Spy cameras: are you being watched?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, the sinister rise of hidden spy cameras.

0:22So, the very first day that I moved in and I had a bath, I sensed that there was eyes watching me when I was in the bathroom which I know sounds ridiculous but I just I just sensed it. It was just before Christmas in 2019 and Heidi Marnie was having a terrible time. Her relationship had broken down and suddenly she and her baby daughter were homeless. Help arrived in the shape of a family friend who offered them a room in his house in Soby Bridge near Halifax in West Yorkshire. It was a detached farmhouse, four bedrooms across three floors. And my daughter and I had the back end of the house. The rent was low and Heidi was grateful.

1:08But in the bath that first night, something felt off. So he had a sensor in the corner and also a TV in the other corner with a dongle hanging down with a red light. So I took a picture of that and I sent it to my friend and I said, You don't think that's a camera, do you? I have an unbelievable feeling I'm being watched. And my friend said, no, that's just a sky dongle so you can have sky in every room. How do you feel stupid for even suggesting it? I said, no, he's the nicest person. How could I even suggest that he would do that? So I disregarded my intuition in that moment. He never looked at me in a wrong or inappropriate way.

1:50He was sweet, kind. Honestly, I couldn't say a bad word about him.

1:58Years later, she came to deeply regret not listening to her gut, and she wasn't the only one. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pidd. Today in Focus. Are you being watched?

2:19Let's go back to the start of this story. How did you know the man who was ultimately convicted of spying on you and what did you think of him? So Rob Holden was a family friend of mine. He was my half-sister's uncle, so I saw him like an uncle of mine. He was the town councillor and just the pillar of the community. Just the nicest guy you could ever meet, honestly. Right. And how did you end up moving in with him? so I had a relationship breakdown and I had seen that he'd put an ad out on Facebook and it just seemed fitting for me basically because it was quite close to my little girl's nursery she was 16 months old I loved and trusted him like family and it was really low rent so it seemed suitable for me and also because he had a computer shop and also was a counsellor he was never there so that suited me I felt like I was there on my own and what sort of interactions did you have with him at the start when you moved in?

3:19He's just the kindest person. So we would sit down, you know, on an evening, have a glass of wine, put the world to rights. He would listen to my heartaches, you know, he would pump me full of confidence that I didn't deserve this and I would have a great life and all those sorts of things. So it was pleasant. I enjoyed staying there. At what point did you start to think, hmm, many red flags? So we went into lockdown and so he was at the house all of the time. And it was one particular night where he was extremely drunk and he just started to make remarks. So he'd put some music on and he asked me to choose a song.

3:57And as I did, he would say, oh my goodness, this is my favourite song. Take me to bed right now. And I would screw up my face and be like, what are you talking about?

4:08so I was 27 and he was about 48 I think and I would definitely see him as a father figure to me like so those comments I was really not happy with and there were a few more things that he said I played an Abba song and he said oh this just reminds me of my friend we call her Jackie Big Tits and then he said oh you've got great boobs Heidi and I said what do you mean you know I was so upset and um he said come on you've been living with six months I've seen them and I just was so confused and I said right I think that it's time for I go to bed now and I said why would we even say that and then um as I went up to the bathroom to brush my teeth he had to walk past his bedroom to go to the bathroom and as I was coming back down the stairs he smacked my bum like with the back of his hand like lightly and said you're an ass Heidi but at least you've got a good ass and I just I just went to my bedroom and burst into tears but as of then that's when everything changed between him and I the dynamic completely changed then

5:20at what point did you have any evidence that something unusual was going on I had been there for about 10 months and I decided that I would work entirely on myself not date anyone or anything and I started speaking to somebody and when I told him about it he was really unhappy about it and I just thought that was strange like you'd be acting like a jealous partner it was odd but then what happened was and I went to meet this guy in Leeds and I told him that I was meeting my mother in Hebden Bridge, which is a good hour apart. I just didn't want the conversation. And just as I got into Leeds, I'd driven into this guy's apartment building, underground car park, and he texted me and said, weird, I swear I've just seen you, you must have a doppelganger.

6:13And in that moment, I felt physically sick because I knew there is no way that you have seen me. I'm in central Leeds, but I'm not anywhere to be seen. So yeah, I started to panic then. And then And the guy that I was with said, why don't you check find your iPhone? And I did. And he had tracked me off of my MacBook, which I purchased from him. Rob, remember, owned a computer shop and he was good with IT. Heidi realised she needed help and rang her auntie, a police officer, who told Heidi to check the house for cameras. So she said, I see this in my line of work all the time. and I said well the weird thing is I actually already have the very first day I moved in and and she said what do you mean she said why would you have done that that's your intuition and um she said just please I need you to check and I said honestly there isn't and she said I want you to send me a video of the bathroom because I told her it was the bathroom where I've sensed it um and she immediately screenshot the sensor and said what on earth is that I'm sending that to a colleague of mine I believe that's a camera and he replied saying yes looks like a camera so she sent off this picture of the sensor that you'd sent her and then somebody came back saying I think it's a camera what did you do next um so I decided to wait until the next day when I knew he was hosting a counsellor meeting because he would be on zoom for two hours so I I had a good window to do it so I put my little girl in the bath and then I got a knife so anyway I prized it open and it said camera and microphone.

7:56How did you feel in that moment?

8:01Panicked but almost in shock I feel as I'm like recalling it now I feel like I didn't feel much just like oh my goodness what do I do now um so I took a photo of it uh so I actually went into my bedroom with my little girl and I just froze for about two hours completely froze I um there was a serial number on it so I googled that and it said um hidden camera designed without a red light so it doesn't alert the visitor that they're being watched I was and then I text my auntie and said it's a camera um and then she said you need to ring the police and I said I don't want to there's got to be an explanation for this you know and then my auntie got the colleague who originally said yes it's a camera to call the police on my behalf so what emerged they called me and said um Heidi we have found cameras in the house you will never be allowed to go back to that house again so we need you to go back and get all of your belongings and make sure that you don't forget anything because you won't be going back so they'd found more than one camera and not just the one in the bathroom yes so he had one in his bedroom as well and they also found footage of me on his phone which he told them that was consensual footage of you doing what just pictures of me so whatever he had taken from the cameras that he liked he'd said that I'd sent it to him.

9:36Were the police able to ascertain whether he had the camera on 24-7? Was he just turning it on when he could hear you go into the bathroom? Yeah so he had it on 24-7 so the camera would run for three weeks at a time. He would then take it down, analyse all of the footage, keep anything that he liked and then erase that three weeks and then put it back up. So I was devastated that my daughter and I had been filmed and the police were quite blunt in saying your daughter's collateral damage. He didn't save anything of her so she's not a victim of voyeurism and that was infuriating for me because she's been filmed just as much as I have.

10:16but voyeurism is only a criminal act if you can prove that they've done it for sexual gratification and so because he didn't save my daughter she's not classed as a victim in the case and what did they find in terms of how many videos of you um he had there were close to a thousand pictures and i'm not entirely sure how many videos he had they never specified that but i've been living there for almost a year so there will have been a lot and he he would save anything that had any form of nudity on show I read every single night so there was a lot of footage for him

11:03Anna Moore you're a freelance writer for The Guardian we've just heard from Heidi about what happened to her when she moved in with a family friend who ended up spying on her and you know Heidi of course because she featured in a piece that you wrote recently which looked at the chilling rise of these cameras like the one that Rob Holden used. How did you end up interested in this issue?

11:23Anna Moore:Well I write a fair amount about violence against women and girls and that increasingly involves like more and more amounts of tech. I've always looked at those cameras the secret cameras like disguised and I've just always wondered how can that be legal. I just imagine they would be used to abuse women and that would be the main reason that they're boars. Can you just give us a sense of how big a problem it is, these cameras being used for nefarious and frankly extremely creepy and criminal means? So December of last year saw a 24 % rise in reported cases of voyeurism and exhibitionism. Crime statistics combine the two and you can't really separate them out.

12:07Anna Moore:and in that time there were nearly 16 ,000 recorded cases and so if you compare that to say 2012 to 2013 there were six and a half thousand so that gives you an idea that it's rising but of those recorded cases very few are actually prosecuted. In 2020 out of more than 10 ,000 reported cases there were less than 600 that reached court, you know, far more reported than ever reached court. And so the ones that I'm going to describe really are the tip of the iceberg, but they're so disturbing. There was one in Glasgow in May where there was a doctor who rented his Airbnb. You know, we've all stayed in Airbnbs and, you know, he had used hidden cameras in the bathroom, one pointed at the loo and one at the shower disguised as air fresheners.

13:00Anna Moore:And then he had one in the bedroom I think it was a smoke alarm there was the sentencing that month of a photographer David Glover in the south of England who'd been photographing hundreds of women in the changing rooms of his studios over a long period you know there was a case of two young men Adam Dennis and Robert Morgan who had filmed over 5 ,000 people changing in swimming pool changing rooms in London and Surrey and shared the images and traded them online. Just really appalling cases that most people wouldn't have no idea about because they don't make national news, just little local stories.

13:42Anna Moore:How big are these cameras and how are these crimes usually carried out? They're cameras that are disguised as just everyday domestic items. Disposable coffee cup that could be left in a changing room. You would never look at a disposable coffee cup or a pen or a plug adapter or a humidifier and their leg can be left there for years. In fact, in most of the cases I saw, they are left there for years. What do we know about the people who perpetrate this kind of voyeuristic behaviour? I spoke to Dr Vicky Lister, who is a researcher in Kent, who has said there's a real lack of literature about this because it's not necessarily taken that seriously.

14:22Anna Moore:She said because it's a non-contact crime. So it's seen as victimless, which obviously it isn't. But she has done quite a lot of work in it. And she's spoken to men in prisons who are serving time for voyeurism offences. And she said, you know, sexual gratification are the reasons for access to inappropriate people. So that might be access to seeing children, of course, for a lot of them, or, you know, neighbour. I saw a lot of these cases, actually, a neighbour. It's a married neighbour. This is a keyholder. So the keyholders pop over maybe to feed the cat and put in a secret camera. A stepdaughter, she also mentioned as an example, and I also saw one of those last year.

15:07Anna Moore:She was 18, but she found one hidden in her tessies, filmed her naked. This is just absolutely dreadful. And then another factor that Vicky said was maladaptive connection seeking. So, you know, wanting to connect, feeling very lonely. And the only way they felt able to connect to get that intimacy, you know, was through voyeurism. When you're describing all of these different scenarios, it's kind of not lost on me that these are all very popular porn scenarios. Peeping Toms, stepdaughters. and I just wonder if pornography webcams have normalized this kind of voyeurism I'm not saying everybody that watches porn or a peeping tom kind of genre online is going to do this kind of behavior but it you'd imagine it might be normalizing it in some way so I was talking to somebody for a piece about Giselle Pellico and she said that what the internet has done of what online porn has done has taken away the shame so if you had those urges once or thought about it once you would think maybe it's just me or you wouldn't necessarily act on it when you have those urges now and you go online and you can see it absolutely everywhere and millions of people contributing or participating in that it seems maybe it emboldens you and feels like that's okay to do that seems to make sense to me in terms of voyeurism i mean if they're all available to buy then must be okay you know why not use them if they're legal selling them other people are doing it you can see it online i mean some of the cases even the ones i mentioned were posted online like the ones in the changing rooms thousands of images so you can see that there are other people doing it and and do we know whether the people who engage in this kind of behavior go on to commit further crimes.

17:04Anna Moore:Whether or not it's a gateway offence, there is some evidence, but the studies that have really looked at that are quite out of date. They go back to the 80s. And rapists, they have found a high rate of voyeurism in adolescents especially, I think 45 % in adolescents or 20 % in adulthood. And then sexual murders, 20 % in adolescents, I think of 40 % in adulthood. But is that high risk individuals that are just engaged in a whole host of sexual crimes or is one leading to the other? And there's not a lot of research. I spoke to the mother of Libby Squire, who was the Hull student who disappeared in 2019 and had been murdered.

17:47Anna Moore:And her mum has done a lot of campaigning around the importance of reporting any instance of voyeurism or exposure. The man that murdered her had been for a very long time in that area of Hull, exposing himself, but also standing at windows of students and watching them. They'd seen a student changing or also having sex, actually, and had seen him standing at the window watching. And so Libby Squiser's mum has done a lot of campaigning around the importance of not laughing off, of reporting those crimes. And in your article, you also detailed how it's not just sort of strangers or acquaintances who carry out these kind of voyeuristic crimes, but also abusive partners.

18:37Tell me a bit about that. What did you learn about that?

18:39Anna Moore:That's something that domestic abuse charities and women's sector have been campaigning on for a long time. Spyware, trackers, listening devices, cameras, they're used by men to control, gaslight, terrorise partners and ex-partners. And actually technology facilitated abuse. It's a huge and growing area and refuge. The women's domestic abuse charity have their own team basically entirely given over to tech abuse because it's just such a huge area. I spoke to one woman who was in a relationship with an abusive man at the time. And she would be on her own and she would sit down for a cup of tea, she'd say, and she'd get a text from him and say, I'm enjoying your cup of tea or there'd be someone at the door.

19:25Anna Moore:She'd go and answer it and he'd message and say, who's at the door? She felt like she said she was living in a TV show. She didn't find any cameras at first. She'd asked him about it. She eventually found some these tiny, tiny cameras that were hidden when she was sort of deep cleaning the house. that's a common feature of abusive relationships now involves monitoring and hidden cameras make that very easy because they're made to blend in in a domestic setting like plugs, humidifiers, remote controls. They're things that you just find in your front room you know.

20:06And can you tell us a bit more about Vicky Lister's research?

20:09Anna Moore:Yeah, she interviewed men in prisons that were serving time for voyeurism. There aren't any women in prison serving time for voyeurism. Many had used secret cameras, including one in a public shower. It was disguised as a shampoo bottle. She said that the men told her that everyone has probably been a victim at some point, which she said that the more you dig into it, the scarier it gets. There was a study in Canada that actually found that 79 % of participants would engage in voyeuristic behaviour if there was an assurance they would not be caught, which suggests that using secret cameras, which make it so much easier and safer, would actually lead to more voyeurism.

20:55And currently, how are these crimes treated by laws in the UK?

21:00Anna Moore:At present, the law defines voyeurism as non-consensually observing or recording someone during a private activity for sexual gratification or to cause distress. So it has the motive there, which isn't helpful because somebody in court can say, well, I never wanted them to find out, so I didn't want to cause distress. Right. And the sexual gratification. So if you were filming your partner to control them or gaslight them again with a camera in the front room, again, you could say that wasn't for sexual gratification. So it's not helpful. And from the experts that you spoke to, did they think that the current law goes far enough?

21:43Is there anything else that could be done to make it more difficult for this to happen or to be punished more severely, perhaps?

21:49Anna Moore:Under the Crime and Policing Bill, they are addressing the secret cameras and it will become a criminal offence to install equipment intended to take intimate images without someone's consent. So it's changed to just consent. There's no motive. It's just it's about consent. And also, if you've installed a camera without someone's consent, then that can become a crime, even if you haven't got around to taking the images. so that's helpful but the thing is how many of those crimes would come to light they're hidden I mean it's a little bit of progress but the point is the cases that I found overwhelmingly had been going on for years and years and years and they were the very few that reached prosecution after years and years of footage taken so the chances are you know if you can get a camera you can use it for a long time without being found and this won't address that yes installing a camera will become a crime but how would people know if there was one in your airbnb you know the chances are most aren't discovered for a very long time if at all and is there is it would it be at all feasible to ban the sale of these cameras or are there too many legitimate uses do you think the women i spoke to they were adamant that those cameras should be banned they shouldn't be allowed because the potential for abuse is so obvious and the legitimate uses are so limited.

23:10Anna Moore:In comparison, should there be licenses? Should there be applications to buy them in specific reasons? Should they just be more controlled? Or if you have a criminal record for domestic abuse, for violence, should you not be able to buy them? At the moment, anyone can buy them from Amazon, eBay, from a specialist spyware store online. coming up what happened to Heidi's landlord

23:46at what point did you find out that you weren't the only victim so when I checked the camera I googled the serial number and it said that it went out of production in 2017 so two years prior to me living there so I knew that it was not put there for me something that Rob did was he would always tell me about his previous lodgers so because he'd obviously spoken about all of these women I just instinctively knew you've all been a victim of this so I didn't have confirmation until maybe a year later when they came back to me and told me that the police had contacted them And how many women in total had he filmed?

24:29Gosh, the number isn't clear because there were hundreds of victims in the case, but because he owned a computer shop, there were just some images that he had taken. I believe there was over 30. Presumably not all 30 had been lodgers, had they? No, so he used to always have house parties. He would call it Roe Farm Hot Tub Party. because there was quite a few bedrooms spare, people would stay over. So there was a lot of victims in that sense. So one of the women was actually filmed having sex with a gent in the bathroom. And what was he ultimately convicted of? It was 33 counts of voyeurism. And then there was data misuse.

25:15And then there was one that was to do with underage because one of the girls he had filmed was only 15. She was his best friend's niece who had been doing some gardening and he encouraged her to have a shower. He got six years and two months and he was sentenced on the 26th of September. Last year, in 2024? In 2024, yeah.

25:41What long-term impact has all of this had on you? Well I think that whenever I go anywhere I do look out for what could potentially be a camera I remember going to my partner's house and getting in the shower and he had all these fancy jets and I remember falling to my knees and just crying my eyes out because I just thought oh my god is this my life now is this going to overwhelm my thoughts um and am I going to think everything it's a camera. Thankfully I have done a lot of therapy and I'm in a much better place but there was so many things just average household objects that can be cameras these days so it's hard not to let it impact you.

26:23Heidi thank you very much. Thank you for having me. That was Heidi Marnie. Thank you to her and to Anna Moore. You can read Anna's feature all about spy cameras at theguardian.com. I appreciate this was a pretty creepy episode but if you appreciated it and the reporting that we do at theguardian.com, perhaps you'd consider leaving us a review. We always really enjoy hearing what you think of the show and these reviews help other people to find us. And that's all for today. This episode was produced by Natalie Gatenner and presented by me, Helen Pidd. Sound design was by Ross Burns and the executive producers were Elizabeth Kassin and Sammy Kent.