Ask someone what a private investigator carries and they will describe a movie prop room: pen cameras, tracking devices, listening bugs. After years of surveillance work, my actual kit would disappoint a film director. Everything in it earns its place against two questions: does it help produce evidence a court will accept, and does it help me stay unnoticed while I produce it? Here is what is actually in the kit, and just as important, what is deliberately not. You will notice there are no brand names in this article. Gear turns over every few years; the principles behind choosing it do not, and the principles are what a client is actually paying for.
The camera system comes first
The camera is the kit. Everything else supports it. Mine is chosen for a strong optical zoom and reliable performance in bad light, because digital zoom degrades exactly the image quality a court case needs. If the plate number or the face is only legible after software enhancement, opposing counsel has an opening; if it is crisp in the original file, there is nothing to argue about.
Before every assignment I verify the date and time settings, because courts rely on embedded timestamps to confirm the sequence and integrity of evidence, and a camera set to the wrong day can undo a clean week of work. A second body sits in the bag as a backup; electronics fail at the worst possible moments, and a dead camera at the decisive moment is not a story any client wants to hear. Spare batteries, spare memory cards, and a charging plan that accounts for a full shift round it out. Power discipline sounds mundane until hour ten of a twelve-hour sit.
"Reliable in bad light" is worth unpacking, because most decisive moments in this work happen at dusk, at dawn, or under a porch light. That means a fast lens and a sensor chosen over megapixel counts, stabilization that holds a long lens steady from a car seat, and, more than anything, practice: knowing by feel what the camera can and cannot capture at each light level, so the shot gets taken through the window that actually exists. The camera also stays reachable, never buried under the rest of the kit, because the habit that proves continuity, short hourly clips of the scene, only survives if taking one costs nothing. One more discipline that surprises people: video is shot with the understanding that any captured audio may be stripped before delivery, and conversations near the camera are kept to nothing, because everything on the original file can face cross-examination.
What the vehicle carries
The vehicle is the other half of the working kit: neutral, unremarkable, well maintained. It starts every assignment with a full tank or a full charge, because leaving a surveillance position to refuel is how the decisive ten minutes get missed. Where local rules allow, window coverings keep screens, notes, and camera gear out of sight of anyone walking past; surveillance that gets noticed has already failed.
The rest is about lasting twelve hours without breaking cover: weather-appropriate spare clothing (a jacket change alters a silhouette surprisingly well), food and water, battery banks for the small electronics, and an awareness of light discipline after dark, when a single glowing phone screen makes a parked car obvious from across the street. For the fuller treatment of how the vehicle actually gets used on a sit, Art of Surveillance Part 1 covers positioning, light, and cover stories in detail.
Ontario’s seasons are part of the kit too. Winter work means battery drain that halves every runtime estimate, window fog that betrays an occupied car, and a real decision about idling, because an exhaust plume on a minus-twenty morning is visible for a block. Summer means heat management, water, and knowing where the sun will sit across a six-hour window, both for the camera and for staying functional. None of this is glamorous. All of it decides whether the person in the vehicle is still sharp when the thirty seconds that matter finally arrive.
Covert gear for foot follows
Sooner or later the subject parks and walks, and the kit has to walk too. For foot work the requirements invert: instead of long lenses, small and silent. A covert camera with no lit indicators, operated instinctively, so well practiced that powering it on, confirming it is recording, and framing a shot happens without looking down for more than a moment. Clothing that fits the environment rather than any idea of what an investigator looks like. A small audio recorder for dictating observations afterward, because writing notes mid-follow is a tell, and memory decays faster than anyone admits. The follow itself is its own craft; Art of Surveillance Part 2 covers it properly.
Two unglamorous details earn their place here. Cash, because a card receipt puts your name at the subject’s coffee shop, and a small purchase is the most natural cover behaviour there is. And clothing chosen for the second location, not the first: the follow that starts at a warehouse can end at a courthouse, a mall, or a bar, and the person who fits none of them gets remembered. The phone, used deliberately, is also the most underrated covert camera in the kit: everyone in every public space is already holding one, which is exactly the point.
Detection equipment: finding devices, not planting them
A separate case holds the counter-surveillance gear: spectrum analyzers and RF scanners for finding transmitters, optical detection tools for locating camera lenses, and the physical inspection tools that find the devices no scanner sees. Clients call for sweeps when a divorce turns hostile, when a business suspects a competitor is hearing too much, or when someone simply cannot explain how another party keeps knowing things. The hiding spots get more creative every year; the detection kit has to keep pace.
A client sweep is more methodical than the movies suggest. It starts with a conversation about why they suspect something, because "how would the other party act on what they knew?" narrows the search dramatically. Then the RF survey, then the slower work: physical inspection of the usual hosts, power bars, chargers, clocks, vents, vehicles, gifts that arrived around the time the leaks started. And a fair number of sweeps end with a benign explanation: a phone syncing to an old shared account, a location feature someone forgot they enabled. That is a good outcome, not a wasted one. The client came in not knowing how the other party knew things; they leave knowing.
Vehicles are the most requested sweep target, and the same ownership rule from the tracking question applies in reverse: we sweep vehicles the client owns or leases, and finding a device on one is the beginning of a legal conversation, not a licence to retaliate.
Worth stating plainly: this equipment exists to find devices, never to place them. That distinction is not a style choice. It is the legal line the whole trade stands on.
How evidence is stored and handled
Case evidence lives on dedicated, clearly labelled storage, one case per card, never on a personal device, and it stays retained per the case type’s requirements; in many matters that means years, not months. The separation earns its keep the day a case is challenged: the recording device and storage media can face forensic analysis, and mixing personal material with case evidence turns a routine authentication exercise into a privacy problem and a credibility problem at once. Clean storage, clean chain, nothing to explain.
"Chain of custody" sounds technical and is actually simple: who had the evidence, when, and what they did with it, accounted for without gaps. In practice that means originals get archived untouched, working copies get made for review, and file naming carries the case, date, and source, so material found two years later still identifies itself. Reports reference exhibits by those same names, so the report and the media never drift apart. Retention matters for the same reason: cases reopen, appeals happen, and the card that was reformatted a month after the report is the card someone will eventually ask for.
What we deliberately don’t carry
The most common questions I get about equipment are really questions about legality, so here are the straight answers.
Can a private investigator legally put a GPS tracker on your car in Ontario? Not the way people imagine. Placing a tracker on a vehicle requires a lawful basis, which in practice usually means the consent of the vehicle’s registered owner, the classic example being a company documenting the use of its own fleet vehicle. Sticking a tracker on a vehicle the client does not own, a spouse’s separately owned car, a business rival’s truck, is how an investigation becomes the subject of one. When a prospective client’s plan depends on that, we decline and explain why.
What about listening devices? Canada’s Criminal Code makes it an offence to intercept private communications you are not a party to. There is no licensed-investigator exception. So there are no audio bugs in the kit, no "leave a recorder in the room" service, and no workaround worth anyone’s licence. What a licensed investigator lawfully documents is what happens in public view and what they are themselves a party to.
And the long lens? Powerful optics do not change what may be photographed, only how far away the photographer stands. What happens in public view is documentable; what happens where a person reasonably expects privacy, behind a bedroom window, inside a fenced yard, is not, and altitude does not change the answer, which is why drone work runs under the same rules as everything else. The test is the space, not the equipment.
The short version
If a tool’s only use is capturing what someone does behind a closed door they reasonably believed was private, it is not in the kit, and anyone offering to use one on your behalf is offering you evidence you cannot use and liability you do not want.
Do you need a licence for this equipment in Ontario?
Owning most of this equipment is legal for anyone; cameras, scanners, and recorders are consumer goods. What is licensed in Ontario is the activity: conducting investigations for hire is regulated under the Private Security and Investigative Services Act, and working investigators carry a licence you can ask to see (the province explains the licensing scheme here). Individuals and agencies are licensed separately under the Act, and a legitimate firm carries both. The gap between owning the gear and knowing what may lawfully be done with it, on whose behalf, and how the results have to be handled to survive scrutiny, is most of what separates a professional file from an expensive mistake.
Verifying is straightforward: ask for the licence number before you sign anything, and be wary of anyone offering what this article just told you is not on offer, recordings from inside private spaces, trackers on vehicles you do not own, or "guaranteed" results. A legitimate investigator will put a written scope in front of you before any money moves; the other kind will not.
None of this replaces training or judgment. The equipment supports the work; it does not do it. The kit exists for one job: surveillance that produces admissible evidence without ever being noticed, and every item in it, and every item kept out of it, serves that job. The least visible part is the maintenance: batteries cycled, cards wiped only after archival, clocks and firmware checked on a schedule, so that when the twelve-hour sit produces its thirty decisive seconds, nothing in the bag has an excuse.