Counter-Surveillance · Nationwide · Since 1991
Find out who is listening.Then make it stop.
U.S. TSCM is the technical surveillance counter-measures division of Special Solutions, Ltd. — a licensed Illinois private detective agency operating since 1991. We locate hidden microphones, covert cameras, wiretaps, GPS trackers and data-line taps in homes, offices, vehicles, aircraft and vessels, and we tell you in writing exactly what we found and exactly how we found it.
The problem, plainly
The device that ends your negotiation costs less than dinner.
The photograph is a working audio transmitter, held between two fingertips. We recovered one like it from the conference room of a major food distributor. It had been bought online for thirty dollars.
That is the uncomfortable truth of modern eavesdropping: the barrier to entry collapsed years ago. A competitor, a soon-to-be ex-spouse, a disgruntled employee or a process server no longer needs a budget or training. They need a credit card and twenty minutes alone in a room.
What has not collapsed is the difficulty of *finding* one. A device that transmits in short bursts, or only when it hears a voice, or not at all until someone comes to collect the recording, is invisible to the hand-held detectors sold to the public. Locating it takes calibrated instruments, a methodical physical search and someone who has done it several hundred times.
What we sweep
Eight ways we find what should not be there.
Every environment hides devices differently. A vehicle is not a board room, and a telephone is not a ceiling void. Each of these is a distinct discipline with its own instruments and its own search pattern.
The method
We will tell you exactly how we work. Before you pay us anything.
Most people have never watched a sweep and have no way to judge whether they are buying a real technical inspection or an expensive performance. So we have published the whole process — seven phases, including the dull ones. If a firm you are considering cannot describe their own version of this, that tells you something useful.
Confidential intake
We talk first — and not from the room you are worried about, and not on a telephone you suspect. We will happily arrange to meet you somewhere neutral, or speak while you are out of the building.
Threat model and scope
Who is realistically interested, what would they gain, and what could they plausibly deploy? A domestic case and a corporate espionage case call for different searches. A jealous ex-partner buys something off a marketplace. A competitor with real money behind them may field equipment that only transmits for a few milliseconds at a time.
Arrival, discreetly
We arrive in plain vehicles and plain clothes. No livery, no branded cases in the lobby, no announcement. If a cover story helps — IT contractors, an air-quality survey, an insurance inspection — we will agree one with you in advance and stick to it.
Radio-frequency baseline and spectrum analysis
We establish what the radio environment in your building normally looks like — Wi-Fi, cellular, two-way radio, wireless microphones, the building's own systems, the broadcast towers outside. Without that baseline every reading is meaningless, because a busy office is full of perfectly legitimate signals.
Instruments
Over half a million dollars of detection equipment.
Counter-surveillance is limited by equipment as much as by skill. No amount of experience lets a technician hear a 417 MHz carrier, or see a semiconductor junction buried inside a wall. Those things take calibrated instruments — and people who re-train on them twice a year.
The list below is not marketing. Each of these does a specific job that none of the others can do, which is precisely why a single hand-held detector cannot substitute for any of them.
- Spectrum analysers
- Omni-spectral correlators
- Broadband RF detectors
- Non-linear junction detectors
- Telephone instrument test and analysis equipment
- Telephone line analysis equipment
- …and 10 more
Not sure yet?
Twelve questions that sort worry from evidence.
Most people who contact us are not certain. They have a feeling, or one odd incident, and no idea whether it amounts to anything. That is a perfectly reasonable place to be.
So we built a short self-assessment around the indicators that actually correlate with finding a device — information reaching people it should not, who has had access, physical signs, and what is at stake. It takes under two minutes.
It runs entirely in your own browser. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent to us. Given who uses it, that seemed like the only decent way to build it.
Who you are hiring
35 years of finding things people took trouble to hide.
U.S. TSCM is the counter-surveillance division of Special Solutions, Ltd., a licensed Illinois private detective agency founded in 1991. Our consultants are former military, federal, state and local law-enforcement officers, most with more than twenty years in the field.
That matters here more than in most work, because the client almost never has the technical knowledge to check what was done. It is an unusually easy field in which to take somebody’s money, wave a cheap detector around for forty minutes and assure them everything is fine. We have watched it happen for decades. It is why this website explains our method in as much detail as it does.
Confidentiality without exception
We do not name clients, publish case studies or use anyone's situation in our marketing. There are no testimonials on this site and there never will be.
An honest negative
Most sweeps find nothing, and we say so plainly rather than manufacturing a finding to justify the invoice. You get the same written report either way.
Answered around the clock
Nights, weekends and holidays — which is frequently the only discreet window there is. Same-day attendance across Chicagoland.
Free consultation · No obligation
Get a definite answer.
Whether we find something or nothing, you stop guessing. Call us, or send a short note and we will call you — from somewhere other than the room you are worried about.