Creep recorded women with hidden surveillance camera inside Starbucks restroom

A 25-year-old man hid a video camera disguised as a plastic coat hook inside the women's restroom of a Starbucks in Glendora, CA, and secretly recorded more than 40 women and children using the toilet over two days. The man "downloaded the device about every hour to his laptop computer while sitting in his car," according to police. (LA Times)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Stonewalker

Aw… I thought he had built this himself and designed it to broadcast to his laptop. He just bought some crappy spy hook that doesn’t have any wireless capabilities. Lame.

He actually walked into the women’s bathroom every hour and downloaded the media to his laptop. Creative, but not smart!
Stonewalker

Oh, also pervy. Very pervy.
voiceinthedistance

I wonder if anyone has measured his anogenital distance yet?
Geoduck

I’m sorta curious how an “unemployed student” can cough up $50,000 in bail money.
- Cowicide
  
  Yeah, I wondered about that too, but I guess with a bail bond you only pay a small percentage of that.
  - AirPillo
    
    Usually it’s 10%, which does not at all feel like a small percentage when dealing with sums of that size. That’s still a $5,000 bondsman’s fee.
  - Gulliver
    
    Yeah, I wondered about that too, but I guess with a bail bond you only pay a small percentage of that.
    
    I think the defendant pays the bondsman the percentage up front and the bondsman then pays the court, if the defendant fails to appear for trial, out of a standing insurance agreement between the bondsmanâ€™s financial institution and the court. The bondsman then has the legal power to collect the lost bail money from the defendant through applying for liens on the defendantâ€™s assets and suing them in civil court. For larger bail amounts the bondsman will also require the defendant or â€“ going by one of NPRâ€™s Freakonomics segment â€“ a co-signer for the defendant such as a family member to put up assets such as a home mortgage as collateral.
    
    If you ask me the whole things blows. Just let the guy chill in the slammer until the court gets around to him. I get that heâ€™s innocent until proven guilty â€“ and we are talking about the LAPD here â€“ but bail bonds reek of the â€œhow much justice can you affordâ€ mentality. Someone whose loaded could front bail without paying a percentage to a bondsman, and as long as they show for trial they lose nothing in the balance.
Anonymous

for once i’m actually glad i read the comments to an article. huh.
ernestoelgato

SICK
Anonymous

If this is true, which I don’t think it is, then the creep needed a lot more than the device pictured to see the video remotely. This is a self contained unit that is made to record on itself and not connect to a network. So this pictured device would need a lot more to it to download automatically. Like battery pack or hard wire to power the device for any length of time over 5 hours, internet connection which it does not have and all the wires and network access that any device needs to work. More likely scenario: He manually changed the SD card and then dumped the video on the laptop. We sell devices like this http://www.uspystore.com, certainly not for the uses listed here. But for theft investigations, security and general investigative needs. Privacy laws are needed but we may as well start making baseball bats illegal because some people use them to hit and potentially kill others. Make the penalties severe enough to scare the smart ones and take the dumb ones out of circulation.
Anonymous

this is what happens when a pervert is also a nerd
- Anonymous
  
  nerdvert? perd?
Anonymous

A great book that explores the idea of everyone being able to see anyone at any time (even in the past) is: The Light Of Other Days (Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter). [ this thread seems to be going in that direction ]
Tesla_Girl

–definetly a creep
Anonymous

That’s one fetish I never understood. How is it sexy to watch somebody sit down and have a slash, possibly cutting a few air biscuits while they’re at it? Did his mom force him to go potty while she watched? How do you end up with that particular sort of neural twist?

Regardless, he ought to face a hefty fine and a few months in jail, at the very least.
- Jack
  
  Some people donâ€™t do these kinds of things for their sexual pleasure. Sometimes itâ€™s just a bizarre compulsion. I grew up near the boardwalk and remember guys under the boardwalk looking up skirts. Which makes 100% no logical sense since if they looked at the beach they could see women in bikinis. Who knows!
  - gravytop
    
    I don’t think this proves that the compulsion isn’t a sexual one. Rather, that for every guy who gets a charge out of seeing a girl frolicking in a bikini, there’s another who likes to see her popping a squat over the porcelain punchbowl — or getting dipped in a giant vat of chowder, or dressed up like a panda and chasing dwarfs, or … you get the idea.
    - Jack
      
      I shouldnâ€™t judge. I have a â€œcure girlâ€ fetish. DONâ€™T BE HATINâ€™!
      - Jack
        
        Correction: â€œcute girlâ€ fetish.
  - Anonymous
    
    Under The Boardwalk by The Drifters just got creepy all of a sudden. Not only is the protaganist doing this, he took his kid with him!
- blueelm
  
  Well, the fetish for watching some one on the toilet, while hard to *get* as it may be, isn’t really the problem here so much as the sense that his desire to get images of this overrides other people’s right to feel safe enough to use a toilet in private.
  
  If he had people in his life that were willing to sit down and use the toilet while he filmed them, it really would be a personal matter between them after all.
  
  I got no clue how people get any fetish really. Some people seem prone to it by nature.
Anonymous

I knew I saw this somewhere… be on the lookout!

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/usb-rechargeable-1-3mp-pin-hole-motion-detection-spy-av-camera-clothes-hook-black-tf-card-slot-50586
Creperie

The article says that police have identified 11 victims and are trying to identify the others.
Why on earth do they need to do that?
- Xeni Jardin
  
  You know, that struck me as an interesting point, too. I suppose because they have a right to know.
  - Anonymous
    
    Since when do the police, or any law enforcement agency, or for that matter, any government organization, give a crap about the victim’s “right to know”?
  - Anonymous
    
    They’d want to ID the victims partly because their age is significant. Each minor will likely be a case of child porn.
Anonymous

If he’d had it wifi enabled, he probably wouldn’t have been caught right?

Also, is it just coincidence that it’s Glen Walker reporting from Glendora?
loroferoz

Holy Cow!

Is this coming? David Brin on Wired:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/brin.html

The makers of this gadget, do they realize that they are making a spy tool of a fixture of every public restroom? How about a toilet paper holder spy camera?

Now, the guy who did this goes to jail. He is filming people in intimate situations that they choose to hide from view, without their consent. Children cannot give consent, anything sexual you do with them/to them/about them is illegal.
- Anonymous
  
  not the best analogy. Coat hook you can see anywhere and I can see using it to spy on nannies or an office kitchen or something. I’d get a little suspicious if a toilet paper roll holder suddenly popped up by the eating tables in my office. The only place for that is a bathroom stall.
- Gulliver
  
  @ loroferoz
  
  Is this coming? David Brin on Wired:
  
  Brin makes a lot of compelling arguments in his book The Transparent Society. But he was not arguing for the end of privacy. He was suggesting that in public spaces, where privacy is already evaporating, that it would be better for people to acknowledge the fact instead of living at the mercy of powerbrokers with the illusion of privacy. I donâ€™t agree with everything he has to say about cryptology, but his larger point about the need for sousveillance is one we ignore at out own peril.
  
  @ Anon #45
  
  A great book that explores the idea of everyone being able to see anyone at any time (even in the past) is: The Light Of Other Days (Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter).
  
  A very underrated book. This is disconcertingly reminiscent of the creepy scene where the teens spy on their classmates wanking, and still other classmates spy on them.
  - loroferoz
    
    I think he is talking (at least in the interview) about the possibility of having “bugs” everywhere. Because they become ever more powerful and smaller.
    
    He argues for a (not specified how, exactly) equality of watchers, because privacy will end. That privacy laws only benefit the powerful and wealthy, who have lawyers (and leverage) both to enforce the law in their interest, to defend them when they break the law, even to prevent widespread discovery that they did.
Voris Klopchick

A nerd would not have to walk into the building every hour to download the take. He’d pipe it through the store’s wifi and retrieve it from a dead drop site while miles away. Of course, he’d also have come up with a better site to surveil…
InsertFingerHere

How did he make this Wifi is the question. Not that I would spy on women like that, but curious from a hacking point of view.

Cuz if they cant explain that properly, then some of the facts of the story need checking.
RebNachum

No, /now/ I know what “squick” means.
Anonymous

I think identifying the victims has to do with trying to find folks who are willing to press charges, testify in court, etc.
- Xeni Jardin
  
  That is likely correct.
blueelm

“Which makes 100% no logical sense since if they looked at the beach they could see women in bikinis”

Unfortunately that only makes no sense if you are thinking that the nudity of the women is what they are after rather than the kick out of violating consent to be looked at.

It makes perfect logical sense, it’s just twisted.
- Caroline
  
  Exactly. Guys like this get off on violating a woman’s privacy and consent. If he just wanted to see naked ladies, he could have used his laptop to access the entire internet full of porn.
  
  Brandi @38, with a TV remote, you’re seeing the infrared beam it uses to talk to the TV. The digital camera in your cell phone responds to infrared even though your eyes don’t, so you can see the beam. Do these kinds of surveillance cameras emit an infrared beam? If they don’t, you wouldn’t see anything. (Infrared beams are used for motion detectors, so if it was a motion-activated surveillance camera, you’d probably see something.)
Sapa

Out of interest was he an economist by any chance?
Anonymous

One reason to notify the victims is so that they can sue the guy in civil court. Criminal charges are often plead down and end up being a slap on the wrist but a whole bunch of civil suits will take every dime that he has. The guy is unemployed but somehow he has money to be buying gadgets like these. Not for long.
Anonymous

Wait a minute. San Dimas is a real place? For the past 22 years I just thought it was the fictional home of “Ted” Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esquire. Apparently it can now add a technophile-perv to its list of residents. Whoa.
Anonymous

My wife goes to the bathroom with the door open all the time and believe me, there is nothing sexy about it.
Anonymous

“I told you! No wire hangers, ever!”
forbid89

Perfectly Normal, Perfectly Healthy
Anonymous

Lol!

Disguised as a coat hook or disguised as an interesting looking sex toy?
- Anonymous
  
  first thing I thought aswell: that’s one phallic hanger!
Anonymous

If you use your phone like you are going to take a picture and look through it; you will see a red laser if a camera is around. Try it with a tv remote, you can’t see the laser during normal view but with a cell phone you can.
YarbroughFair

Shame on you guys!

The description for the camera states it will last “up to” 90 minutes on one charge (via USB cable}. It can NOT transmit to a laptop, images can only be viewed from the device. So he either had more than one or found some way to recharge the “built in” battery with a USB cable or he just switched them out. The product photos and description show that it’s screw mounted. And many buyers commented on the low battery life.

Please think more critically and read the product description before commenting on the devices functions. Sitting in his car and watching from his laptop is impossible with this device.

http://www.dhgate.com/motion-activated-door-coat-hook-spy-camera/p-ff8080812e32cc68012e5698fbfc4578.html
- BikerRay
  
  Says it has motion detection, so maybe that’s 90 minutes of video, not just 90 minutes of “on” time.
Brandi

If you use your phone like you are going to take a picture and look through it; you will see a red laser if a camera is around. Try it with a tv remote, you can’t see the laser during normal view but with a cell phone you can.
YarbroughFair

CORRECTION, he could have used a 16mb wifi sd card.

At a glance
Video Record
Audio Record
Still Pictures
Low power consumption
Long recording time
Video format: AVI
Resolution: 1280 x 960 @ 30fps
Built-in rechargeable battery
Support T-Flash Card expend to 16GB
Automatic motion-activated
Parameters
Condition: Brand new
Made of high quality and durable material
Compact design and easy to use
Support AVI video format.
Support 30 fps for 1280 x 960
Support USB1.1 2.0
Support 16GB T-flash card. (maximum)
Build-in lithium battery which can make a video more than 90 minutes
Color: black
Package Contents
1 x Clothes Hook camera (Black)
1 x USB cable
1 x Power adapter
2 x Sticker
2 x Screw
(No original package)