Category: 007ish

Well now, isn’t this just tooooo cute? Anybody else out there remember all the hubbub and hullabaloo over those Canadian “spy coins” a few months ago? The ones that were supposed to be being used to track the movements, conversations, sexual preferences and video rental habits of American defence contractors.

Yeah, those coins.

Turns out that the explanation for that sturm und drang is a little — how can I put this diplomatically? — anticlimactic:

WASHINGTON — The surprise explanation behind the U.S. government’s sensational but false warnings about mysterious Canadian spy coins is the harmless poppy quarter, the world’s first colourized coin.

They were so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. army contractors travelling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them.

The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” said once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails.

The 25-cent piece features the red image of a poppy inlaid over a maple leaf. The quarter is identical to coins described as suspicious by the contractors.

The supposed nano-technology actually was a conventional protective coating the Royal Canadian Mint applied to prevent the colour from rubbing off. The mint produced nearly 30 million such quarters in 2004 to commemorate Canada’s 117,000 war dead.

“It did not appear to be electronic (analog) in nature or have a power source,” wrote one U.S. contractor, who discovered the coin in the cup holder of a rental car. “Under high-power microscope, it appeared to be complex, consisting of several layers of clear but different material, with a wire-like mesh suspended on top.”

The accounts led to a sensational warning from the U.S. Defence Security Service, an agency of the Defence Department.

[…]

Meanwhile, in Canada, senior intelligence officials expressed annoyance with the U.S. spy-coin warnings as they tried to learn more about the oddball claims.

Seriously, guys, just what the hell were ya thinking???  

Um, okay; anybody have any idea just what the heck this James Bond bullcrap might be all about? I guess truth really is stranger than fiction but come on now, boys and girls; this is loopy even by my standards. While I can admit that loonies and toonies bug the hell outta me, I never thought of bugging one myself. It seems, though, that someone else out there doesn’t quite have my level of restraint:

They say money talks, and a new report suggests Canadian currency is indeed chatting, at least electronically, on behalf of shadowy spies.

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 Defence.

“…and for God’s sakes, 007, do try not to break this one.”

Now I’ve heard everything. While the Yanks are keeping a tight lip on the details — not surprisingly, most of them are classified — of the little gizmos, it’s kind of hard to see what use they could be in an uncontrolled environment. I mean, come on now. The range on those things can’t be more than a few hundred metres, at most, and besides that, Chris Mathers (a security consultant and former undercover RCMP officer) manages to point out one doozy of a drawback, if you’re planning to track somebody with one of these things:

“From a technology perspective, it makes no sense,” he said. “To me it’s very strange.”

Then there’s the obvious problem: what if the coin holder plunks the device into a pop machine?

“You give the guy something with a transmitter that he’s going to spend — I mean, he might have it for an hour,” Mathers said with a chuckle.

Well, I guess it’ll be one helluva well-observed pop machine then, won’t it? 🙄