Books: No Place To Hide: Bugging Guide

No Place To Hide: A Guide To Bugs, Wire Taps, Surveillance and Other Privacy Invasions, by Alan le Mond and Ron Fry (St. Martin 's Press, New York) 278 pages, $8.95

Want to read more on the bugging business? This book is an up-to-date account of how government and private agencies keep tabs on you.

For example, le Mond and Fry tell how a small transmitter can listen in on your house for about seven hours. Or, you can be filmed right through solid walls by a technique similar to x-rays.

While electronics may be sensational and probably used less than many people believe, most information comes from more everyday sources- like schools, banks, place of work, or even garbage cans. Friends, neighbors and informers can also get you into trouble. And ultimately much of the information is simply fed into computers where it becomes available to anyone who might accidentally discover the code to get into the program.

Easy reading, the book is filled with case histories of numbers of individuals who suddenly discovered someone knew their most private secrets. Even worse, the reports other people had on them were all too often exaggerated or even completely fabricated. Yet such information could all too easily be used to ruin a person's life.

After scaring you to death with the possibility of what someone might know, the book also has a number of suggestions for keeping your private life private, It also goes into laws meant to protect individuals and how to use them.