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.

Comments

Nothing new

[mcgrew]

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.

Re:are they even legal?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:are they even legal?

[kbonapart]

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.

Re:Hiding in plain sight

[houghi]

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.

Re:Great....

[ircmaxell]

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...

Re:Sounds rather disappointing, really

[ehud42]

SSSSHHHHH! You'll give away Canada'a secret weapon!!