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Bugged Canadian Coins?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Jan 10, 2007 03:25 PM
from the time-for-the-tin-foil-pants dept.
from the time-for-the-tin-foil-pants dept.
tundra_man writes "CBC has an article about RFID type devices in Canadian coins found on US Contractors. From the article: 'Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense.' The report did not indicate what kinds of coins were involved."
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Necrotica writes "An odd-looking Canadian coin with a bright red flower was the culprit behind the U.S. Defence Department's false espionage warning earlier this year.
The odd-looking — but harmless — "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP."
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Motive??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Aside from:
"Passing the coin to an unwitting contractor, particularly in strife-torn countries, could mark the person for kidnapping or assassination"
But that doesn't seem practical in this case.
Anybody make sense of this?
Re:Motive??? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Motive??? (Score:4, Interesting)
I seriously doubt anyone managed to mung currency and insert a real RFID unit.
What I do think however is that in a small percentage of coins they resonate at the same frequency as an RFID which would appear as though they were magical.
If you did infact hollow out a bit of a coin and replace some of the metal with an electronic bug the weight and bounce (striking against a piezo sensor) would cause such a difference any coin mech you inserted it into would reject it.
Parent
Re:Motive??? (Score:5, Informative)
Also it's better if vending machines reject the coin. If you can't spend it in a soda machine you're going to just keep the coin, and probably try another.
Parent
A Day In The Life Of A Twoonie (Score:5, Funny)
i see a trend here, eh.
Parent
Re:A Day In The Life Of A Twoonie (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, this is obviously a clever ploy for the Canadian government to discover where all the Tim Horton's restaurants are located.
Parent
Re:Motive??? (Score:4, Insightful)
These can't be general circulation coins. It's too expensive to put RFID in a coin, and there's no use for it. If the government was minting RFID coins, even as a test-run, there would be *some* mention of it *somewhere. If the government were doing it for legit purposes, they would own up to it after these reports. These coins must be being specially made.
Why would you want to make them? I don't think you're really worried about the coin itself; you are worried about the person carrying the coins. You don't need to know where they are at any moment -- there is no infrastructure to track a single coin. You just want to correlate a person carrying these tagged coins on a regular basis with the source of the tagged coins. It's a kind of 'swarming' identification. If the person regularly has a number of tagged coins in their pocket 3 days out of the week, you know they must be one of the people interacting directly with the source. This person is part of the group of people you are trying to identify.
Imagine a customs checkpoint on the border with thousands of people passing by every day. Suppose you know that there are some 50 contractors passing by there every day on their way to work in Canada. For whatever reason, you can't figure out who they are in any other way. But suppose you have access to the Canadian money supply inside the vending machines of the worksite. So you make sure that all of the Canadian money coming into the vending machine is tagged. You have a scanner inside the customs booth. Everyday, there are a number of cars where the driver has anywhere from 0-3 tagged coins. You know these guys must be getting tagged coins from the vending machine you control.
Parent
NOT an RFID is my bet. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you RTFA article closely you'll see that the souce told the press that transmitters were found in coins.
Then (in paragraph 11) reporter notes that the type of transmitter was not disclosed. In paragraph 12 he starts speculating about RFID. The rest of the article (and possibly part of the preceeding section - along with the Slashdot headline) is based on the unfounded assumption that the transmitter IS an RFID-type device.
Which strikes me as totally bogus.
IMHO it's more likely that the "transmitter" found is a remotely-powered area audio bug, like "The Great Seal Bug", the martini fake olive bug, or the "diodes in the wall" bugs. Planted on a person it would bug his conversations and those around him until he spent it - hours or days later. (As you can imagine from the martini-olive bug, which is only useful while the spy is toting the martini, in some situations long-term bugging is an unnecessary bonus.)
Such bugs can be simple: A shaped cavity with a flexible membrane over it is one way to do it - the cavity resonates, giving a strong reflection, while the sound modulates the cavity's effectiveness, AMing the reflection. Another is just to fasten a diode to something that can be vibrated by sound. The diode frequency-doubles the reflected signal or mixes two of them to produce the sum and difference frequencies (sorting the diode's reflection from most ordinary reflections) and the vibration of it along the line between the bug and the monitor phase-modulates the return with the local audio. No fancy circuitry or local power supplies necessary.
I presume this one did involve at least a diode, or some semiconductor circuitry, since it was found in a radio scan - which is often done by looking for the frequency-multiplying and/or frequency mixing effect of diodes / semiconductor junctions. Finding a pure cavity resonator bug - or even identifying what it is when you have it - is a bitch.
Bugging the audio at a conference, or the conversations of a contractor at work on classified projects, would be worth planting a bug on him and having it there for only a few hours. After that, if he "spends" it, so what? (At least until they are noticed and a way found to identify them BEFORE the conversations to be monitored.)
Parent
Re:Extortion? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Motive??? (Score:5, Informative)
That's funny, Spanky... when *I* was homeless I was FAR more interested in staying fed, getting a job, and getting back to where I was now. So were most of the guys at the shelter.
My question: Did you have a big helping of WhiteBreadNess this morning, or do you watch too much cable?
Assuming you're not limited to RFID limits, in theory how much power could one of these spit out? What distance could they be tracked from?
Parent
Re:Motive??? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Motive??? (Score:4, Interesting)
I doubt this is intended as a coinage solution for Where's Willy [whereswilly.com], the Canadian currency form of Where's George [wheresgeorge.com]. And the duration of the track of an individual depends on when the subject is expected to make another purchase. And it doesn't have to be very long to get useful, potentially compromising information, or just get the subject close enough to a reader wired to an explosive device.
Scarier is the thought that such RF trackers are just the test run, gathering distribution data to see what will happen when they replace the RFID chips with tiny samples of Polonium-210 [wikipedia.org] or other more deadly toxins.
Parent
In Canada... (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps this is overblown? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGA
RFID chips (Score:4, Funny)
With RFID chips costing a fraction of a cent apiece, the addition of such a chip must at least triple the value of whatever canadian currency you add it to.
Re:RFID chips (Score:5, Informative)
Canadian Dollar to U.S. Dollar Exchange Rate [yahoo.com]
Parent
The crazy dude on the corner (Score:4, Funny)
Takes WheresGeorge to a new level! (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, a April Fool's joke I recall was that WG had developed a way to track US dollar coins, with a machine that would emboss a unique serial number into the coin's smooth edge. The new project would be "Where's Sackie [usmint.gov]?"
Looks like the Canadian government is way ahead of the curve on that one. Better alert the folks at Where's Willy? [whereswilly.com], the northern branch of Where's George?.
Logical course of action? Invade Canada! (Score:4, Funny)
hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Is this even true? (Score:3, Interesting)
"The report, which first came to light in a U.S. newspaper, has since been posted on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, an organization that tracks the intelligence world and promotes government openness."
Well, I don't see it on fas.org (search [google.com]), and if its in a "american newspaper", its one that google news [google.com] doesn't search.
Something just doesn't sound right about this whole story.... It makes no sense, and there's no other cites for it.
It's actually a value added feature... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:There's not a chance that this is real. (Score:4, Informative)
implantation in animals (Pet-ID, HomeAgain) are about the size of a grain
of rice.
Parent
Re:Defence? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent