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

Takes WheresGeorge to a new level!

[RobertB-DC]

Wow, and I thought I was on the cutting edge by stamping bills and entering them into Where's George?

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?"

Looks like the Canadian government is way ahead of the curve on that one. Better alert the folks at Where's Willy?, the northern branch of Where's George?.

Re:Motive???

[LiquidCoooled]

I also read the article and thought WTF.

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.

hmm

[dheera]

well, for sure, it would make creating coin vending machines much easier to implement, mechanically. once i was in canada and received a coin that looked like this which i initially thought was fake, but believed later after reading online.

Is this even true?

[Mr 44]

From the article:
"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), and if its in a "american newspaper", its one that google news 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.

Extortion?

[Anonymous Coward]

The coins may have been given in some immoral/illegal situation by Canada's equivalent of the CIA. Perhaps by one posing as a prostitute? Perhaps perhaps at the scene of a bribe (no, I'm not saying the coin itself is the bribe; but perhaps the bartender gave the bugged coins at the scene)? If the coins showed up on the person in a meeting with the contractor the next day you'd guess which members of the contractors team were present during the immoral activity.

Common Cents

[Doc Ruby]

Hey, we fingerprint all Canadians entering the US, soon to demand (RFID) passports from all of them, while our NSA is tapping their phones and email. Who knows what our CIA does up there.

Since Americans are allergic to Canadian pennies now worth almost as much as ours, and dump them whenever we see them on our side of the border, these RFID trackers are relatively pretty benign.

Maybe if we just all wound down the BS simcurity that pretends to protect us, and instead actually just destroyed us some Qaeda recruitment cells, the US dollar would become strong enough again that we wouldn't bother schlepping their Canadian coins back home, like pocket lint.

Accidental Perhaps?

[HighOrbit]

The article didn't specify if the RFID chips were adhered to the surface of the coin or somehow implanted in the coin itself. An internally implanted chip would be nefarious, but a surface adhesion could be accidental. In the case of an internal implant, since the reading would be local, they would most likely be used to figure out the coming-and-goings of a few locations (i.e. stake out a building and see how many readings you get during certain hours), or perhaps to tell when somebody is NOT in their hotel room, so the place could be searched or laptop with sensitive information pilfered.

Assuming that it was adhered, I could conceive how it could be accidental.

1. spill coffee on pants on way to conferece
2. stop at chain store to buy new pants
3. chain store uses RFID to track inventory, puts small tag in pants pockets of stock
4. tag seperates from cloths and adhers to pocket contents

There's not a chance that this is real.

[Beardo the Bearded]

I'm just a lowly Electrical Engineer who works in RF.

At my last job, we made transmitters. Some of them were really small - small enough to be surgically implanted into fish or ducks. It was cutting edge stuff; I had to work with the manufacturers to work out bugs in the chips, compilers, and programmers.

There is no way that a working transmitter can be fitted into a mockup coin. You'll have to have some kind of processor. The 10F202 is really small, coming in at about 2mm x 4mm x 2 mm, plus a little extra for the leads. Next we'll add the required RF circuitry, like the tuning and bypass capacitors, amplifiers, etc. We'll neglect voltage regulators and other things, but you're looking at more parts than what will fit in a toonie.

We'll assume that no board is being used, since that alone will negate the chance of a coin being used.

Let's assume an 800MHz signal. Why? Well, why not? That's going to give a 4-inch antenna. Let's assume a 24-gauge wire with a very small insulator, giving it almost negligible displacement. If you wrap this up inside the coin, you're going to have - quite frankly - fuck all for range. I guess you could run the wire on the outside of the coin, but you're not going to have much luck. Internal antennae just don't work very well.

Then you have a battery - oh, whoops, no more room.

So how does this work, again?

Re:There's not a chance that this is real.

[bigberk]

That's of course true, the whole idea of RFID chips is they are inductively powered and don't have to carry their own power source.

(I happen to be a Canadian RFID researcher, of all things)

But the article sounds like BS to me. Let's say the coins did have an RFID chip on their surface, perhaps in one of the quarters with a poppy cut-out in the center (or the two dollar coin which also has a center that can come out). What would you DO with the "spy chip"? You're going to record audio or video? Fine... then do what with it? You don't have enough space to store it, and you can only transmit it a few feet away.

It might be a practical way to track where coins go, but I can't see how it could be used to "spy". It's really no different than say a serial number stamped on currency, which we do have on paper bills. I just don't see the point.

Re:my guess

[SilverJets]

They probably got one of those poppy quarters from a few years ago and figured the painted on poppy was a listening device. I say produce the coins so the public and Canadian officials can see them or shut up. This has to be one of the most retarded stories I've read in awhile....transmitters in our coins....sheesh!!

Re:You don't know?

[sentientbeing]

The article didnt specify what the bug actually did

Im speculating, but I imagine it would not be impossible to minuturise an RFID reader to fit inside a coin with the intention to copy the RFID identity card which a defence contractor may carry on his person (In his pocket?). An attacker would then need to obtain the coin with the recorded ID information, I suppose.
It would be a simple matter to recreate the ID card giving an attacker access to a secured installation.

Re:Motive???

[paganizer]

I haven't been a high energy microwave tech actively for quite a while, but i'm pretty certain thst with some $$ and an actual interest, I could read a passive rfid tag at about 100m. Might screw up some nearby cell phones, though.

NOT an RFID is my bet.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

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.)

Tracking

[Aneurysm]

Maybe its just something simple like they added chips to a small sample of coins in order to track them round the mint.

Adding them to any processes after other coins are struck might allow them to see any bottlenecks in the factory line and therefore improve the flow of coins.

Just an idea, seems more sensible than being used to track a person, because the chips probably had a low detection range, and coins change hands so quickly as other people have pointed out.

Re:Motive???

[HTH NE1]

Either you only want to track that person for a very short amount of time, or you're really interested in tracking the money itself.

I doubt this is intended as a coinage solution for Where's Willy, the Canadian currency form of Where's George. 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 or other more deadly toxins.

Re:Motive???

[StikyPad]

My guess is that it was just a proof-of-concept for one of the vendors looking to sell the technology to someone (although obviously not to the contractors involved), therefore it was irrelevant as to whether the coins were disposed of shortly, or ever. If someone had developed a method of tracking the RFID tags over distances of 10s or 100s of meters, it would make tagging and following someone much easier. Additionally, if the tags could fit in a coin, it's great evidence that they can be implanted in small everyday objects that wouldn't raise suspicion.

If I were a vendor, and I could say "Hey, I planted these devices on US personnel and was able to track them all over Toronto without raising suspicion (until much later)."

On the other hand, the fact that they were, in fact, discovered later sort of invalidates that claim. The object may well have been to have the individuals dispose of the coins before ever noticing they had been compromised.