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Hollow Spy Coins
Bruce Schneier's blog links to a few sources for hollow spy coins, one being BoingBoing's Bazaar — where a nickel that can hold a microSD card costs $27. Another is Slashdot's sister company ThinkGeek, where you can get hollow quarters and half-dollars in the low 20s. As if corporate and government security geeks didn't have enough to worry about.
Not sure. All x-rays I've seen just show metal as a bright spot, not much relief. And either way, all you have to do is keep the coin in your pocket. I never take my belt, rings or glasses off and have yet to be beeped by the metal detector and I've been flying twice a week lately. A little bit of metal is allowed. Just keep the coin in your pocket and take all other metal off and you'll almost certainly raise no suspicions or alarms.
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I was a amateur magician when I was ten or twelve, and I'll be 58 next month. You could get those coins at any magic shop way back then, or through the mail from catalogs; I owned a couple of them. Also, any machinist can and could make them easily.
Free Martian Whores!
ThinkGeek is pretty neat. I've bought a lot of stuff from them (not much lately though).
I keep The Rabbit of Caerbannog plush toy in my magician's hat.
Since these are machined out of gen-u-ine legal tender, the charge you would be worried about is defacement of currency, rather than counterfeiting.
That said, I've never heard of anybody going after currency defacement operations(even the overt ones. Those "souveneir penny" machines that crush a graphic associated with whatever attraction the machine is located in have been around for decades, and the Secret Service has shown no signs of caring) unless they involve wholesale export of coins for their melt value(I think there was some issue involving the old pure copper pennies during one of the spikes in copper prices fairly recently).
If you somehow got caught, and your hollow nickel contained a microSD card with a copy of secret_leaked_CIA_documents_that_the_illuminati_don't_want_you_to_have.doc, they'd probably throw a defacement of currency charge at you, just for completeness' sake; but, while almost definitely illegal, they aren't exactly a huge legal risk.
No, it's a coin. A real, minted coin. Currency.
"Actual coins are precision hand milled to create a secret compartment inside" from Thinkgeek description.
It's the most expensive half-dollar you'll buy without being a collector, though. Potentially the most expensive you'll spend, depending on the contents of the micro SD card.
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The "defacement of currency" charge that people toss around doesn't really apply to tearing up a dollar bill, or crushing a penny. The defacement charge is there as a hedge against people drawing a zero on the end of a five dollar bill and trying to pass it off as a fifty.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
No, it just means you have a spy pocket you could sell to sucker for 20 bucks.
You can't handle the truth.
I thought the illegal action was the "deBASEment" of the currency, not defacement. When coins were made out of precious metals, they could be shaved for bits and slivers of that silver or gold. Since the coins weighed less, but still represented the amount of money it was promised to by the government, the currency was debased. And that was a major crime. It defacement of the currency is illegal, then we would've locked up all those wheresgeorge.com people, who keep stamping one dollar bills.
There are no gods but ourselves.
The key word there is 'fraudulently'. That means, to be illegal, you have to try to use the altered coin as real currency.
Probably because you are not a beard wearing Mediteranian. Random searches and such, you know.
And a nice place place would be in your laptop itself. For small things, just put them in the battery department. And for very topsecret things, open the laptop and tape it to the motherboard. Unless they realy are looking for it AND have somebody know how the xray should look like, it will look like a motherboard with some chips on it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Considering the material of the inner wall is copper, it'd have to be a VERY strong field to penetrate the coin. It would have to be so strong that the induced currents are strong enough to begin to melt it. And actually the small size is an advantage, since you'd need a VERY high potential gradient to even generate a significant current (given the walls are how far apart? A tenth of a millimeter? Or on edge maybe a few cm at most). So basically you could generate a high power EMF that's oscillating at a very high frequency (to keep inducing high currents) over a VERY small distance (So that the generated EMF has a VERY high potential gradient) to even be able to generate any kind of a significant current... And by that point, if you melt the copper, you've pretty much destroyed what's inside, so the better option would be developing something to detect the seam rather than try to pear inside with EMR...
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good
Depending on A/S/L up to $3.7 million according to Fox News: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,480037,00.html
There are companies that will sell you coins from many different countries, if you're worried about spending your spy coin...
Modding "-1, Troll" is not a proper response if you disagree with me. Try reason.
SSSSHHHHH! You'll give away Canada'a secret weapon!!
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
No, in the U.S. you may do anything you want to a coin as long as it is not with fraudulent intent, e.g. bleaching a $1 bill and reprinting it to look like a $100 bill, etc.
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/coins/portraits.shtml#q13
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