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Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Big Brother is watching… your wallet Did you know your twenty dollar bills have RFID tags in them? That is what these people think… and they have the burned bills to prove it.
A year or so ago I suggested microwaving as a way to de-louse items with RFID tags in them. From the state of the bills in the picture, I think we will need a gentler method of disinfection.
It is apparent to me that the chips are just soaking up too much energy from the rather high intensity inside an oven. It doesn’t really take all that much to waste a chip so a much milder power source is called for. Suggestions and experimental results are welcome.
All you need is some engineering creativity and money to burn.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Uh, you are joking about this correct?
Just in case you are not:
1) Take a stack of paper (any paper)
2) Put it in your microwave
3) Turn on microwave for more than a few seconds
4) Watch as the paper burns, in the same spot
The power/heat distribution of a microwave isn’t very exact or uniform. So how exactly does this prove that there are RFID tags in money? If anything it is that little metal security band that is absorbing a bit more energy, and those things have been in US money for ages.
I think you just want user submitted pics of their own burnt money, you sneaky bastard! 🙂
It’s an urban myth.
Oooh! Those sneaky government type even arrange for the RFID tags to burn in a way consistant with the microwave heating of a stack of plain paper; most charring in the middle and less on the outer leaves.
Nearly as cunning as the guy who managed to detect the RFID device using a totally different resonant tag detection technology in the truckstop. Cool.
I am going to microwave my tinfoil hat now, just in case.
Have you ever put a CD in a microwave? When I worked in a university lab, we used to fry AOL CDs in the kitchenette microwave and stick them on the corkboard as decoration. About three seconds and you’d get a cool arc-over and the CD came out with nifty-looking dendritic patterns where the aluminium layer had broken down (CD-Rs aren’t so much fun). Ten seconds and they’d catch fire.
If you want to kill an embedded chip then a second in a standard domestic 1000W microwave oven will do. Field strengths are what’s important here and if you can generate a few millivolts across a CMOS junction then you’re talking about field strengths in the thousands to several million V/m. That will fry an integrated circuit (and these things are fersure CMOS because of power requirements).
As for detecting them – I am confident the details of the technology will become known soon. I don’t know if the chips re-radiate at the same frequency as the exciter. If so, that would require some sort of pulsed signal with a diplexer (like a monostatic radar) which would make detectors more expensive. Or you could make the chip fire up a local oscillator and mix it with the incoming carrier so your return signal is on a sideband. That would make a fairly easy detector design at the expense of more complex (and costly) chips. Either way, you can bet that some Taiwanese knock-off merchant will have RFID detectors for consumer sale shortly after they become widespread.
It’s not the tag, it’s the ink. It has traces of metal in it and in the place where the ink is densest – the portrait – gets hot the fastest.
Thanks to David for clearing that up for me!
BTW No need to put “like a monostatic radar” in brackets as EVERYONE knows what a diplexer is!
Not to sound dense, but wouldn’t you be able to find these tags by inspecting the bills under a microscope?
RE nuking CDs above- if you have access to a tesla coil (some guy at my university built one in his spare time), a microwaved CD makes some VERY pretty sparks as the tesla-generated lightning tracks along the cracks in the CD and vaporizes the aluminium.
Personally, I’m hoping the RFID technology will catch on as widely and quickly as possible. That way, my soon-to-be announced line of designer Faraday-cage clothing will sell like hotcakes.
I suspect a few commenters didn’t read the article I linked to. I’d not have posted if it was just ‘we put the bills in a MW and they burned’. It was the fact that they triggered the RFID detection and the personell there narrowed the culprit to the one guys wallet. Why would a wallet trigger the detector? Why would foil around it then prevent the detection?
This is hardly Urban Myth since you can perhaps contact the people who wrote the article about it.
The MW’s in an oven form a standing wave pattern unless there is a conductor. This one of the reasons for the rotating tables, to make sure all of a dish gets into the highs. I’ve also read that an ant can survive in a MW (at low levels at least) by staying in a null. The wavelengths are such that an ant could do that.
My own testing has consisted of a few LED’s which gave one really good last RED blink… and fork tines which get some nice arcs across them… but you don’t want to do that too long.
As to looking at a $20 with a microscope… I’ll leave that to those of you who have dollars in their pockets. I’ve got Pounds at the moment. And they do have an embedded foil strip which I’d think would get really toasty really quick.
Dale Amon asks:
Why would a wallet trigger the detector? Why would foil around it then prevent the detection?
Dale, I must ask at this point: Why would an RFID tag trigger a store’s security tag detector? The security tag barriers seen in shops around the world are based on magnetic fields and magnetised tags attached to items within a store (which staff at the counter deactive – demagnetise, I believe – upon purchase). A lot of stores may be eyeing up the possibilities of RFID at the moment but it seems highly unlikely than any have yet implemented RFID-based in-store security systems. How likely is it also that the staff at the store were equipped with portable RFID tag detectors? I find it quite implausible that the alarm was being set off by an RFID tag or a combination of RFID tags.
The affected wallet may actually have contained something that upset the store’s magnetic security tag system or it may have contained a magnetic security tag that had not been deactivated when it was purchased.
My question is: Why did they have to go to a store to buy tin foil? Couldn’t they have just stuck it in their hats for moment?
Finally, a topic about my chosen field (not counting drinking). I work in the logistics industry, and no is currently using RFID tags as a matter of course. Walmart and The department of Defense are cutting edge on this, and neither is expected to have their programs in place before 2005. For further info on current state of the art and blue sky dreaming, check out the January issue of Scientific American, or almost any issue of DC Velocity.
RK Jones
Bunk, junk and more bunk. No, my American $20’s didn’t explode in the microwave either. Although they do smell like popcorn now…
For those wishing to read all the wonderful tripe on this, they can take a look at the slashdot article here:
Do your $20 bills explode in the microwave
Some people will find it interesting when they get to the paranoid bit, with and the links of how he think that the government has people who follow him. Also don’t forget, this is from the same ‘crackpot’ as one AC put it who runs ‘Infowars’.
Most likely, the wallet involved still had an antitheft tag in it somewhere.
Figure it to be highly unlikely that some podunk truckstop is near to first in line to have an RFID reader.
My point was that even if $20 bills have RFID tags in them (which I strongly doubt – printing currency is expensive enough as it is and until the per-unit cost drops to the sub 10-cent bracket you are not going to see them used for tagging cash), exposure of < 1s to the microwaves in a domestic oven will kill the tag stone dead, without dumping enough energy into the bill as a whole to cause the scorching shown in the pictures. Current anti-shoplifting technologies use very different and vastly more primitive techniques (a good primer on the different forms of Electronic Article Surveillance is here). And as soon as RFID tags are widely available, consumers will be able to check for them, and then we will be able to debunk this (how long before pirates get the chip-fab capabilities to counterfeit them?). Elektor will probably have schematics so you can build your own scanner.
Rob Read: I assume you’re being facetious, so for your benefit, a duplexer (the ‘i’ was a typo) is a device that switches an antenna between two radio-frequency devices. Without it, the high power transmitter would fry the delicate receiver. But they’re expensive. However, one cent extra on a tag outweighs $1000 for a duplexer if you make enough of them.
The thing which gave some plausibility to this is that the idea of tags imbedded in money has been talked about in government circles here and we’ve written about it before. And of course, the US tends to be the first place these sorts of things are tried. So from here it passed a plausibility test.
I personally have no way to directly check the article and I’m quite happy with the interesting responses.
Also, the guy who passed me the link works in an american bank and is known to several of us, which is why I bothered to read the article in the first place.
And please, can the tinhat inferences. Money with circuits in it for one purpose or another is going to come. It might not be here yet, but it will come and not in the far future either. You can be certain of that.
…and it’s unclear whether the issuing governments will advertise the fact.
David,
Thanks for the short rhapsody on the joys of signal generation and detection. Samizdata is always a joy. And nothing over joys me as much as signals, detectors, and noise.
BTW I’m working on a Tayloe mixer which doesn’t require a diplexer since it is an integrating detector. Dan Tayloe even responded to one of my queries. Woo hoo.
My plan is to do some experiments at DC (60KHz) and then move up to around 6MHZ for real work.
As to RF IDs. A 1KW pulse of about 1 second duration in a reflective chamber ought to work nicely.
When I read the original article, a couple of things jumped out at me:
The beeping was narrowed down to the wallet, and
The place was a *truck stop.*
For the first, I work in a retail outlet with the standard Sensormatic security sensors. We get a lot of false (read: non-criminal) alerts, usually because the Toys R Us next door has their sensors turned off and doesn’t bother to demagnetize their tags. However, we get a lot of false positives from certain cell phone batteries, magnetic key IDs, and *new purses and wallets.*
Department stores in the US rarely, if ever, have anti-theft sensors, yet the companies that make purses and wallets place the tags in anyway, where they set off other stores’ sensors. One gentleman said he’d been setting off sensors for months, but we were the first to bother to check. (That was also a wallet.)
And as for the second? A TRUCK STOP is going to have RFID sensors before Walmart? My suspension of disbelief doesn’t reach that far.
(One last note: as the readers on Slashdot pointed out, who needs the government to track money, when you can do it yourself at wheresgeorge.com?)
What is interesting is that no one has attempted to refute this by the classic scientific method of experimentation – has no reader got a twenty dollar bill and a microwave?
And also it is widely reported that the EU are planning to put RFID tags in their notes by 2005. And a weak story suggests they may already be there… An Englishman’s Castle
An update – Neil Armstrong has tried with the Euro notes – see link above for details and no sign of RFID tags…
Durbin: No one is asking you for suspension of disbelief. The facts you gave are just fine and supply a good explanation. Why not pass it on to the worried individual who wrote the original article I linked to so they can get their wallet fixed?
It seems fairly clear the incident has been explained. Now… what of the future? Any takers on the convergence of physical and virtual money supplies?
Dale Amon wrote:
‘The thing which gave some plausibility to this is that the idea of tags imbedded in money has been talked about in government circles here and we’ve written about it before. And of course, the US tends to be the first place these sorts of things are tried. So from here it passed a plausibility test.’
Er – no, it doesn’t, because the US currency is famous for being gloriously archaic and about 25 years behind the technologies which are commonplace everywhere else. That was one reason why it was so easy to counterfeit, although it’s much harder now.
10-15 years ago, when I was working in the ATM industry, things like bar-codes, ID pictograms, riotous colour, embossments and 101 other techniques of one sort and another were commonplace in the currencies of many nations, but the greenback just plodded along the way it was, with its 1920’s illustrations and 2-colour printing.
The advances of the last five years have dragged the US currency into the 1990’s, kicking and screaming, but other nations are far ahead in ID technologies. The Dutch, for example, have had machine-readable ID on their notes for a decade or more.
Plus – the US being what it is – if there actually was any sort of RFID in US currency, it would be all over the Internet, in living colour, with photographs, and lawmakers would be brandishing $20’s on the House floor. As it is, a couple of foil-beanie-wearers doing science-fair experiments in the communal kitchen of their group home is not excatly what you’d call compelling evidence.
llater,
llamas
llamas: Compelling evidence no. Interesting story worth an interesting discussion: yes. If you don’t think this has been fun then you’re too serious.
This is part of the difference between blogs and deadtree media. I can toss out a link and an interesting story and rely on the commentariat to flesh out detail. One can be immediately dismissive of strange claims… in which case one misses out on the fun of figuring out what happened, why it happened, whether it happened and how it could be dealt with if it were true… all of which have been added to this thread by readers.
To the fellow who commented on EU currencies: none have done this yet to my knowledge. As llamas pointed out, it will be all over the internet the day after they do it… unless there is a small quiet trial with a few thousand or hundred thousand s of notes. I don’t know how feasible that would be; and it probably wouldn’t be possible for legal reasons in many countries if the treasury and law enforcement ministries wanted it.
Still, is there anyone here who doubts there will be an attempt to embed RFID or embedded chips? And that eventually it will be the norm even if we do fry the first lots?
I took your advice Tim and tried this out with a variety of bills, both denomination and national origin, and then repeated the test.
2x$20 bills – burned in the middle after 25sec (I’ll take them to the bank tomorrow and tell them they were burned by my vandal children – replacement costs=$0)
2x$5 bills (US) – burned in middle after 30sec
2x$1 bills (US) – burned in middle after 20sec
2x$1 (Canada) – burned in middle after 25sec
2x20rieis (Brazil) – burned in middle after 35sec
2x50peso (Mexico) – burned in middle after 30sec
2x100peso (Arg) – burned in middle after 30sec
2x25cent (quarter US) just for fun – cool arcs between the two coins.
So in conclusion:
1. Amused myself during an evening at home alone,
2. burned a few bucks (though less than if I’d gone out),
3. stunk up my home
4. possibly damaged my microwave.
No conclusion on the RFID thing. What, you think I’m a scientist?
Re Faraday clothing, hold that thought, also accessories, like wallets, handbags, briefcases…y’know, if we ramp up the hysteria just a bit…y’think…nah…
Well, I’ll suppy the conclusions for you:
* Something about money causes it to absorb MW and
burn in the center.
* You have money to burn 😉
Alternative explanations provided here: the ink is concentrated in the center and has metallic elements in it; any paper will burn in the center.
So, if someone were to cut typing paper into bill sized bits,
that would differentiate whether this is inherently pick up of MW from the water content of paper or is due to something about the special paper or ink used in notes.
One other possibility not mentioned yet is that the paper itself could have embedded metallic threads for anticonterfeiting purposes. UK notes have a strip threaded through the layers of paper. I would think you’d get a sparkling over the whole note if the paper had threads throughout. No one seems to have seen that, or at least no one wrote it up.
S.F. library officials grilled on plan to put trackers in books
RON HARRIS
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco library officials hosted a public forum Thursday night to take up the thorny issue of radio frequency identification tags, small, paper-thin devices that the city’s library system wants to put in books to improve inventory control.
Critics of the idea say there are serious privacy concerns about exactly what information would be contained on the tags and how secure the devices would be. They fear third parties, bored hackers or the federal government, might find a way to surreptitiously find out who’s reading what.
“Privacy is really the handmaiden of the First Amendment,” said Ann Brick, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who stressed that the libraries are historically trustworthy with patron information, but the prying technology of others may not be so kind.
“It’s the rest of the world that we’re really worried about,” Brick said.
Several large city libraries throughout the United States and the world use RFIDs for inventory control. And retailers are increasingly adopting the technology to streamline their operations and cut down on theft.
The system that the San Francisco library envisions would recognize which items were checked out to whom, and then special gates installed at the exit doors would detect if the book has physically left the premise.
Kathy Lawhun, chief of the city’s main library and a proponent of the RFID proposal, described the technology as benign by design.
“RFID is simply a chip with an antenna,” Lawhun said. “You can have as little or as much as you want on that chip.”
Lee Tien, a staff attorney for the for the Electronic Frontier Foundation said it’s not the power of the chip, but those who would choose to exploit such devices in the future that should be of concern.
“Now is the time to seriously worry about the government using RFIDs to track people,” Tien told those in attendance.
San Francisco’s RFID plan still must pass muster with the mayor’s office, the board of supervisors and the city’s seven-member library commission.
RFID-enabled devices are expected to become more abundant as the cost of RFID readers, such as handheld wands and readers, go down. Stockholm-based Cypak AB announced Tuesday that it has developed a disposable computer made of a small RFID tag and printable sensors on paperboard.
The Milwaukee Public Library has anti-theft tags in books and media, and sensors at the entrances. Some office key cards, typically carried in wallets (but not mine) will set them off. Next time I see this happen, I will peel some aluminum foil off my beanie, and see if wrapping the key card foils the sensor.
Hey,
Long Time Troller, First Time Poster,
Alex Jones (the guy who runs “Info Wars,” the website this story links to) is a legend among my circle of friends. He had a radio show in Austin, Texas and my wife is obsessed with him. She’s fascinated by cranks and conspiracies, and Alex makes the Samizdata crew look like a pack of government loving Pollyannas. For our anniversary, I took her to see him speak in person and watch his magnum opus, a three-hour long documentary called “Road To 911.” The theatre was packed with true believers who would say things like “those bastards” whenever Alex would show “proof” that the FBI engineered the Oklahoma City bombings, or his grainy, shaky, spooky video of concentration camps being built in south Texas by United Nations troops.
In short, if Alex is burning $20’s in his microwave, it’s hardly the crankiest, most paranoid thing he’s ever done.
Regards,
Kenneth
I believe that any large stack of US currency (say, $1000 of twenties) would set off magnetic detectors. The metal security strips contained therein are specifically designed to set off an airport metal detector to make it difficult to smuggle massive amounts of cash into/out of the country in that manner. It would be interesting to try using the desensitizer in the store to see if it rendered the bills nondetectable.
andy wrote:
‘I believe that any large stack of US currency (say, $1000 of twenties) would set off magnetic detectors. The metal security strips contained therein are specifically designed to set off an airport metal detector to make it difficult to smuggle massive amounts of cash into/out of the country in that manner. It would be interesting to try using the desensitizer in the store to see if it rendered the bills nondetectable.’
There are no metal security strips in US currency, and never have been.
The first US currency to contain a security strip in the paper was the series of 1998 and later, the ‘offset-portrait’ style, and the security strip was/is made of imprinted polyester.
Visit the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at
http://www.moneyfactory.com
for all you ever wanted to know about the design of US currency.
llater,
llamas
Readers interested in comprehensive scientific testing of US currency are encouraged to forward large stacks of it to me. I promise to test all currency received thoroughly and under the most rigorous scientific conditions, in a wide variety of retail and, er, social, environments, and report on my findings.
Certain reports may be delayed until the statute of limitations has run.
Hey why did you delete my post! I think I have the right to my own opinion! Thats the glory of Demockracy!
P.S one of you nerds spammed me so fuck off!
EDITORS NOTE: Yes, you have the right to your own opinions in your own space and on your own property… and that has nothing to do with democracy (or even Demockracy) but rather has everything to do with liberty, which is not the same thing at all. When you leave a comment here, you are do so on our property and therefore at our sufference. If we think your remarks are too off topic or just plain worthless, we will delete them whenever we feel like it. Our house, our rules.
you know you twats don’t have to take the piss out of him just because he put an extra letter in.
GET A LIFE!!!! and dont be clever saying “I’ve already got one!”
Because just face it you all think “The Man” is watch you!
DON’T YOU GUYS GET IT? Dale Amon is right!!!
A really good aliby that the government would likely use if confronted with this is, “We are using RFIDs for anti-counterfieting purposes.” I think that is a crock of shit! If Uncle Sam ever tells you that lie, you will know the truth. NEVER TRUST YOUR GOVERNMENT!!! Especially in these times, as lust for power is becoming an epidemic. If we trust our government too much, they will take advantage of us. They’ve been doing this since the mid-1940’s.
Next, they will offer to implant an RFID-type chip under your skin. Those who accept this chip will be granted extra conveinience. (The best example I can think of is the Sun-Pass pre-paid toll program we have here in Florida. Those who are fed up with waiting in line to pay the toll on the turnpike would get the Sun-Pass and be able to wizz right by everyone else.) This chip will also secretly double as a tracking device. I believe that this will be the “Mark of the Beast” mentioned in the Bible. What better way to keep track of people and ultimately control them than to do it electronically?
You see, it’s all a plot to take all the world’s governments and combine them into one. The next step is the complete control of the planet’s people. We can’t let them do this. Take the RFID’s out of anything they are used on. Learn how they work and you will find that deactivating them is simple. Visit my site (see end of document) for lots of other info about how to promote and practice Anarchy and also learn the TRUE definition of the word. Anarchy is NOT a state of utter chaos and darkness. It is the exact opposite of a police-state (which is a society based on control of their citizens). I strongly insist upon this post being posted for all the world to see, for everyone deserves to know the truth.
Jesus loves Anarchists, too! God bless the Anarchy.
W W W . F R E E W E B S . C O M / C Y B E R S P A C E _ P I R A T E (my site. Disregard the spaces in between the letters. I WILL get my information out, one way or another! I’m not an idiot!)