Spy movies love to show agents carrying ultra-compact, efficient gadgets. That is just another trick in Hollywood’s repertoire to surprise consumers. In real life, you find things like the Teletron MiniOctopus FTMRS 3, a 7.5-kilogram tank that intercepted up to four telephone lines and used Windows 95 as its operating system.
From Hollywood to Reality
When the world saw Thunderball, the fourth James Bond film, one of its gadgets quickly stood out. The idea of breathing underwater with such a small device caught the attention of many, including the British army. Its representatives asked Peter Lamont, designer and art director on 18 Bond films, how he had managed to reduce an entire diving suit to a mouthpiece. He answered what few imagined: the device was a lie, and Sean Connery had to hold his breath. Unfortunately, film and television often create expectations that are “divorced from reality” when depicting espionage, wiretapping, and tech investigation. From Hackers to CSI, the horrors that paraded across the screen were gigantic, but this time we have a good dose of realism from the 1990s: the Teletron MiniOctopus FTMRS 3.
A Real Wiretap Machine
A museum piece these days (literally, since the images and the computer come from the Fundación Museo ICATEC), the Teletron MiniOctopus FTMRS 3 is the younger brother of the Octopus phone-tapping systems, which, installed on a trunk connection, could intercept the content of up to 120 telephone lines. The MiniOctopus’s main goal was ease of transport, a very important factor in short campaigns, though that goal was questionable with its 7.5 kilograms. According to what appears to be an old copy of its official website, the Teletron MiniOctopus FTMRS 3 can monitor four telephone lines at once, recording two thousand hours of conversations in high-quality digital format, and as if that were not enough, it can also intercept and reproduce documents sent by fax.
A Brief, Controversial Spotlight
Another notable detail is that the Teletron MiniOctopus FTMRS 3 is compatible with telephone lines and/or ambient microphones, whether connected directly or via a compatible wireless transmission system. The MiniOctopus FTMRS 3 had a kind of exposure more than ten years ago, when Peruvian media linked this technology to Moshe Rothschild, an arms dealer and former Israeli Air Force pilot, “wanted” on several occasions by Peruvian justice.
An Unlikely Operating System
To close, all available sources indicate that the MiniOctopus used no kind of top-secret operating system, but rather had a copy of Windows 95 inside. I can only imagine the crashes and lost conversations must have driven more than one spy crazy...
