech is located at:

Spy Tech
2005 Yonge St
Toronto, ON M4S 1Z8
(416) 482-8588
Get Directions from where you are

Buses wired for surveillance worry experts

Surveillance cameras are gradually making their way onto school buses with education and transport officials defending the equipment as a good deterrent to rowdy behaviour and bullying.

But some privacy experts say the cameras don't always discourage misbehaving and represent a possible invasion of student privacy.

Earlier this month, Pembina Trails School Division in Winnipeg became one of the latest school districts to put surveillance cameras on all of its buses after a 65-year-old driver was charged with sexually assaulting a female student.

Across the country, some school divisions in Canada have already been using such technology for up to 15 years.

Dave Carroll, a safety and legislation consultant for the Ontario School Bus Association, says there are 18,000 school buses in Ontario and the practice of using cameras is not widespread.

But there are boards which use them to discourage rowdy behavior by students.

"To my knowledge, the board would decide to install cameras not so much to monitor drivers, but to monitor student behavior so that the kids would be more inclined to act responsibly," Carroll said from his office in Etobicoke, Ont.

Some school districts place phony cameras with a glowing red light on buses to fool students, he said.

"It's a less expensive way to equip the fleet, and then they move the real cameras from bus-to-bus so the kids never know if they've got an active camera or not."

Joel Sloggett, chief administrative officer for Student Transportation Services of Central Ontario, which provides service for several school boards in the region, said the company rotates about 25 cameras on its 650 school buses.

Sloggett said the principal of a particular school decides whether there's a need for video cameras on a particular bus due to allegations of bullying or physical altercations between students.

"Nine times out of 10, when you put a video camera on, things settle right down because students now realize that the camera is on."

Cameras are also being used on public transit.

The Toronto Transit Commission is putting cameras on its buses after attacks on drivers, Carroll noted.

About 535 transit buses in Winnipeg will also be equipped with digital cameras by the end of 2009 in an attempt to make buses safer from vandals and violent passengers.

But Brian Edy, a Calgary lawyer and former president of the Alberta Civil Liberties Association, said there are always privacy concerns when people are being filmed without their consent.

Edy said parents may be concerned about how widely the tape could be viewed, and who could look at it.

"People will always suggest that cameras will assist us. It doesn't always increase security and that is the unfortunate part of it. It doesn't always prevent a problem," Edy said.

"We have to be careful about getting on that slippery slope of trading away all our privacy, everywhere, in favor of a camera that may or may not be a deterrent."

School bus drivers may end up benefiting from the cameras, Carroll said.

"Some of them may feel that it's a good way to protect the driver against any kind of false accusations. So the drivers might benefit from that as well."

But Carroll said it's rare to hear complaints against bus drivers, especially complaints of a criminal nature.

"We just don't hear very often of any kind of driver conduct that would warrant putting them in tens of thousands of school buses across Canada. It would be a very expensive proposition."