DIY wiretap kit for kids
Elenco Electronics's "Telephone Bug Kit" (soldering required) gives your kids everything they need to build a dime-sized wiretapping device that lets them listen in on your phone conversations. Educational and creepy! Link (Thanks, Tyre!)
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... lets them listen in on your phone conversations just like the government does!
...comes with codebreaker manual and homeland security jr executive badge.
I think Matt Blaze blogged about this a few months ago when ToysRUs was selling the kit.
http://www.crypto.com/blog/wiretapping_for_kids/
Good thing I, and a lot of people I know, don't have a land line.
I'd have loved that as a kid.
what i used to tap the phone when i was a kid was a hi-impedance ear piece that came with my crystal radio kit.
ps is anyone else having problems logging in to leave comments?
Is our children learnin'?
I used to play with the phone lines all the time when I was a kid in the 80's. Fortunately my parents encouraged it. I had wire taps, extra extensions enabled by frankenstein-like knife switches, speaker phones built into my desk drawer, passive taps to listen on the lines without opening the circuit, and all sorts of gizmos and lights powered off the in-line power. All this freakish experimentation set the stage for a later interest in computers and the internet.
Pfffft. I was doing this with my friend Chris when we were in fourth grade back in the mid-Sixties. In fact they used to sell these little induction coils with suction cups over at Lafayette Electronics that you could stick onto the telephone earpiece and then plug into a tape recorder or amplifier.
I'm glad to see someone is still selling such things today. No sense in letting the gummint have all the fun.