The World of Spy Tech

The technological advancement we know doesn’t only provide beneficial and useful information, but also helps to shape crucial data and pass on to be used for our daily lives and businesses. But what if long before the tech craze, it was used to “spy” – something like a 007 in real life?!

While most of the cutting-edge and explosive technologies we see on the movies are a bit exaggerated, it was indeed a true event that in real life those occurrences do happen to spies and trained professionals as they use stealth techs to obtain and pass on information of the target back to the intelligence agency. It might seem too good to be true, so here’s how the world of spy tech started long before we thought technology was “a thing”.

The spy game is a serious business, and throughout history, the tools and technologies developed for it have mattered as much as the spies themselves. A lot of them were used during World War II where espionage operations were highly dependable on tech tools to bug, surveillance, and wiretap enemies between walls. Some of them were hidden inside concrete, wood carvings, watches, typewriters and even inside the shoe soles. Even back then, these spy techs were already small, undetectable, and highly damaging.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, most of the embassies, government offices and intelligence agencies were severely bugged and monitored by enemies, even one managed to listen to the world leaders’ conversation and captured crucial state affairs documents. It was that serious and highly utilized that the advancement of spy tech kept getting smaller, smarter, and dangerous. It wasn’t until the late 1980s when the Internet was invented and the world of spy tech took another great leap to infiltrate more serious matters of espionage.

It was then that the spy techs used during the battlefields wars became used to the web. When the Internet first came around, it has become so convenient even for spies to enjoy the wireless world as the Internet has transformed the world of spy tech. Technology combined with the Internet has transformed and enabled the field of spy tech to gain an upper right hand. As simple as hacking, breaching, and cyber attacks are one of the few simplest forms of espionage to access and compromise big data on countries that is done until this date, namely “cyber espionage”. 

These days, cyber espionage is widely used and known to gather sensitive or classified data, trade secrets to intent a competitive advantage or even worse, as a threat of weapon. Federal government cyber attacks were one of the main targets for many hackers and spies, one of the known cases happened in 2020 where a major cyberattack suspected to have been committed by a group backed by the Russian government penetrated thousands of organizations globally leading to a series of data breaches. 

Wait, so spy techs are more common than we think? Even in the simplest form of cyberattack and hackings? It also might be around us?!

Unfortunately, yes. As the Internet and technology advances, spies were open to more options to do espionage from their own convenience. Simple hacking would do the job and gain the information needed. But what and how did they use that information… are strictly secrets! But another shocking fact is that spy techs are becoming more easy to obtain for normal people and even harder to detect for the authorities. Do you have this eerie feeling that sometimes you are being watched and heard by someone? Well, high chance that it might be “spy cams”!

Humans are benefiting from the advancement of technology, and so do many other criminals, especially one where they would sell your personal information and footage to the black market obtained through hidden spy cameras – used to record people unknowingly. Spy cams are considered legal and it’s affordable that you could buy one from any random gadget store, making spy cams highly accessible for being used by criminals to coerce and blackmail people of their privacy. They are micro-sized, hard to detect, and often installed in everyday objects around you. Without you realizing, spy cams “might” be everywhere. 

The world of spy tech has brought a lot of history in the shaping of technology and the Internet itself where we see how it started to be used as espionage now had turned into a chance for criminals to exploit. As modern spy tools are faster, smaller, more accurate and more easily concealed, crimes with spy cams become difficult to detect and the perpetrators difficult to catch. The technological advancement that brought upon the world doesn’t always bring impact but also effect… and you’re living in both of them!