Chinese Spying Devices Installed On Hong Kong Cars 171
jjp9999 writes "Spying devices disguised as electronic border cards have been secretly installed on thousands of Hong Kong vehicles by Chinese authorities, according to a Hong Kong newspaper. A translation of the story states Chinese authorities have been installing spying devices on all dual-plate Chinese-Hong Kong vehicles for years, enabling a vast network of eavesdropping across the archipelago."
It's China... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing they do surprises me anymore.
Hey, we're learning from the market leaders! (Score:2)
We took Japan as the big role model for society when it was still market leader 'til their bubble burst, now China is the new role model. Soon we'll see something similar here, of course only to find your car easier if it gets stolen or something like that. And how conveniently easy it is to implement, stick the bug into the license plate! You have to have one to operate your vehicle, it's government issued and it's illegal to tamper with it already. Beauty!
Re:Hey, we're learning from the market leaders! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the current suggestion is to put a device on your car to track the mileage so they can tax you based on how much you drive.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/05/18/news/economy/gas_tax_drivers/?section=money_latest [cnn.com]
Re:Hey, we're learning from the market leaders! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is blatant BS (on their part, not yours), since if they only cared how much you drive (rather than where and when), then all they'd have to do is check the fucking odometer!
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Or tax at the fuel stating.
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Road wear is relative to the weight of the vehicle, so your 12 MPG SUV causes more damage per mile than the 40 MPG compact. That makes the gas taxes used for road maintenance more fair (at least in that respect).
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But if you need to haul a lot of people/things an SUV is just one vehicle on the road whereas you would need more than one of the compact cars.
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Then get the stonecutters to put a stop to that technology.
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You mean, like, people would switch from cars that drive on fossil fuel to electric cars to evade the tax on gas?
No, we can't let that happen!
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They can just do what they already do -- tax electricity.
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That depends on whether they want to use variable road pricing, which was an idea mooted in the UK a few years back. The idea being that you get charged more for driving on roads that are more congested. Or something like that.
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If variable road pricing is incompatible with the Bill of Rights, well then they don't get to do the fucking variable road pricing!
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Which is blatant BS (on their part, not yours), since if they only cared how much you drive (rather than where and when), then all they'd have to do is check the fucking odometer!
Yes, because it would be much more efficient for the government to pay people to go around writing down people's mileages from their odometers, after first identifying the owner, getting them to open up the car, writing each one down and collating them each day...
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GPS tracking would also be an efficient source of violating our privacy. I expect also for the devices to track speed and speed limits, eventually allowing them to ticket you automatically (which would suck massively).
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Every time an inspection at a government facility is conducted for emissions or safety (as many places require) the odometer reading is noted. When a vehicle is registered the odometer reading is noted.
It wouldn't be all that hard to start conducting equipment or emissions inspections in the few places that currently lack them, and while doing so, check the odometer.
Mind you, I don't think it's right, and I'm much more in favor of fuel taxes, but it's certainly not hard to do it.
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I don't know about your country, but in mine you have to take your car for inspection every year. Think it would be too much a hassle for the mechanic to check the odometer while he's at it, and cash in the tax as well? The whole deal could be kept in a database where the garage has to enter your current amount, get a statement what to cash in from you and have to transfer it with the rest of the tax they have to pay anyway, being a business.
It would actually be more efficient than inventing a new system th
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Holy strawman argument, Batman!
Don't you realize that all they'd really need to do is look at the odometer once a year when you renew the registration? Hell, if the jurisdiction requires emissions testing or an inspection, then the info is already there on the report!
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If they want to do mileage based taxation, just do an odometer check when you get your tag renewed.
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Yes, because it would be much more efficient for the government to pay people to go around writing down people's mileages from their odometers, after first identifying the owner, getting them to open up the car, writing each one down and collating them each day...
Or how about a transmitter that ONLY TRANSMITTED YOUR ODOMETER READING, instead of every place you've driven?
Or, if you want to do variable road pricing, have it figure out how much you owe based on where you've driven and just transmit that?
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Yeah, but if you crossed state lines, then your state would be collecting tax for miles driven in another state.
You might think that states wouldn't care about that sort of thing, thinking that it would even out, but IFTA [wikipedia.org] does just that for commercial vehicles - my company has to keep track of where I drive and submit that paperwork to Oklahoma along with a nice fat check, and Oklahoma pays the other states what is owed them.
Before IFTA, you had to buy fuel permits from every state you operated in, keep tra
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On the contrary, I know full well that states (as well as municipalities) would be up in arms about it. My response to those concerns?
"Tough shit; the People's Rights come first!"
Besides, my solution would be to measure aggregate road usage and dole out the funds to each jurisdiction accordingly. They don't need to know who is driving on each chunk of road; they only need to know how many.
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Why is the movement of money taxed repeatedly in a way which puts the greatest pressure on the poorest? Why does the majority of government money or money in areas of natural monopoly go back to private contractors and licencees, when government could do most of the work in-house?
Because rich, powerful people everywhere - whatever label they're wearing - want your money and don't want any more competitors. This means siphoning off from your wallet at every stage so no campaign or party donor, no ex school b
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to exploit.
The problem is not too much government or too much corporation. It's too much human.
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Don't know how I never heard of this. They tax the car purchase, require you to pay to register it, pay for plates, and pay taxes on gas. Why the hell should I then be double taxed, I already paid for the tax on the car AND the gas.
No, I think the idea is that you pay tax on mileage instead of directly on gas: as someone has noted above, with electric cars you can't really tax the fuel at source.
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I doubt it would be instead of gas taxes but in addition to them. Legislatures have to repeal these taxes, and I have a feeling those states hungry for revenue (e.g California) wouldn't pass up on such a wonderful opportunity for double taxation.
Technology seems interesting (Score:3, Informative)
stick the bug into the license plate!
I do wonder how they work technically. I mean, there can't be much space for a battery in such a licence plate. You can't use RFID like technology at a distance of more than 10-50 meters, which would make actual eavesdropping a challenge even for a government. If it is to have any semblance of being secret obviously you can't use the car's battery or electrical systems.
Very weak radio transmitters still need about a watt for reasonable communications (ie. cell phones). So if you wish to use something like t
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Read the article, the battery is 3 AA(A)s in plastic.
You don't need a anything close to that to have them on standby. They could activate them when they scan them crossing the border for a period of time with a known bit sequence of arbitrary length.
The article writer/PI is pretty bad though at least one of the crystals is the clock for the microchip no (need for two carriers). To me is looks like the black one is providing a clock to a high power transistor for the carrier the blue is just too close to the
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stick the bug into the license plate!
I do wonder how they work technically. I mean, there can't be much space for a battery in such a licence plate. You can't use RFID like technology at a distance of more than 10-50 meters, which would make actual eavesdropping a challenge even for a government. If it is to have any semblance of being secret obviously you can't use the car's battery or electrical systems.
Very weak radio transmitters still need about a watt for reasonable communications (ie. cell phones). So if you wish to use something like this for, say a year (they're valid for a year), you'd need a tiny, tiny 31 MJ (that's megajoule) battery, or 3 KWh, but it can't be much larger than a watch battery.
So how the hell do you keep that thing powered ?
For that matter, which radio do you use ? Cell network ? It would require a hell of a lot of people in the loop.
Perhaps they are very low power transmitters and there is a network of receivers... perhaps the bugs have data storage which they dump when in range of a receiver. Who knows maybe its a mesh or p2p system. But enough clueless speculation - from actual article, their is more than one type of device. One type is about the size of a PDA (so no need to speculate about nano batteries and friggin lasers) with a range of around 20km. Don't forget the penisula is not that big. The ones in the article are fitted to
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Yea, there's an idea for eavesdropping, place a bug in a spot with a lot of general noise when operating and where few people have conversations. If they required that you put it on your dashboard and announce yourself first, then I'd start to wonder such things. If this is the best that Red China can come up with, well then, no wonder communism is on the wane.
All the 'spying' that they need is done just by being active and identifiable at specific points, like ezpass. Perhaps the thing was just built by
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Yea, there's an idea for eavesdropping, place a bug in a spot with a lot of general noise when operating and where few people have conversations. If they required that you put it on your dashboard and announce yourself first, then I'd start to wonder such things. If this is the best that Red China can come up with, well then, no wonder communism is on the wane.
All the 'spying' that they need is done just by being active and identifiable at specific points, like ezpass. Perhaps the thing was just built by a committee, or someone who wanted to sell extra parts, or had a large engineering margin. People get so worked up about the silliest of menudo, while the real suppression becomes 'old news' and accepted. Oddly all this does is make them far less capable of spying than the City of London (when if comes to cars, but I'm sure that they keep great records on people).
It seems unlikely it'd be used for mass spying - so much easier to use, say, fucking mobile phones! (sigh). But if you were trying to catch people who think the police listen in to their mobile phones anyway - like smugglers (who are right) - then it's probably a good idea (reasonable return on investment) but I suspect it would be targeted - not blanketed.
Test your sarcastic ideas against reality - when was the last time anyone ever got convicted on the basis of a in car recording device huh? It's trivial
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Lots of things are very profitable to smuggle in to China. Foreign cigarettes are a big one.
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>>And that's where I get stuck - trying to figure out what is profitable to smuggle into China. Milk products made from milk?
The one item that has a huge markup is gold. the spread is up to 20%, and small 5 gram bars have the largest mark-up
Re:Technology seems interesting (Score:4, Informative)
And that's where I get stuck - trying to figure out what is profitable to smuggle into China. Milk products made from milk?
Religious texts and other restricted or forbidden items or material, drugs.
That's the problem - pot's kind of hard to get hold of down south, but up north it's not hard to find. Methamphetamines are everywhere Cocaine I wouldn't know about - but I'd be surprised if it wasn't available - there's certainly plenty of heroin moving around. Firearms are dirt cheap. China makes most of the things that are illegal in the West. And there's no money in Bibles - they're not even restricted anymore - it's only fruitcake Americans that bang on about raising money to ship Bibles to China - there's a hell of a lot more Bibles in China than there are people who want to read them. Trust me - after you've spent a couple of days in the industrial and commercial boom-towns you begin to realise that if there's a demand it'll be satisfied in just a couple of days, well maybe not satisfactory, and probably toxic. Whiskey is cheaper in China than Hong Kong. As for western tech - it's all made there in the first place. I agree there's got to be a market for smuggling something into China (apart from smuggling workers without passes back). On the other hand a shitload of stuff gets smuggled into Hong Kong.
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Even a cheap PAYG mobile phone has bluetooth and voice recording capability (eg. ZTE). Using a laptop bluetooth dongle it is possible to set the phone to record audio to files and stream off the audio files through Bluetooth from a distance of 10+ metres. No mobile phone network is required. The maximum range really depends on the strength and sensitivity of the other party.
Since there is around 64 Mbytes of internal memory, so it really makes me wonder what it is going on inside a device like that.
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We took Japan as the big role model for society when it was still market leader 'til their bubble burst, now China is the new role model. Soon we'll see something similar here, of course only to find your car easier if it gets stolen or something like that. And how conveniently easy it is to implement, stick the bug into the license plate! You have to have one to operate your vehicle, it's government issued and it's illegal to tamper with it already. Beauty!
Until some arsehole steals your license plates. Oh, wait....
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Hey gamers, help me out with your combo skills!
When .gov quits pretending to actually be for citizens, they'll just pull up the covers with the nice Corps they're in bed with. Let's pair the last two semi-consecutive stories in a row.
"Location aware apps from Adobe. Spying from Government."
Why are we now falling for the spin? Are we that desperate for Minority Report style ads?
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Yeah really, pretty clumsy effort.. In the 'west' we do it right, we build the device into the car.. inside your rear view mirror is a hidden camera and mic
Re:It's China... (Score:4, Interesting)
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http://www.zdnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/150467 [zdnet.com]
With the new GPS rules and very friendly telcos, expect ever more data to be available to the FBI with less oversight.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/us/13fbi.html [nytimes.com] ie. expect to be of interest after 'five meetings of a group" and enjoy terms like "preliminary investigation", “proactively” ect.
Or just fix a device to your car as a nice and legal "tracking beacon" t
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A democracy needs to be controlled by the citizens though, and not the citizens controlled by the government's propaganda.
The US government is controlled by the citizens [salon.com]. Or were you referring to the proles [wikipedia.org]?
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You are perhaps unaware then that since Obama became President we have run up more debut in three years than Bush managed in eight?
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When you get a financial disaster as it's happening, you're going to have to hang on and let it happen to the end before you can start fixing it.
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You are perhaps unaware then that since Obama became President we have run up more debut in three years than Bush managed in eight?
You are perhaps unaware that the debt was borrowed for the stimulus packages which were trying to fix the recession that started during the Bush years? It also paid for the two wars and the unfunded Medicare part D, both straight from Bush's desk.
And before you complain about Obama's evil stimulus package, remember Bush passed one himself before he left office. Even the Republ
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You need to follow the source!
The original [googleusercontent.com] is from Apple Daily, the second highest circulation (300,000 in a city of 7 million) newspaper in Hong Kong. It is not particularly pro-Falun Gong. It has strongly pro-democracy (HK doesn't have much of that), pro-free market, pro working class, with the usual Hong Kong mix of high minded analysis, original poetry and literature, lurid celebrity coverage, and serialized softcore porn!
The original article seems well researched. The guy who took it apart is an associ
On the consequences of tampering with those device (Score:2)
In China, I'd think that you'd be getting off very lightly if you were charged with tampering those.
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In China, it's quite common for people to tamper with their license plates. Taping a CD over them (to blind cameras) is popular. Swapping your plates for forged military / police plates is also done, but a little riskier - some farmer got sentenced to death for "impersonating the military" - driving with military plates to avoid toll booths, but the sentence was overturned and I think the judge got sacked.
Heavy charges are reserved for property crimes, drug related crimes, violent crimes, and anything *remo
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The article is kind of pathetic (Score:5, Interesting)
Those who RTFA can read this:
Apple Daily says they took the device to a university professor and a private investigator, both of whom attested to the espionage potential of the units.
or this:
An Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong, Zheng Liming, took apart one of the devices and confirmed that it can listen in on conversations
and see a photo in which a hole in the plastic shell is marked "cavity for receiving sound" (a microphone would have been more convincing), two quartz crystals (the likes of which can be found in almost every modern electronic devices) marked "generate carrier frequency for radio transmission" and a nondescript chip that "turns voice signals into digital information".
You know what? I think I'll take a photo of my cellphone's innards, photoshop conveniently spy-sounding labels into the photo, bring my cellphone to a university professor who will testify that my device has a microphone, a crystal, an antenna and a processor that definitely has the potential to turn it into spying device then write an article about it.
Some journalism...
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Um, except that it wasn't your cellphone. It was a device that is installed for 'inspection and "quarantine"' reasons (secondary quotes because quarantine doesn't make sense in almost any context) by a government agency and does not seem to have any business even being there let alone containing voice to digital and a radio transmission circuits.
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It is taped to the windshield. It does not seem to have any (external) power supply. How could such a device be able to transmit a serious quantity of data, over a distance of 20 km, with mountains in between? Hong Kong may be small but it's hilly, with peaks of almost 1000m tall. From most parts of this 20km radius there is no line of sight to Shenzhen - all mountains in the way, except for the north-western part of Hong Kong which is mostly protected wetland. Such transmission if at all possible takes a s
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It is taped to the windshield. It does not seem to have any (external) power supply. How could such a device be able to transmit a serious quantity of data, over a distance of 20 km, with mountains in between? Hong Kong may be small but it's hilly, with peaks of almost 1000m tall. From most parts of this 20km radius there is no line of sight to Shenzhen - all mountains in the way, except for the north-western part of Hong Kong which is mostly protected wetland. Such transmission if at all possible takes a significant amount of power, a battery that fit in there would run out in hours or less. On these points alone I'd call this story total nonsense.
Last time I checked the Chinese had no problems setting up receivers in Hong Kong, well, less than before it became Chinese territory anyway! So I'll have to call nonsense to your nonsense.
They have been installed since 1997 - that means most are in place for some four years now. The only way to keep it working is if it's a passive device, using external radio sources as their power source, as is typical for devices used for automatic toll payment and similar purposes.
Please link to the source of your information? And why would a device the size of a mobile phone have to be passive? It's not like they haven't always been an obvious electronic device.
I was in Hong Kong three years ago and what you are saying was bullshit then. The licenses are good for ten years - but the displayed perm
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Active broadcasting a signal takes a lot of power. A typical mobile phone can last maybe 10-12 hours on a charge, when talking. Up to two weeks standby. For these devices well let's be generous, make it double the time, that's 24 hours of broadcasting signals. The rest of the year: no battery. And I didn't see a battery on the photos.
As I said, and what you handily ignored: no visible power source on any of the photos. An external power source is a necessity for this kind of broadcast if it has to last a w
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And I didn't see a battery on the photos.
That'll be the three cylinders covered in blue plastic taking up most of the space within the casing. At a guess, anyway.
Re:The article is kind of pathetic (Score:5, Informative)
Active broadcasting a signal takes a lot of power. A typical mobile phone can last maybe 10-12 hours on a charge, when talking. Up to two weeks standby. For these devices well let's be generous, make it double the time, that's 24 hours of broadcasting signals. The rest of the year: no battery. And I didn't see a battery on the photos.
What have you been smoking? There is only one photo in TFA linked article. Look again - see the blue shrink wrapped batteries? [theepochtimes.com] Still no? How about now? [youtube.com]
The device will not fit in your shirt pocket - it's a little larger than an iPhone (I and other posters have seen these devices). As for your proof - again, what the fuck have you been smoking? A phone and this device have little in common when it comes to power consumption (see if you can work out why). Hint - I can buy devices on the open market that will transmit an audio signal for more 12 months - and they will fit in my pocket. No nuclear power pack involved. Don't go basing you idea of surveillance technology on what the FBI leaves attached to the bottom of Arab students cars - you can bet the Chinese have access to far more sophisticated devices than I can buy.
The rest of your screed is pure castles in the air - try getting off the sofa and visiting the world. China == Hong Kong - lip-service is the only difference between one side of the border and the other. The speculated range of the devices is just that. Speculated. As for signal interception - really, are you fucking serious? Do you hear mobile telephone calls on your transistor? (and that's a GHz crystal in the photo you can't see - just under the battery pack that doesn't exist).
Consider it - every insightful argument you've come up with is wrong - you can't see the obvious, and you can't even count up to two properly. And no, advertisements don't count as pictures. But hey - don't let your ignorance to stop from being an expert in Chinese spying devices, it never stopped you from making laughably clueless statements about the nature of emails or programming.
A dollar gets me ten you've got some weasely denial.
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Please put of your tinfoil hat and stop ignoring what I'm actually writing.
First of all, I am a Hong Kong permanent resident. And still live there.
Secondly: what is really in that blue shrink wrap? May be batteries indeed. I can't see: it's shrink wrapped.
Now let's look at the numbers that I "can not add up" and you don't even bother to look at. So let's say that blue thing is a battery. My half-year old phone can pack 5.6 Wh in it's battery, it looks like my battery is roughly half the size of that blue
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First of all, I am a Hong Kong permanent resident. And still live there.
And yet you've never seen one of these devices.... and you have only considered a receiver (if there's only one) being on the mainland?
Secondly: what is really in that blue shrink wrap? May be batteries indeed. I can't see: it's shrink wrapped.
So because you can't see it (but everyone else can) it doesn't exist. And the video is fake too is it? Because the guy in the video looks just like the guy he's supposed to be. Is that Western propaganda?
Now let's look at the numbers that I "can not add up" and you don't even bother to look at. So let's say that blue thing is a battery. My half-year old phone can pack 5.6 Wh in it's battery,
I don't doubt you about your phone battery, though you clearly have no grasp as to what consumes power in your phone. Your phone receives a signal. Your phone has a screen
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I don't live in Hong Kong, but those blue batteries look just like the battery packs you use in cordless telephones. I bet you'd get a decent life out of them if you were only waking up the device when you were recording or transmitting.
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They're really hard to come by (first of all you need to own a car - most people here don't, secondly you have to get a cross-border permit - just a small fraction of car owners have such a permit), and then I've no idea on the implications of "losing" the device. So I'm afraid it won't be that easy - and this will also explain to you why it took four years before someone comes with a theory like this. Not many people will destroy a device that's so hard to come by.
If true, this could set off a shitstorm y
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What you'd do is include an RFID-style receiver. You'd interrogate this from some roadside equipment (such as you'd find at tollbooths or on the approach to customs, or anywhere interesting things happen). The receiver responds with its ID, and if they want to enable that particular transmitter, they'd
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Or, it's just the guts of a cheap mobile phone. It's only installed on the occasional "high risk" targets (frequent border crossers), and immediately swapped as they pass customs. Everyone with a bug gets "inspected", and the "inspected" cars get their bugs serviced or swapped for a non-bugged plate.
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A typical mobile phone can last maybe 10-12 hours on a charge, when talking. Up to two weeks standby. For these devices well let's be generous, make it double the time, that's 24 hours of broadcasting signals. The rest of the year: no battery. And I didn't see a battery on the photos.
The blue plastic wrapped thing is the battery pack. It contains three cells the size of a AA. A single alkaline AA has more energy than most fully charged cell phone batteries, and of course has a multi-year shelf-life. A three alkaline cell could provide (by your calculations) as much as 40 hours of talk time and several years stand-by. There are battery technologies that would out perform this by an additional factor of three, but given given the number of these things produced I think the cheaper tec
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Well, look at the thing. If it isn't meant to transmit, then why the UHF antenna? And it has a hefty looking 3 cell battery. Plain old alkaline cells could deliver 1100 maH apiece. More expensive Li-Fe2 cells would provide up to 3000 maH apiece and have good shelf-life. A three cell battery pack could yield as much as 9000 maH, or 10x the energy of a typical cell phone battery when fully charged. Since a regular 900 maH cell phone battery might yield 3 hours talk time, a 3000 maH alkaline battery pack mig
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The devices are supposed to be for identification purpose only - an RFID device can very well do that. So the fact that it needs a battery is already fishy - why use a more expensive device that needs more maintenance instead of cheap, readily available devices that need almost no maintenance?
The professor in question had actually disassembled the device in question, and it was
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You know what? I think I'll take a photo of my cellphone's innards, photoshop conveniently spy-sounding labels into the photo, bring my cellphone to a university professor who will testify that my device has a microphone, a crystal, an antenna and a processor that definitely has the potential to turn it into spying device then write an article about it.
Except everything you are saying here is not nearly as absurd and ridiculous as you hope it would be.
The USA is engaged in warrantless spying to such an extent, that it's not even something targeted, but rather, it's a data mining operation of the highest order. And yes, cell phone data is mined, you can be sure of it. So yes, your cell phone is in all likelihood spying on you as we speak. It's spying on you for the benefit of the government and also for the benefit of the corporations.
Read this and thin
maybe, maybe not. (Score:4, Insightful)
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We have a couple of experts saying it certainly could be a bug. But nobody said they found the freq it was transmitting on and got feedback from it. Kinda flimsy evidence so far.
I agree, probably need more evidence, but if I were to suspect any country (or Government) in the world of doing this, it would be China, based on everything else they've done to monitor, censor, and control.
the source... (Score:5, Informative)
I'd be weary of the source, it is the Apple Daily (Score:4, Interesting)
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Lol. That's like reverse racism. I don't even read the papers anymore here. Apple daily is a fun read when ou go dim sum Sunday yeah? :)
"No charge, Sir" (Score:2, Interesting)
The article notes that the Chinese government has been installing these devices at no charge since 2007. Well, there's your biggest reason to be suspicious. What kind of respectable government would actually buy _you_ something? In the US, drivers have to buy their own RFID transponders just for the privilege of being able to pay tolls electronically. In China, one would expect to not only pay for the transponder, but slip some money under the table at the same time, no?
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In the US, drivers have to buy their own RFID transponders just for the privilege of being able to pay tolls electronically.
Not necessarily. I did not pay for my EZ-Pass transponder. At least in New York and New Jersey, two of the states that use the EZ-Pass transponder that I can vouch from personal experience, the transponder is given to you free if you have the tolls billed automatically to your credit card.
Which is, pretty much, is the only practical approach. If you take the other option of getting a
My 50 cents... (Score:2)
Daughter board is a JZ-871 (Score:2)
I was lucky to find this with just a little googling. It is a JZ-871 GFSK transceiver module.
http://www.sz-wholesaler.com/p/505/545-2/micro-power-data-rf-module-jz871-171649.html [sz-wholesaler.com]
Amateurs (Score:2)
The real pros would install a spying device that can also disable the car and then sell this to the car owner as "extra service".
Maybe even add a button for the owner to press, so he thinks he is in control. A blue button with a star on it would look very nice.
Yeah, so is my FASTRAK device (Score:2)
Those living in the bay area know how it CAN be a spying device too.
Re:How do you not see such a device... (Score:4, Informative)
How does seeing help....
When it is disguised as a border pass transponder, which you'd pretty much expect to have "taped onto the vehicle’s front window"?
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So is my Fastrack. Maybe I'm naive, but I never seriously considered it was being used to spy on me... (though now that I think of it, it's probably more likely than not ;)
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You're from Hong Kong?
Me too but not a driver, let alone cross-border. I had never heard of these devices.
Could you share with us the daily use of these devices? That is, the stated purpose?
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FasTrack [wikipedia.org] is an automated toll collection system used in the California Bay Area. Other US states have similar devices for tollways, etc. It basically just charges an account via RFID so you don't have to stop to pay tolls when driving.
My point was that putting a device on your windshield doesn't necessarily mean you are being spied on... but I guess if the Chinese govt did it, I might be a bit more more suspicious...
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The thing with those devices is that of course they automatically log when-ever you pass a toll gate. So there is a record of the movements of that device (and in effect an individual vehicle). I wouldn't be surprised if law enforcement uses it to track smugglers (they typically cross the border multiple times a day).
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But that's a totally reasonable usage - even in the Chinese case, it would be fine if they just tracked when you entered/left the mainland from HK.
The point to the spying is that it also tracked and eavesdropped on you everywhere ELSE you went. I'd be a bit surprised if Fastrack, etc did that :)
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You don't have to track prepaid tags that simply transmit tokens until they run out of tokens -- you just keep track which tokens you have heard and only accept new ones. Tokens then may be randomly loaded when payment is made, without any need for association with any particular person or vehicle.
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How so? The system only recognizes tokens that it issued and signed (so client can't produce its own tokens), and the token can be used only once (so copying tokens does not allow multiple toll passes).
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The whole point is, there is nothing to compromise. At worst, someone can steal someone else's tokens. If system is run by complete and total morons (such as yourself or Sony admins), the key may be compromised, so some asshole's fake tokens will work until the end of the month when the key will be changed.
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The government tells you not to see, so you don't. Nothing unusual about it..
What's fnord in Mandarin?
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I was just in Hong Kong for three days. I noticed at least one or two clearly electronic devices on the dashboard. One was a thing that the driver would "pat down" and that would presumably start the fare. I can easily imagine a listening device being contained in this. Another didn't seem to have a purpose and was just there.
Thank you - it was commonly believed when I was there (3 years back) that they were tracking devices - I just never considered they recorded or transmitted conversation.
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In effect yes. Societies do not simply up and go to war one morning. It's generally a process that takes some time to build up. The larger the conflict, the longer the build up.
A good example is the Libyan conflict, which took several weeks of drumming before allied forces launched air-strikes, and even still the US was quite reluctant to proceed. The Syrian conflict is currently being drummed up as we speak, but whether there's enthusiasm for air-strik
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"Hacking could be an act of war" (no matter how stupid that is, because any half-decent military system with anything "useful" should be COMPLETELY inaccessible from the Internet).
So you can only start a war if you attack military targets? As long as I stick to sinking commercial ships and destroying commercial enterprises there is no casus belli?
I think it absolutely obvious that in an age when electronic commerce is a major part of your economy, an attack on that commerce can be considered an act of war. This is stupidly obvious, but it doesn't mean that someone hacking Facebook accounts is going to start a war. Nor does it mean that probing attacks on military networks would autom