VoIP You

Perhaps it’s all the James Bond movies we watched when we were kids, or maybe it’s just that there’s a little bit of voyeur inside of us all, but a slew of the hottest gadgets, websites, and services are designed to let you know where you are, whose coming for you, and if there are any celebrities within a ten mile radius.

Gizmodo reports that high-tech surveillance is finally affordable for all us common folk:

“This kind of stuff has been around for years, but until now it’s been prohibitively expensive. Now, for a mere $199 and a monthly fee, you can feed your paranoia with a webcam that sends images and SMSes to your cell phone AND blasts out an audible alarm.”

According to the post, low costs and ‘round-the-clock spying capabilities can only lead to one thing:

“...surveillance gear is soon going to be hanging from every rain gutter on every house everywhere.”

If you’re more concerned with having people know exactly where you are than knowing what everyone around you is doing, you can partake in a new service that allows you to be tracked at all times from virtually any computer. As one intrepid adventurer recounted on O’Reilly:

“Using a $100 kit…I’ve turned a prepaid cell phone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that (my girlfriend) can access from any computer.”

With such easy access to espionage-inspired technology, the question becomes: why spy on normal people when you could be spying on celebrities? Well, the good people at Gawker Stalker have made it possible for anyone with a VoIP or cell phone to turn into a world class paparazzo. Snap a shot of an unsuspecting celeb and you can have it posted next to quotes such as:

“SJP leaving The Women's National Republican Club at around 3pm today. We paused, wondering who on earth the paparazzi could be stalking outside the WNRC, when she appeared looking very conservative with pin straight hair and a modest dress.”

I guess the quaint days of lugging around that bulky Polaroid camera that could be heard two blocks over every time you took a photo have passed. But at least now if you have the right service, you can take the shot, call all of your friends to tell them about it, and get out of there before somebody's alarm tips everyone off to your whereabouts.