Tracking People with Spy Coins: A New Espionage Threat?

[Ivan Seeking]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Money talks, but can it also follow your movements?

In a U.S. government warning high on the creepiness scale, the Defense Department cautioned its American contractors over what it described as a new espionage threat: Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside.

The government said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

Intelligence and technology experts said such transmitters, if they exist, could be used to surreptitiously track the movements of people carrying the spy coins. [continued]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/11/spy.coins.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

 

[hypatia]

Maybe their should be a Where's Looney . com site?

 

[Evo]

I've always said you can't trust those Canadians.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

This is one of my favorite stories:

a listening device found in the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1952. The hiding place: a hole in the Great Seal of the United States hanging in the ambassador's study. The carved wooden seal, a gift from the Soviets seven years before, held buried inside it a small cylinder called a Hi-Q resonant cavity. The cylinder contained a diaphragm at one end and an antenna at the other. Voices in the room caused the diaphragm and then the antenna to vibrate. U.S. officials surmised that Soviet technicians across the street kept a high-power microwave beam trained on the seal to measure the vibrations, allowing them to reconstruct the conversations.

Like the laser microphone system, in which the target's window is the vibrating surface, this nasty little eavesdropper is known as a passive bug. Passive bugs don't need batteries, wires, telephones or transmitters. As a result, they are nearly impossible to detect.

Of course, this has to be a close second!

A bizarre variation on the theme is the toilet-bowl bug, proposed by the late Bernard Spindel, a master eavesdropper of the 1950's and 1960's whose career included more than 200 arrests or indictments for illegal snooping. Using Spindel's system, a spy on the roof of a building would place a microphone inside the air-vent pipe leading to the target toilet. Since the surface of the water in a toilet vibrates like a diaphragm in response to nearby voices, and since water is such an excellent conductor of sound, the voices would be carried up the pipe to the microphone. [continue]

http://www.bugsweeps.com/info/spytech.html

There would be times when you really wouldn't want to listen.