Is spying on a spouse legal? Can my spouse use the information from their surveillance against me? Lee Rosen, retired divorce attorney and founder of the Rosen Law Firm, discusses.
Is my House Being Bugged Transcript
Is my house being bugged? Well, yes. It could be. We’ve had many, many cases where the house has been bugged. One spouse has been listening to the other secretly for a variety of reasons. Now understand that the information that one can get from bugging your house can be used in these cases, especially in alimony cases. Adultery, for instance, is a big factor when we are deciding alimony, and spouses spy on one another in order to figure out what’s going on.
We represented a woman who believed that something was wrong. She thought there were too many coincidences. Something just wasn’t right. Her husband kept showing up in places before she even got there. She felt she was being watched, so she came to us, mentioned these things, and asked us to hire an investigator to go in and scan her home. The investigator went it and it was literally like an electronics store. There were so many different devices and gadgets hidden in that home. There were hidden microphones. There were hidden video cameras. An example was an alarm clock that had a camera and a mic set in it that was watching her whenever she was in that particular room. Her phone was bugged. Literally she was being watched 24/7.
You need to be concerned about this. I want to give you some ideas for things you can pay attention to if this is something that you are worried about. So I mentioned that alarm clock with the microphone and the camera built into it. That’s a clue. Be aware if you are suddenly getting gifts from your spouse, especially electronic gifts. They can hide these devices in everything today, and so if you see new things popping up around the house, pay special attention.
Pay attention if you feel like things are physically out of order. If it looks like the house has been rummaged through in some way or another, be aware of that. Look for signs that there had been some modification to the home. Sometimes a microphone or a camera might be imbedded in a wall. Keep your eyes open for evidence that something has physically been done to the structure of the house. These are all warning signs if you see them coming.
Now the thing that we see a lot of is changes to the computer. If your spouse suddenly says, oh honey, I need to take the computer into the shop to get the hard drive repaired, that should be a big heads up. If anything is different about what’s going on with your computer, it’s worth worrying about, and if you notice the computer acting funny, if it’s behaving strangely, doing something unusual, maybe it’s dramatically slower than it used to be, be aware of that.
The telephone, if your spouse has been fooling with your mobile phone, be aware of that. I like to keep a password on mine. And if you have a land line phone, and you hear any weird scratching noises or beeping noises, that sort of thing, that can be a clue that something is going on with you being monitored.
And then finally, the same thing that the woman in the story that I told you were dealing with, the weird coincidences, if you’ve got people showing up that shouldn’t be there at odd times, people seem to know your plans, or your spouse let’s something slip in conversation, pay attention to that. That could be a sign that you are being monitored.
Okay, so pay attention. I don’t want to make you paranoid. I don’t want you to be worried that everything that seems out of sorts means that you are being monitored. But realistically this is a time when somebody may be paying attention to what you are doing, and there is the potential that they stray over the line into doing something that may be illegal so pay attention. And if your level of concern reaches to the point where you really feel like something needs to be done, this is a good time to talk to a lawyer who will have a referral for you, usually to a private investigator that is equipped with the technology to go to your home, to go to your office, to go through your vehicle, and make sure that you’re not being monitored, and if you are, to clear out the situation. This is a problem that can be solved and that can be taken care of.
