Secret Recording Grows Safer as ‘the Wire’ Grows Tinier

“I run the Queens County Republican Party. Nobody else runs the party,” the politician, Vincent Tabone, says, according to a criminal complaint unsealed last week.

Then, Mr. Tabone, 46, a baby-faced veteran of local and state politics, appeared to grow cautious. Just before accepting a $25,000 bribe, he patted down the agent, ostensibly to check for a recording device, federal prosecutors allege in the complaint.

The moment was reminiscent of the 1970s and ’80s, when undercover agents recorded conversations with mobsters using a bulky tape recorder strapped around their waists, and wires — connected to a microphone — secured to their chests with an adhesive. Today, in an age when technology has gone wireless, the phrase “wearing a wire” is a largely allegorical term of art.

“In the old days, they would say, ‘Let me pat you down for a wire’ and boom, everybody would just open their shirt and say, ‘I’m not wearing a wire,’ ” a retired undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, Joaquin Garcia, said in a telephone interview on Friday. “Now there is no need to wear a wire. It’s become extinct. It’s all gone digital. But what are you going to say, ‘I’m wearing digital,’ instead of ‘I’m wearing a wire’? It’s just become part of the parlance of law enforcement.”

Technological advances aside, the methods have remained the same, with federal agents and undercover officers using covert recording equipment to ensnare would-be criminals, sometimes with the help of a well-placed informer or cooperating witness.

“Technology has made it so easy to plant a device that is much less detectable,” Richard B. Zabel, deputy United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in an interview last week. “Yes, people are conscious of being recorded, but as you’ve seen, in some cases they are not able to find the recorder anyway.”

Nowadays, recording equipment is miniaturized. “Your options have increased a lot because the devices are a lot smaller,” Mr. Zabel said. “They can really hide them now in buttons, in pens, at the point of a pen, in a cuff link or the edge of a tie clip.”

And frisking an undercover agent for a wire, as Mr. Tabone allegedly did, can be as fruitless as finding a pay phone and “dropping a dime” to call the police.

“That is sort of an antiquated way to look for a device,” Mr. Zabel said.

Federal prosecutors have charged Mr. Tabone, vice chairman of the Queens Republican Party, with bribery and wire fraud for allegedly taking cash in exchange for using his influence to secure a ballot spot for State Senator Malcolm A. Smith, a Democrat, in the Republican primary for mayor. Mr. Smith, along with a Republican city councilman, Daniel J. Halloran III, and a Republican Party leader from the Bronx, Joseph J. Savino, were also charged. The criminal case was built, in large part, on secret recordings.

It was the first of two instances last week where federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint against New York political leaders, using their own words against them.

On Thursday, two days after the corruption case centered on Mr. Smith’s mayoral aspirations became public, the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, announced new charges in an unrelated bribery case. In that case, cooperating witnesses, including Assemblyman Nelson L. Castro, who has since resigned, wore devices to record conversations that led to the arrest of Eric A. Stevenson, a Democratic state assemblyman who was accused of accepting more than $22,000 in bribes to help developers open adult day care centers in his district in the South Bronx.

In one recording, officials said, Mr. Stevenson invokes previous scandals in Albany and openly worries about being taped. “Be careful of those things, man, the recorders and all those things,” Mr. Stevenson says to a cooperating witness, according to the criminal complaint.

Mr. Zabel and other federal officials declined to reveal exactly how the recordings in the two recent cases were made. “We don’t want people to know what we can do, but we don’t mind people thinking that we can do all kinds of things,” an F.B.I. spokesman, James Margolin, said last week.

As for the recordings of Mr. Tabone and other suspects in the two cases, Mr. Margolin said, “I presume that it wasn’t the kind of devices that we used in the 1980s,” similar to the one depicted in movies like “Prince of the City,” the 1981 film starring Jerry Orbach and Treat Williams, who plays a New York City narcotics detective who wears a wire to expose police corruption.

Affective Programming Grows in Effort to Read Faces

At Cambridge University, an eerily realistic robotic head named Charles sits in a driving simulator, furrowing its brows, looking interested or confused.

And in a handful of American middle school classrooms this fall, computers will monitor students’ emotions in an effort to track when they are losing interest and when they are getting excited about lessons.

All three are examples of an emerging approach to technology called affective computing, which aims to give computers the ability to read users’ emotions, or “affect.”

People are good at understanding one another’s emotions. We realize quickly that now is not a good time to approach the boss or that a loved one is having a lousy day. These skills are so essential that those without them are considered disabled.

Yet until recently, our machines could not identify even seemingly simple emotions, like anger or frustration. The GPS device chirps happily even when the driver is ready to hurl it out the window. The online class keeps going even when half the students are lost in confusion. The airport security system can’t tell whether someone is behaving as if he were concealing something or is just anxious about flying.

Technology that masters these skills could also help people who struggle to read the emotions of others, like those on the autism spectrum, or provide companionship and encouragement for nursing home residents. Without a grasp of emotions, some researchers argue, computers will never reach their full potential to support people.

“Our digital world is for the most part devoid of rich ways of expressing our emotions,” said Rosalind Picard, director of the affective computing research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.

She has been working for more than two decades to translate emotions into 1’s and 0’s, the language of machines. One early project, with a collaborator, Rana el Kaliouby, was to design glasses for people with Asperger syndrome, a mild variant of autism, that warned them when they were boring someone. People with Asperger’s often fixate on particular topics and find it hard to read the social cues, like yawning, fidgeting and looking away, that indicate the listener is bored.

The prototype included a tiny traffic light, visible only to the wearer, that flashed yellow when the conversation was starting to drag and red when facial cues suggested the listener had completely tuned out.

More recently, Dr. Picard and Dr. el Kaliouby have been developing software that maps 24 points on the face to intuit an emotion. In the past, computer algorithms have had trouble distinguishing among genuine smiles, smirks and the gritted teeth that come with frustration, Dr. el Kaliouby said, because they are often fleeting and result in only very small changes to the overall configuration of the face.

To capture these subtleties, webcams needed to have high frame rates and resolutions not possible until recently. The software also requires thousands of examples of each facial expression, labeled by humans — hence the women in Cairo coding recorded expressions.

“If we don’t have enough examples, across cultures and age ranges, the machine won’t be able to discriminate these subtle expressions,” Dr. el Kaliouby said.

Affective technology one day may help online education programs provide better learning experiences. Now, when a student makes a mistake, a program can’t tell if it’s because the student is bored or befuddled. A program that distinguishes this, Dr. el Kaliouby said, could offer more challenging problems to the bored students and simpler exercises to the struggling ones.

Dr. el Kaliouby and Dr. Picard also are working to develop something called Q Sensors, bands worn on the wrist that measure emotional arousal through the skin’s electrical conductance and temperature, as well as activity level. For people with autism, many of whom can’t speak or can’t articulate their feelings — or for anyone else — the sensors provide insights into emotional state that the users may not be able to articulate themselves.

“With this technology in the future, we’ll be able to understand things about our loved ones that we weren’t able to see before, things that calm them, things that stress them,” Dr. Picard said, adding that it will be true even for people without communication challenges.

“I’ve always thought of the skin as a covering, hiding what goes on inside our body,” she said. “Who would have ever thought of our skin as a peephole?”