Kal
Whispers
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
Privacy is an illusion, a fragile screen separating individuals from the group. A screen that can be broken at any moment for any number of reasons: Governmental oversight, corporate greed, familial curiosity, and a favourite of the Shadows - the clinical examinations of a detached spymaster.
It is this latter role for which the Comspike was made, but many others can be met if the need - genuine or fabricated - is there.
Globex is not one to police its customers, after all. After confirming that the devices were relatively unlikely to breach its most secure encryption, the corporation gleefully made its new Comspikes available on the open market. On the galactic level, anyway. Local jurisdictions often hamstring the sale of such devices, but since Globex does nothing to restrict resale - by the law-abiding or otherwise - this has not impacted the bottom line.
- Intent: A sneaky way of listening to private conversations / spying on enemy combatants.
- Image Source: Year Million (2016) series: Ear Phone - Concept Art by Gergely Piroska
- Canon Link: N/A
- Permissions: N/A
- Primary Source: N/A
- Manufacturer: The Globex Corporation
- Affiliation: Globex Internal Affairs
- Market Status: Open-Market
- Model: FR1-x Comspike
- Modularity: Significant
- Highly variable appearance, can double as a communicator, can include a self-destruct mechanism, etc.
- Can be an earpiece, a handheld device, a module added to a droid, etc.
- Production: Limited
- Material: Electronics
- Comspikes utilise sophisticated decryption protocols to slither into encrypted communications channels, including private conversations on a communicator, secure frequencies used by enemy soldiers, and in some cases the binary chattering of droids and digital systems.
- Comspikes can double as communicators and/or process background sounds, e.g., to listen to distant conversations.
- Eavesdropper: Privacy is an illusion; Comspikes allow users to hear all kinds of juicy rumours (and state secrets).
- Codebreaking: Comspikes can breach many kinds of encryption, but they are neither perfect nor undetectable.
- Implicit Guilt: 'I was just looking for the refresher.' is a lot less convincing if caught with a Comspike in hand.
- Size Matters: The smaller the Comspike, the closer one needs to be an active communicator to listen in.
Privacy is an illusion, a fragile screen separating individuals from the group. A screen that can be broken at any moment for any number of reasons: Governmental oversight, corporate greed, familial curiosity, and a favourite of the Shadows - the clinical examinations of a detached spymaster.
It is this latter role for which the Comspike was made, but many others can be met if the need - genuine or fabricated - is there.
Globex is not one to police its customers, after all. After confirming that the devices were relatively unlikely to breach its most secure encryption, the corporation gleefully made its new Comspikes available on the open market. On the galactic level, anyway. Local jurisdictions often hamstring the sale of such devices, but since Globex does nothing to restrict resale - by the law-abiding or otherwise - this has not impacted the bottom line.
