10 January 2002. Thanks to the authors. Published without permission.

To: Deleted
From: "david_johnrobinson" <david_johnrobinson@hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 22:11:50 -0000
Subject: The "Big" rental sweep debate

Two things hit me regarding this listing; A) so what is new? this stuff has been out there advertised for years. B) Why does every one immediately jump and say CCS?

Let me put my cards on the table, I was the operations manager for CCS for a time here in London, and they realy do not deserve the bad mouthing they get from the group, OK so most of the stuff they provide is "crap" from a professional point of veiw, but to most of their clients it's exactly what they want (most of them are Mr and Mrs Joe schmo).

Any one wanting professional equipment would /should come to professional suppliers like our company Department Q who only deal with Government level bugs, covert equipment and GSM tracking.

I don't think it is CCS for several reasons, Firstly they have exactly this type of thing on their already long established web site ; www.spyzone.com which for the genre has some very nice products. Secondly we are told by the group these are CCS type prices - wrong! when I worked there the prices were much higher - try 800% mark up and dollar prices quoted as pounds in UK, and lastly they only ask for $500 dealer price - a CCS licence costs $150.000 with no stock.

So I think it's time the "farmer and the cowboy should be friends", get off CCS back , there prices and equipment will kill them and the other dinosaurs off soon enough.

If you want to worry, and it seems you do, try talking to professional covert suppliers - if you call us a spy shop you had better duck, ask us what we can do with your GSM phone and why we have stopped telebanking and wap messaging.

There will always be some one out there who wants Kiddy toys and some one who will supply them - so let them ,  they deserve each other.

Thanks for letting me have a say, I'll sneak back into the shadows now and watch the sparks fly.

Dr David J Robinson
Department Q (international HQ)
England
+44 1903 787943

Over 25 years covert experience with British forces

To: Deleted
From: "Steve Uhrig" <steve@swssec.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 21:49:59 -0500
Subject: Re: Attacking CCS? Yes, exactly that

Once upon a midnight dreary, david_johnrobinson pondered, weak and weary:

> Two things hit me regarding this listing; A) so what is new? this
> stuff has been out there advertised for years. B) Why does every
> one immediatly jump and say CCS?

Because some of us have been around a long time and have seen this stuff over and over and over. I'm talking longer than some of the players in this industry have been alive and longer than practically anyone in the industry has been in business.

>  Let me put my cards on the table, I was the operations
> manager for CCS for a time here in London

Then pardon me for being forthright, but either you were incredibly naive or you are a crook.

> and they realy do not deserve the bad mouthing they get from
> the group,

See comment above. If you really believe this, I will go with naive.

> OK so most of the stuff they provide is "crap" from a
> professional point of veiw, but to most of their clients it's
> exactly what they want

One could make the same argument about illegal drugs or abortion. That doesn't justify it.

> Any one wanting professional equipment would /should come to
> professional suppliers like our company Department Q who only
> deal with Government level bugs , covert equipment and GSM
> tracking.

Now I will change my opionion back to crook.

If you only deal with 'Government level bugs', why are you inviting anyone to come to you. Do you claim to be supplying 'Government level bugs' to anyone? In the unlikely event you supply anything at all, I would expect it would be to anyone *other* than the government.

Remember, there are a (very) few people around who actually work in these technologies, with government clients on a daily basis, and cannot be fooled. Most of them are smarter than me and keep their mouths shut. I speak my mind.

> I don't think it is CCS for several reasons

<snip whining>

For all the reasons you mention, it absolutely fits the pattern of CCS. Lie to someone with money, schmooze them, pump up their egos and convince them they will make outrageous profits dealing with CCS. The ignorant fool (and ANYONE who deals with CCS/G-COM in ANY way is an ignorant fool) hands CCS five or six figures for the 'privilege' of acquiring their absolutely worthless but impressive boxes of nonfunctional bells and whistles. At that point the relationship, such as it was, is over unless CCS feels they can extract/extort even more money from the ignorant fool.

In this case apparently, and I have seen it more times than I could count, the ignorant fool private labeled the crap because he wants the other ignorant fools who might buy it to think he manufactured it. CCS doesn't care. They got their money. They probably charged the guy extra for private labeling it, which in itself is funny because CCS was the original king of  repackaging and slapping their name on standard products from other manufacturers and claiming it as their own.

CCS cheated the guy pushing this private labeled crap, because he was an ignorant fool and had more money than he had brains. ANYONE who does any homework on CCS would never deal with them on any level.

> a CCS licence costs $150.000 with no stock.

A CCS 'license' or 'distributorship' or whatever they choose to call it costs precisely as much money as they can extract from the ignorant fool who gets involved with them. They (CCS) are very good at developing financial information on their victims, and this is how much they charge.

Same with 'exclusive' rights to distribute CCS's vaporware in a particular country. I had the distinct pleasure at a trade show in New Delhi some years ago of introducing three 'exclusive distributors for all of India' to each other. Each had paid, as I recall, sums between the rupee equivalent of USD $50,000 and $200,000 for the alleged privilege of having an 'exclusive' representation for CCS in all of India. None received anything in return. Nada.

If I called them tomorrow, I could purchase the exclusive rights to distribute their products in any country you could name, and I likely would be the 50th person to purchase the exclusive.

You were a member of the den of thieves. You know how the game is played. You just have to pretend to defend them to justify stealing money from your victims.

If you led the victim (ignorant fool) to believe something which was not true, either from a product representation standpoint or from an equipment performance standpoint, then you committed fraud. Whether you believe it or not, some day there will be a day of judgement, and you will have to provide an accounting, before man possibly and to God definitely, for your actions. You do have the opportunity to escape those penalties and erase the slate, and if you wish to discuss this issue only via PRIVATE email with me I will be glad to do so.

> If you want to worry, and it seems you do , try talking to
> professional covert suppliers - if you call us a spy shop you
> had better duck

You already provided substantial incontrovertible testimony that you are a crook, and your likely fictitious claims indicate you still are operating in the mode you learned from CCS. Therefore you fit this list's generic, and my personal, definition of a spy shop.

This month is 30 years I have been manufacturing electronic surveillance and intelligence gathering products for government agencies. Do some research and you will find that is true.

Manufacturing is starting with a blank CAD screen, component manufacturer's data books, designing a prototype, breadboarding and debugging a few, building the prototype, debugging it, putting a few beta test units into hands of professional users, getting their feedback and incorporating that into the design, refining the design, getting circuit boards etched and stuffed with components, firmware written, the incredibly difficult job of doing an effective job of packaging, documenting everything for small or medium scale production, writing instruction manuals, technical manuals, writing test procedures, setting up boxing and labeling and all the other tasks which exist between a wet dream and a workable effective product shipping to market.

It is not taking some other company's product, repackaging it, and slapping your own name on it.

Your claim of dealing in covert electronics is not the claim someone would make who genuinely does that work, but is the claim of someone who is playing the same CCS game of dealing in sensitive and restricted equipment as a sales tactic to make ignorant fools believe they are getting something they're not supposed to have. CCS caters to Walter Mittys, people who have more money than brains, and people who want to throw money at something and think they are going to get rich overnight. CCS sells dreams. They play on the mystique of dealing in sensitive and restricted technology.

And ignorant fools fall for it, don't do any homework, and lose their investment. CCS plays a psychology game more than anything else.

You know it and I know it and a good number of others know it.

Denying it just digs your grave deeper.

Some of us have been around for a while. All over the world, dealing with governments who have been cheated by CCS and seeing their tactics firsthand. I have visited most of CCS' shops around the world, played the game, flashed some cash and pretended to believe them just to see how bold they would get.  I've witnessed and exposed phony government demos of theirs over and over, and some were impressingly cleverly staged.

Don't forget that.

There are others on this list who read your comments the same way I interpret them, who have similar backgrounds. They just, as mentioned above, have the discretion to just let you play your little spy groupie game and keep quiet.

I don't often blatantly attack crooks, but you provided sufficient evidence to where a reasonable man who is familiar with this industry would believe you were and are a crook and a prevaricator (polite word for liar).

I've made my comments, and of course you will have to jump in and whine and threaten and bluff and try to save face and convince all 1000+ of us who follow this excellent list that you are not a crook claiming to manufacture all sorts of secret squirrel devices but are just a bold groupie pretending to play a man's game and thinking you will fool us. You may fool some of us. You will not fool all of us.

Maybe you're just mentally deficient. Maybe you are merely delusional. I don't know. More likely, you learned how to extract money from ignorant fools from your time at CCS, and are continuing to pretend, now that you have your own business card, letterhead and probably a combination phone and fax machine operating in some corner of your flat. Do you have full time employment somewhere else to earn enough money to pay the light bill and feed your fantasy of peddling vaporware to alleged government agencies?

You're really only fooling yourself.

You can reply however you wish, but I will not be baited and will say no more on the subject. The above represents 30 years of watching this industry and being intimately involved in the very issues I discussed, and knowing of whence I speak.

The very best move you could make at this point would be to drop the issue and just back off and fade back into your 'lab' in the spare bedroom of your flat.

I will work patiently for years mentoring someone who genuinely wants to start a business, pay his dues, build it on a firm foundation and, above all, be honest with everyone. I have done this with a number of members on this list, behind the scenes, for no reason other than I wanted to give something back to the younger fellows and help them get started along the right path. No one on the list knows it because I don't do it for money or to feed my ego. If someone wants to start an *honest* business and understands it takes years of work, I'm glad to share with them some of my experiences, mistakes and successes.

But I give no quarter to the crooks in this industry. A former sales manager I had commented that this was the scummiest industry in which he ever had been involved.

This message seems to confirm his observation.

Steve

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Steve Uhrig, SWS Security, Maryland (USA)
Mfrs of electronic surveillance equip
mailto:Steve@swssec.com  website http://www.swssec.com
tel +1+410-879-4035, fax +1+410-836-1190

"In God we trust, all others we monitor"

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