I-Spy and your neighbors in San Marcos I-Spy has gone digital, according to Mike Sepiol, a guy who ought to know. As owner of American Surveillance & Security on San Marcos Boulevard, Sepiol is the go-to guy when it comes to the nuts and bolts of private citizens checking out what's going on ... Sub-rosa, that is. Sub-rosa is a fancy term I learned during my days as an insurance investigator. It means undercover. Secret. Hush-hush, Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and all that. I sat many a surveillance in the 1980s around the Louisiana bayous waiting for the supposedly lame to jump and run around the block, or the accidentally blinded to go to the park to play softball. And I would have killed to possess some of the new age surveillance gadgets that are de rigueur for today's amateur supersleuth ---- devices found at Sepiol's small shop in a nondescript San Marcos strip mall. That's the way Sepiol likes it, for he keeps a low profile as do most of his customers. Yeah, you know his customers well. The average modern day surveillant isn't some shadowy government operative or randy detective. It's your neighbor. "A couple of years ago we thought most of our customers would be going for the nanny cams," Sepiol said, surrounded by the tools of his sales trade such as a minivision camera-in-a-clock-radio that was used by a dentist to watch his waiting room or that Raggedy Ann doll lamp for catching bad baby-sitters Not to mention the vast array of wireless transmitters, stealth dog-barking alarms, covert pen microphones and voice scramblers that ring the shop. "But more than anything else, the cameras are going to people having trouble with their neighbors," Sepiol said. "Somebody is keying their car. Teen-age kids are egging their house." Sure, Sepiol gets a few of the "Aliens are chasing me" and "People are breaking into my home to steal my mayonnaise" crowd, but it's mainly your friends and neighbors going undercover. Maybe that's not surprising given recent findings by Harvard researchers for the San Diego Foundation that North County residents have a far higher degree of disconnect with neighbors than residents in other parts of the country. Your neighbors are going at it digitally, by the way. As the world of electronics has miniaturized and digitized, the world of tiny hidden cameras and microphones has followed suit. "That's the big change in the industry over the last year; analog to digital," Sepiol said, holding up a small "monocular" camera with digital storage capability. It has a motion detector and takes 42 pictures, three or six seconds apart, day and night. "Everybody is digital," Sepiol said. "Our hottest seller is an 8-hour digital audio recorder with earpiece and external mike, complete with software that you can use to store on a PC as a wave file for $204. We can't keep this in inventory." Business is booming. So, what does that tell you about our world? Surveillance has gone mainstream. Comforting to know, I'm sure. Dan Weisman North County Times 8/25/01