Are there any devices that can detect the presence of another electrical device? So that it could scan places. This is scary, imagine renting a place only to know the owner has put cams all over. Stuff of nightmares.
In theory yes¹, but in practice I would expect it to be a tricky time-consuming process. How would you differentiate between a legitimate electronic device on the other of the wall, and an illegitimate electronic device embedded inside the wall? The difference between those may only be a few inches.
I don't think this is one of those problems looking for a technical solution. What's needed is a legal/social solution: an aggressive campaign for publicly identifying and shaming perpetrators, with very harsh punishments handed out.
¹ From what I know traditional "bug detectors" work by trying to induce the bug to broadcast and then detecting that broadcast signal. But "metal detector" style bug detectors that instead simply look for circuits seem like they should be possible.
A more plausible solution is putting all that NSA deep packet inspection infrastructure to use tracing uploads of the banned videos, and even that isn't very plausible.
As long as there is a fairly safe market for the videos, people will keep being violated on a large scale.
I don't think this is one of those problems looking for a technical solution. What's needed is a legal/social solution: an aggressive campaign for publicly identifying and shaming perpetrators, with very harsh punishments handed out.
¹ From what I know traditional "bug detectors" work by trying to induce the bug to broadcast and then detecting that broadcast signal. But "metal detector" style bug detectors that instead simply look for circuits seem like they should be possible.