can anyone tell me what this is and why would it be in grout and walls in a house?

Polarbear46

 

Looks like a Mirror-Mounting-Clip.
I can't remember the proper name for it.
Several much sharper Pictures would help a lot with identification.

 

Looks like a Mirror-Mounting-Clip.
I can't remember the proper name for it.
Several much sharper Pictures would help a lot with identification.

best I have thus far, wife seems to think it is some type of electronic device

 

A sharper picture with some size hint, or a coin for size reference, would hep.
If it was embedded in a patched area then it was simply not removed when a repair or remodel was done. "LaZY WORKMANSHIP" would then be the answer as to why.

 

can anyone tell me what this is and why would it be in grout and walls in a house?

Can you post pictures of the whole thing with better focus?

wife seems to think it is some type of electronic device

That seems unlikely. Is your wife an electrical engineer?

 

Can you post pictures of the whole thing with better focus?
That seems unlikely. Is your wife an electrical engineer?

thanks Dennis, no she isn't, just finding seeming strange stuff in the house thinks it is bugged from the previous owner. we have little info on the past history of it.

 

thanks Dennis, no she isn't, just finding seeming strange stuff in the house thinks it is bugged from the previous owner. we have little info on the past history of it.

https://www.amazon.com/Mirror-Fasteners/s?k=Mirror+Fasteners

Standard holder clips. Maybe she thinks they are old and ugly looking and is using the 'it is bugged' as an excuse to get rid of them.

 

From your potato-cam picture, I think @LowQCab is right. Very common in old houses.

 

thanks Dennis, no she isn't, just finding seeming strange stuff in the house thinks it is bugged from the previous owner. we have little info on the past history of it.

I don't see anything that could be an electronic device. Post some clearer pictures.

 

wife seems to think it is some type of electronic device

Are there any wires attached to it? If not - even if it's battery powered, the battery is going to go dead sooner or later. Personally I see nothing to make me think of electronics.

My wife can be somewhat paranoid as well. Every time she screws up a setting on her computer she thinks she's been hacked. Cat'd would be a better definition of what goes on in her office. Our cats walk on everything. Even the printer buttons. She can't understand how or why the settings get changed. I suspect it's cats, not hacks.

 

While there are passive bugs, having some random wire on screws means only that it was a hangar for something extremely unlikely to be a bug.

 

While there are passive bugs,

The absolute all-time, all-class surveillance G.O.A.T.

A whole lot of people recognized that Maxwell's work was brilliant. But even after 77 years, very few really understood it. Two who did were our old pal Nik, and Lev Sergeyevich Termen.

ak

 

she should be pranked

 

The thing does not look like a commercially made bug, and being as it appears to be clear colorless plastic, there are no electronics in it. So the solution is to put it in a bottle full of water so that any invisible electronics can be short circuited. And then put the bottle of water as far from the house on your property as possible. There are ways to defeat even dead bugs tiat don't exist.

 

Tent the house to clear any bugs with a bug bomb.

 

Tent the house to clear any bugs with a bug bomb.

thaks all

 

Just a suggestion—your wife’s concern doesn’t seem the kind that will be assuaged by eliminating each suspect situation as it arises. With all due respect to her, and with the intention of respectful advice, risking the possibility it is redundant or unwelcome—this sort of concern can be the leading edge of paranoia.

We see many people here with such questions, usually not through a third party. They generally aren’t happy with the answers because they are looking for confirmation, not explanation. In your case, it may not be anywhere near the level we’ve seen—but given the current social climate something triggering a sudden intensification seems very possible.

So, bottom line: please don‘t ignore the possibility of things getting more… acute. It would be easy to deal with each little concern in isolation and miss that it was getting more frequent or more irrational. While you might feel that you can’t say for certain there is nothing going on, I suggest you might want to abandon any attachment to leaving possibilities open on logical grounds and just repeating as often as possible that there is nothing going on.

Take this advice for what it’s worth, which is exactly what you paid for it. A random person from the Internet is not a great source, but you can think about this yourself and maybe research it a bit. It would be easy to step from level ground to join her on the slippery slope if that’s where she is currently standing.

NOTE: I say all this because your house is not bugged by its previous owner. That she would entertain this idea is a bad sign. The world today has plenty of support for wild ideas, it’s very disturbing.

 

One more comment about any possible bugging is that in the majority of houses listening to the audio from a bug would be horribly boring at best. There might be exceptions, but not many of them.
And in the event of an actual bugged location the simple way to thwart any listening is to constantly have full-spectrum music playing. That will thwart all but the very most sophisticated speech detection systems commonly used to assist analysis of what is spoken.
ALSO, if it is the CIA listening, probably there is a good reason.

 

if it is the CIA listening, probably there is a good reason.

Or n.o.t.

ak

 

Or n.o.t.

ak

The local police are a lot more likely than some letter agency. In the case of locals, a wild rumor can be the reason.
Those Flowers are expensive, so the reasons for delivering are pretty strict.