Telephone taps are devices that allow telephone conversations to be listened to or recorded without the users of the telephone line knowing. It’s been known for the law enforcement agencies to dive into telephone exchange boxes to place listening devices. However, we’ll focus on taps that can be connected within a residential or business premise.
A telephone tap might be a hardwired device connected to a tape recorder, or it might be a transmitting device. You can have parallel and series versions of both hardwired and transmitting devices. It’s common for hardwired taps to be parallel devices and transmitting taps to be serial devices due to the complexity of the circuitry. The distinction between series and parallel is how they are connected to the phone line, and what they are capable of intercepting.
A series telephone tap involves inserting the phone tap between the actual telephone and telephone line. There are two wires that carry the audio signal in a telephone line in the UK, which are numbered 2 and 5. You need to disconnect one of these wires and connect it to one wire of the series bug. You need to connect the other wire of a series bug to where you disconnected the telephone wire. Essentially the electrical signal flows through the bugging device.
A parallel telephone tap is completely different and is installed without disconnecting any wires. You connect one wire of the parallel bugging device to wire 2 on the phone line, and the other wire to wire 5 on the phone line. So the parallel device is essentially peeking on the electrical signal flowing in the telephone line.
The advantages of series and parallel taps can be found on Spy Review in an article I wrote a while ago.
With the pervasiveness of mobile phones these days, there’s not a great deal to be gained from bugging just a landline. However, bugging a mobile phone is incredibly difficult to do!
A compact telephone line recording lead that allows you to record phone conversations on to your standard voice recorder. The adaptor is approved for use on UK telephone lines and is compatible with any analog phone line.
This lead can be used to record conversations from both wired and cordless telephones connected to the phone line.
In this day and age, digital voice recorders are considerably superior to their old analogue tape counterparts, but are surprisingly affordable. The Olympus VN-5500PC is a high quality digital voice recorder that can record up to 221 hours of audio to an internal 512MB internal storage device.
Using a USB cable, you can download all of the audio recordings from the voice recorder in the high quality WMA audio file format. Using an adjustable recording quality option, you can record 35 hrs 20 min of audio in high quality mode, 69 hrs 35 min in standard quality mode, and 221 hrs 30 min in long play mode (which is the least quality).
The digital voice recorder is fitted with a 3.5mm input socket so that you can use an external microphone or connect it to a telephone recording device like the one above. The digital voice recorder also has a voice activated recording mode, meaning it only records audio when it detects any sound. The voice recorder operates on 2 standard AAA batteries and measures only 102mm x 37mm x 18.8mm.
The Olympus VN-5500PC is available for only £54.99.
