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.

Technology Makes Car-Pooling Safer and Easier

Long-distance travelers as well as commuters are connecting on sites like Zimride.com, Ridejoy.com, Avego.com, Nuride.com, Rideshare.com and eRideShare.com.

This summer, a German company with a quintessential American name, Carpooling.com, will try to break into the United States market with a trial run in the Northeast. In June, the company announced that 30 million rides had been offered through its 10-year-old network, which now has 3.8 million registered users.

Ride-sharing and car-pooling, it seems, are having a moment in the United States after many fits and starts.

“It’s been a tough sell in the U.S. for a long time,” said David Burwell, director of the energy and climate program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “A lot is due to not only the fact that people have different places they want to go, but also safety and other concerns about going into a car with strangers.”

What is different now, Mr. Burwell said, is the advancement of digital technology and social networking, “which removed a significant amount of barriers.”

To that end, eRideShare, which was started in 1999, is testing a mobile app this week for iPhone and Android phones. “I see a lot of new entrants this year” as well as new technology, said its founder, Steven Schoeffler. “I think it will be a very interesting time for ride-sharing.”

The sites vary in the process of matching drivers with passengers, security protocols and how payment is calculated and made. Some sites allow participants to settle on the cost of a ride; others charge by mile traveled. The profit-making sites take a percentage of the fee charged to riders, but it’s free to sign up for the service.

Proponents of ride-sharing say that, by design, it is an effective way to reduce congestion and greenhouse gas emission, as well as to save money on gasoline and car maintenance.

America’s love affair with cars is not fading into the sunset anytime soon. By Sunday, 42.3 million Americans will have journeyed 50 miles or more from home during the weekend after the Fourth of July, according to AAA estimates. That is up 5 percent from last summer.

On any workday, however, most drivers are riding solo. The percentage of people car-pooling has hovered near 10 percent for several years, according to Census survey data. About 5 percent of commuters use public transportation, and 76 percent drive alone.

“The reality is, we do it because it happens to be the most convenient best option for us,” said Paul Steinberg, director of Americas at Avego, a multinational transportation company that is conducting several real-time ride-sharing tests in the United States.

“We are trying to convince 85 percent of the population to give up their car — not every day, but a couple of days a month — and pick up someone or share a ride,” Mr. Steinberg said. “It’s a big challenge; it’s harder in the U.S. than other geographies.” American culture is partly the reason, he said, as is sprawl and subsidized gasoline.

In Sonoma County, Calif., Avego is helping to run a private-public nonprofit program called WeGoRideShare.com. Two testers, Monika Loose and Cyndi Mills, employees of the Sonoma County government, found each other through a ride board on the Web site and have recently shared rides a few times a week.

Ms. Loose is a passenger and helps pay for gas. She drives from her home to a nearby Park and Ride lot, where Ms. Mills picks her up. Together, they can ride in the high-occupancy vehicle lane, which reduces their commute time.

“For me,” Ms. Loose said, “I’m not an everyday car pooler, maybe three days a week. I like to have my car other days to do other errands.”

That also works for Ms. Mills, who says the few days add up and help defray her monthly gas costs. Because she is often transporting her children, she said, “I don’t want people dependent on me every day.”

Tara Weingarten, founder of the automotive site vroomgirls.com, said ride-sharing could work regionally for some commuters but faced resistance in car-centric places like Southern California, “where drivers are used to being cocooned in their private auto bubbles padded with comfy seats, satellite radio, climate control and privacy, where they don’t have to make chitchat if they’re not in the mood.”

Even so, companies that promote the exchange of rides are joining a wave of so-called collaborative consumption sites that use social networks to build communities like Airbnb.com, for finding a place to stay, Swap.com, for exchanging goods, and TaskRabbit.com, for outsourcing tasks and errands.