Good news for unemployed spys. The FSB („U„R„A, offspring of KGB) is, again, hiring. Its wage, a little bit higher than Wal-Mart level. And its perks are far above the hamburger-flipping McJob's. Irresistible perks are thrown in, like: "See the world, free travel assured. And free funeral, even if something went wrong."

Already, Akiba speciality shops are jam-packed with hordes of anonymous agents who buy up all the professional snoop gear to outfit their personnel. Days of in-house gadget development have gone long time ago. Sure, outsourcing is the norm of this century. Akihabara can supply any spy gear to anybody indiscriminately; cheaper, better and more sophisticated.

Compared to those flourishing "agents" from Russia, the US and China, local Japanese spys are pretty much in bad shape. Stingy Government "restructured" them in bulk. They had really a convenient excuse for this mass-firing, sure, all-covering godsend, subprime.

Don't fondle your K-tai on the escalator steps in Japan. You could be mistaken for a tousatsu pervert, or worse, an unemployed spy.

Poor fired spys are, presently, seen roaming around busy high streets. No, they don't go cap in hand to passers-by, but wear cap over their eyes and follow young girls in mini-skirts. They just stand behind the girl on the step of upward escalator, and take a snoop shot of her underside with their K-tai camera. Yes, they have joined the ranks of those (in)famous Japanese tousatsu (peeping shot) freaks.

There are literally hundreds of tousatsu mags coming to combiniya-san (convenience stores) shelves every week to pacify the dirty libido of Japanese men. Our dole-queue spys send the digital towsatsu pics to those mags, and earn a penny or two. A hard and rough life for these proud ex-spys, indeed.

Some towsatsu guys are inept and downright stupid. So much so they forget to turn off the shutter sound of their K-tai camera, and get arrested immediately. Some even don't know how to turn off the strobe light! Most of them store tons of incriminating pictures in the K-tai memory, and are treated as hardcore perverts when apprehended.

Simply, K-tai cameras are not good enough for the trade.

DIGITAl COWBOY's DVR-VP, spycam disguised as a pen... well, at least, half of it is a real pen. Center, camera unit.

Towsatsu industry is surging ahead. Now, DIGITAL COWBOY, a Tokyo distribution channel of Korean chaebol Hanhwa Group, sells a digital camera/camcorder disguised as a ballpoint pen.

DVR-VP looks like a fat ball-pointed pen, and actually the bottom part works as such. But the upper half (around 9cm, 30g) hides a CMOS image unit (352 x 288 pixels, 15 frames/sec) and a pinhead microphone. Recording format, AVI. 2GB of built-in flash memory. With a full charge of its Lithium battery, DVR-VP can run for 2 hours non-stop.

File size amounts around 500KB a second. 2GB memory can store 4,000 seconds worth of images... well, around 60 minutes of recording time, all other things considered. Not too bad for this tiny gear.

DVR-VP's camera unit. Top, power/recording button switch. Small hole on the top of its clip, CMOS camera. Beneath the clip, microphone.

Power can be supplied through its USB 1.1 interface, and video image, too, can be downloaded to PC. Power on/off and video start/stop are handled by a single push switch on the top.

And one more thing. No simulated shutter sound. No simulated movie camera sound. Only visible sign of "on air" is indicated by a blue LED. This DVR-VP could be a wet dream gear of Japanese tousatsu paparazzis.

Price, 17,800 yen (US$171). Presently (May 26), sold out at DIGITAL COWBOY online shop.

 

cheewee
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kaisei1
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