Nowadays, it's impossible to outwit the professionals, unless you yourself are a poacher-turned-gamekeeper, that is to say a trained bug planter who went to the private sector offering debugging skills.
According to one such former KGB specialist, by the end of the 1990s the smallest bugs were the size of a match head and had an internal power source lasting days. The device is simply dropped in a target area and conversations can be monitored from 200m away.
They can be disguised as balls of chewing gum or moulded into cups made of clear glass. Power sources may be internal and last years, or devices are powered from afar using lasers or microwave technology.
Lasers can also be used to interpret voice vibrations on window panes, said Bolton, noting that industrial espionage is now the main focus rather than the political machinations of the old Bond movies.
And cutting-edge technology now allows listeners to use the subject's stationary or cellular telephone as a receiver-transmitter.
"We assume everything we say can be picked up but we presume they no longer have the resources and manpower these days to monitor it all," said a US journalist working in Moscow.
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