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Bugged Canadian Coins?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on 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."

9 of 354 comments (clear)

  1. Motive??? by lecithin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    For the life of me, I can't figure a reason that somebody would do this. Coins change hands quickly and RFID has a pretty limited range.

    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?

    --
    It could be worse, it could be Monday.
    1. Re:Motive??? by lawpoop · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The only conclusion that I can come to is that someone is tracking these contractors to figure out who they are.

      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.

      --
      Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
      -- Pablo Picasso
  2. Another fine example of military "inteligence" by Maury+Markowitz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can anyone here imagine a better way to make an RFID useless than putting it in the middle of a coin? And then after making these magical coins, apparently the same super-spies went all over the US and installed readers at every sensitive plant. Without anyone noticing. Wow, with spies like that, who needs bugged money?

    The sad part about this is that someone believed it.

    Maury

  3. Re:There's not a chance that this is real. by Abcd1234 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    You're quite the engineer if you can't understand the difference between a passive RFID device and an active RF transmitter.

  4. Explains a lot by Foktip · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Im gonna guess that these coins were pennies, since nobody takes the time to ever give exact change, and vending machines dont accept them (usually).

  5. Re:There's not a chance that this is real. by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How are you going to covertly track someone with RFID?

    If you want to track someone, you've got to either broadcast the info or walk up to them with the RFID scanner.

    If you're walking up to them with the RFID scanner, you already know where they are.

    --

    ---
    ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
  6. RFID is pure speculation by TheNicestGuy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Let's be clear about a very important point in this article: It does not say that there were RFID tags in the coins. I quote: "...details of the incidents were classified. As a result, the type of transmitter in play -- and its ultimate purpose -- remain a mystery. However, tiny tracking tags, known as RFIDs, are commonly placed in everything..."

    Thus, it's only an unimaginative guess that the coins contained RFID. So the second half of the article, where security experts speculate on the purpose and effectiveness of RFID embedded in coins falls just short of making stuff up. It may or may not have anything to do with the actual events.

  7. Re:NOT an RFID is my bet. by GWBasic · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My guess is that the bug was "planted" by the coin being placed directly in the contractor's pocket. This could occur when someone casually bumps into the contractor. As a result, the bug is hard to detect. Let's face it, if you found a coin in a random pocket, would you suspect that it's a bug?

    --
    No, I will not work for your startup
  8. Re:Interac foolishness. by ceoyoyo · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Maybe. I've noticed that most people aren't able to use credit cards properly. Getting denied when they run out of money seems to work much better than getting denied a few thousand dollars after they run out of money. Of course, that's how credit card companies make a profit.