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The biggest tech story of Jan. 10 is undoubtedly the unveiling of Apple's iPhone (universal reaction: “I want one!”) but the award for strangest story goes to the discovery that American contractors have been carrying Canadian spy coins.
According to reports in daily newspapers, three American defence contractors who had visited Canada between October 2005 and January 2006 were surprised to discover that some of the coins they carried had radio frequency transmitters hidden inside them.
And no, this is not a joke.
The story is weird for a couple reasons. First, the only known type of transmitter small enough to fit into a coin would be an RFID tag, devices typically used to track merchandise in warehouses and stores. But these little guys have very short range, so they could not be used to track a target's movements around a city unless, of course, thousands of RFID receivers have been clandestinely embedded in lamp posts and doorways. Of course, if you wanted to know if and when a target walked through one or two specific monitored doorways, a loaded Loonie could tell you that.
The second problem with this form of spying, as noted by security consultant Chris Mathers in The Toronto Star, is that coins are meant to be spent; anytime the target uses a handful of coins to buy a latte, the entire covert surveillance program gets stalled at the local Second Cup.
What is not weird about this story is that someone might want to track the activities of U.S. defence contractors. Call it jonesing for a James Bond life, but I suspect that type of spying goes on all the time, and bleeding-edge technology surely plays a leading role.
Peter Wolchak
Posted January 10, 2007
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