Little Brother

That was the theory, anyway. Two hours later, I was still staring at the ceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, what I should have done, all regrets and esprit d'escalier.

I rolled out of bed. It had gone midnight and I'd heard my parents hit the sack at eleven. I grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on my desk and clipped the little LED lamps to the temples of my magnifying glasses and pulled out a set of little precision screwdrivers. A minute later, I had the case open and the keyboard removed and I was staring at the guts of my laptop. I got a can of compressed air and blew out the dust that the fan had sucked in and looked things over.

Something wasn't right. I couldn't put my finger on it, but then it had been months since I'd had the lid off this thing. Luckily, the third time I'd had to open it up and struggle to close it again, I'd gotten smart: I'd taken a photo of the guts with everything in place. I hadn't been totally smart: at first, I'd just left that pic on my hard drive, and naturally I couldn't get to it when I had the laptop in parts. But then I'd printed it out and stuck it in my messy drawer of papers, the deadtree graveyard where I kept all the warranty cards and pinout diagrams. I shuffled them they seemed messier than I remembered and brought out my photo. I set it down next to the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things that looked out of place.

Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the logicboard wasn't connected right. That was a weird one.

There was no torque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal operations. I tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plug wasn't just badly mounted there was something between it and the board. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.

There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings.

The keyboard was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while I typed on my machine.

It was a bug.

My heart thudded in my ears. It was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn't a comforting dark. There were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were watching me. Surveilling me. The surveillance I faced at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the Board of Education looking over my shoulder: the Department of Homeland Security had joined them.

I almost took the bug out. Then I figured that who ever put it there would know that it was gone. I left it in. It made me sick to do it.

I looked around for more tampering. I couldn't find any, but did that mean there hadn't been any? Someone had broken into my room and planted this device had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it. There were lots of other ways to wiretap a computer. I could never find them all.

I put the machine together with numb fingers. This time, the case wouldn't snap shut just right, but the powercable stayed in. I booted it up and set my fingers on the keyboard, thinking that I would run some diagnostics and see what was what.

But I couldn't do it.

Hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. Maybe there was a camera spying on me now.

I'd been feeling paranoid when I got home. Now I was nearly out of my skin. It felt like I was back in jail, back in the interrogation room, stalked by entities who had me utterly in their power. It made me want to cry.

Only one thing for it.

I went into the bathroom and took off the toiletpaper roll and replaced it with a fresh one. Luckily, it was almost empty already.

I unrolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until I found a little plastic envelope full of ultrabright white LEDs I'd scavenged out of a dead bikelamp.

I punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little metal clips. I twisted the wires into the leads for a ninevolt battery and connected the battery. Now I had a tube ringed with ultrabright, directional LEDs, and I could hold it up to my eye and look through it.

I'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown out of the fair once I showed that there were hidden cameras in half the classrooms at Chavez High. Pinhead videocameras cost less than a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up everywhere. Sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their customers sometimes they just put it on the net. Knowing how to turn a toiletpaper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a cameradetector is just good sense.

This is the simplest way to catch a spycam.