if you've ever stayed in an Airbnb I'm sure that you've wondered can I sit on
this toilet without worrying about some creep with a spy
camera there's got to be some way to know for sure and there is they aren't
cheap but this is an nljd A type of counter Espionage device
that has famously been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to
detect everything from hidden cameras to
microphones to data transceivers in fact it can detect any electronic device even
if it is Switched Off watch
this cool right there's one of my
cameras there's another one freaking sick found another one this
thing is so powerful that it will cook your eyeballs and is literally illegal
to use in Japan Switzerland France Germany and many other countries so
given how difficult it can be to access Cold War era spy equipment for many of
you we also grabbed this cheap bug detector off of Amazon to see which one
works better H this one seems to be
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below let's start with our Bayside bug detector from Amazon it cost us only $30
and with that considered it actually has a lot of features it can blast IR to
reveal cameras it has an IR detector defined night vision cameras a magnetic
field detector for GPS trackers and an RF detector to help find devices that
are transmitting on Wi-Fi or Bluetooth frequencies it's this last one that we
hope will be the most useful for tracking down a hidden camera or
microphone let's try it out let me just turn the sensitivity up a little bit and
oh lordy I'm not near
anything so that's a
problem shut
up the guides for how to use those things often instruct you to turn off
any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth devices that are in the area that's no problem during the
Cold War but is virtually impossible today and even if I could turn off all
of my neighbors Xboxes it's still going to be very susceptible to false
positives see in the80s a light bulb
transmitting RF that would have been a dead giveaway but today it probably just
means that your Airbnb host really likes
RGB shut up the final downside is that
if a spy device was configured to record locally or to only transmit on a
schedule we would have very little hope of finding it that's why the pros ignore
toys like this and instead rely on real tools like this meet the REI Orion hgo
4000 a nonlinear Junction detector or
nljd it's kind of like a metal detector
but specifically for electronics and I'm going to show you guys how it works but
before we can do that there are a few safety items absolutely do not point
this at your head or eyes it is a microwave on a stick and it will lightly
cook your eyeballs and turn them opaque not use it if there are anyone with a
pacemaker or a hearing aid in and also do not leave it in close proximity to
any part of your body for more than 5 minutes in a row okay with all of that
in mind the first mode we're going to use is search mode this doesn't tell us
much about what we're scanning but by using pulses rather than continuous
output it allows us to use maximum scanning power without being illegal you
see the FCC won't let me be or let me be me if me wants to Output more than 3.3
watts of RF radiation but they only specify average power and search mode
operates at only a 6% duty cycle meaning that our Peak power can be much higher
without stepping into the illegal realm so what we're looking for then is a high
second harmonic response which is this red line here since that is the
signature of a transistor we're also looking at the third harmonic here on
this yellow line which might be an electronic device but is more likely a
Rusty Nail in a wall so let's give these
vhs's a little scan
here aha oh do you see that it changed
over to semiconductor so there could be an
integrated circuit hidden right here and to show you guys that it won't pick up a
false positive I can scan this circuit tree hoodie from LTT Store.com and see
that no in fact these circuits are just screen printed on so let's go ahead and
change our mode to listen now instead of
bouncing around both bars I can narrow in on just the second harmonic that I'm
looking for and I can actually hear in my headphones bunch of static bunch of
static bunch of static and nothing so what's in here
then could it be a hidden Arduino
yes it could and the coolest part is that it is completely unpowered and not
transmitting anything but our nonlinear Junction detector didn't care it was
able to easily find it
anyway so the only question I have now then is how in the Sam Hill does a
microwave Blaster find Electronics well
originally it didn't the nonlinear Junction detector was invented during
World War II by Charles boville to find corrosion under the paint of planes but
before long they realized hey it was also really good for tracking down spy
devices as you can imagine though as quickly as the nonlinear Junction
detector became popular so did methods to defeated it the CIA for instance
spent a bunch of time and money creating the SRT 107 a special microphone that
has filters built in that will shunt the signal of an nljd to ground rendering it
ineffective meanwhile the Russians developed a different plan when they
were mixing the concrete for the US Embassy in Moscow they hucked a bunch of
dead Electronics into the mix so that there' be no way for the Americans to
tell the real bugs from the false positives very cool history or lesson
lus but none of that answers the question how in the Sam Hill does a
microwave Blaster find Electronics okay okay to understand how the detector
works though we first need to understand what a nonlinear Junction is the
nonlinearity that we're talking about is on the current voltage curve for
something like a resistor or a wire you get a simple straight line like this
More Voltage equals more current which you probably know as Ohm's law when you
have two dissimilar materials touching though like say for example this brass
and the oxidized brass that has formed around it will get some nonlinearity on
the current voltage graph that looks something like this and here's the fun
part basically every semiconductor is
also a nonlinear Junction because semiconductors contain diodes diodes are
typically made out of silicon with one side having small amounts of antimony
added to it called n type material and the other side having a small amount of
boron added called a ptype material an N
type has free electrons while a ptype has holes that simulate a positive
charge since one area has an excess of electrons and the other has an excess of
places for electrons to go naturally some of the electrons will diffuse from
the nide over to the PS side leaving What's called the depletion region in
the center add power to the diode in the correct direction and once you have
enough voltage to overcome the depletion region in the center about6 Volts for
silicon current will flow reverse the direction of the battery though and the
depletion region will get larger preventing the flow of electricity and
making a diode what it is a device that only allows electricity to flow in One
Direction all of this results in a current voltage graph that looks like
this pretty nonlinear right to detect
this nonlinear Junction then all we need to do is run some power through the
device any sort of RF radiation will induce a bit of current in a wire or a
piece of metal that's nearby like this little wire that we hooked up to our
oscilloscope and as you can
see all I have to do is put this here and I end up with a sign wave and since
this wire is a linear conductor it will simply radiate out that signal like the
sine wave we originally generated if the signal goes through a
nonlinear Junction though the reradiated signal will have additional components
and that allows us to tell the difference between a diode and a rusty
nail because of the dramatic difference in how they react to a voltage or a
current applied to their circuits now that we've got the oscilloscope hooked
up we can see how the differ modes operate this particular one is search
continuous where you can see that it's basically just firing out RF at a
variety of amplitudes and frequencies to see if it can elicit some kind of
response it's throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks if we switch
over to listen mode things start to look a little bit more stable but we don't
get the real picture until we Zoom way out that right there is the pulses we
were talking about where it's blasting with higher power on exactly the
frequency to find exactly what we're looking for and then chilling out so
that I don't get a knock on the door there is one thing that kind of ate at
us though typically the current that an RF signal will induce in a wire is very
small like we're talking on the order of Mill volts but since a silicon diode
won't allow any current to flow until about 6 volts how the heck is this thing
able to detect anything well the answer is simple by making it
very very powerful we saw over one volt
in our wire that we stuck next to this thing because again guys it's basically
a microwave on a stick very cool so
conclusion then if you want to be confident that no one is spying on you
should you run out and get one of these well there are actually a couple
problems big problems like you might
imagine this thing works like in a video game right you press up on the d-pad it
enters detective mode and it highlights all the key objects in the room but uh
not so much the recommended scanning rate is about 1 square ft every 3
seconds and that that's for flat
surfaces so a typical small office could
easily take 2 to 3 hours to scan
properly while an executive office could take more like an entire day it is a
long and tedious process that as a general rule of thumb takes about as
long as applying three coats of paint to every wall in a room another problem
they are eye-wateringly expensive a
questionable AliExpress unit starts at about
$10,000 with name brand ones like this Landing closer to 15 grand that's
actually one of the reasons that this project took so long to get off the
ground we had to wait to snag an older unit on eBay which still cost us a
couple of grand that is still a lot of money for nons spy agency folks but I
think the biggest problem though is that an nljd can't detect the most likely way
that someone's going to bug you outside of an Airbnb the chances that someone's
going to go to the effort of hiding Electronics to spy on you are fleetingly
small not because no one wants to spy on you but because these days everyone has
a camera and a microphone on them at all times sometimes more than one why would
I bother physically breaking into your place to plant a device when I could
just remotely access a device you are already carrying with you from the other
side of the planet without ever leaving my chair so if you're concerned about
cameras in your Airbnb that's totally valid but the best countermeasure is
just to look around for anything suspicious we're going to link to a
couple of decent that we found on searching for spy equipment just like
how I'm spying this segue to our
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enjoyed this video why don't you check out our Wi-Fi cracking ban video that
one is honestly a lot scarier than hidden cameras and microphones