Bugged Canadian Coins?

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."

Comments

Motive???

[lecithin]

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?

Re:Motive???

[lawpoop]

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.