It doesn’t take much to motivate someone to spy or eavesdrop. Spy devices are readily available to anyone with online access. Even those who should know better are willing to breach the privacy of others for their own benefit. Duty of care may require security sweeps be scheduled for law offices, accountants, and many other businesses who handle the confidential affairs of their clients.
South Africa: Advocate Penny Hunt has been suspended from practicing as an advocate for six months. Judgment handed down on Tuesday that Hunt was responsible for instructing a surveillance technician, Houston Wayne Impey, to plant a “listening bug” in the ceiling of the advocates’ chambers. She was also accused of having a GPS tracking device attached to the car of a fellow advocate, Mergen Chetty.
Her actions were allegedly linked to an incident where her husband punched Chetty at a Bar function in 2010.
Impey had testified that he installed a listening device in the ceiling above the Bar secretary’s office at the request of Penny Hunt.
He said he put a receiver on her desk to receive signals and installed a program, Audacity, to be able to hear sounds picked up by the listening device. On a later occasion he had upgraded the software.
He also said Penny Hunt paid him R10,000 (approx 770 USD) to install the bug and tracker plus R5,000 ( approx 385 USD) on an earlier occasion to “sweep” her office.
The judges also said that as far as the listening device was concerned the expert evidence led on Hunt’s behalf, showed that when it was found in the ceiling the device could not successfully transmit audio signals and “could not work”.
However, they said the question was not whether or not Hunt had caused a successful listening device to be installed. The question was whether she had requested it be installed. [www.news24.com]
Interesting to note that they used the program Audacity to listen to the audio files. This could indicate that they may have had interest in editing the files which is something Audacity could do. Otherwise most audio files could be listened to with standard media player programs.
More information can be read at news24.com and pressreader.com
If you handle confidential matters for your clients, even though your company may be small, you still may be a target of corporate espionage or other eavesdropping activity. Contact us to discuss proactive scheduling of sweeps to be sure your client communications and information is safe and secure.
Addendum for those interested in the role of an advocate, from South African Legal System:
The legal profession in South Africa is divided into advocates (barristers) and attorneys (solicitors). No dual practice is permitted. The advocates’ profession in South Africa is a referral profession. This means that a client approaches an attorney who, in turn, instructs an advocate.