Mr. Stossel had been charged with making a surreptitious recording of a Baltimore doctor during research on a special he was preparing on what he called "junk science."

This called to mind another recent episode of surreptitious recording.

In general the practice of Labov and his research team, adopted by most sociolinguists working within his general paradigm, has been to ban candid or surreptitious recording.

Friends and colleagues are said to have ensnared each other with surreptitious recordings.

He said his belief was that Murray had made the surreptitious recording as an "insurance policy."

He began bargaining with the Government, using, as chips, surreptitious recordings of top company executives.

Parts of surreptitious recordings quoted by the prosecutors occasionally portrayed Ms. Amsterdam as something like a Dashiell Hammett character.

The law prohibits the surreptitious recording of private conversations.

This followed controversy from a released surreptitious recording of a conversation involving eliminated finalist Đức Anh insulting fellow eliminated contestants, judges, the media, and others.

Ralfe was a reporter for CTV when in 1973 he exploited a loophole in Canadian law that allowed surreptitious recording under certain circumstances.