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US orders travelers on Air Force One to throw away gifts, pins, and burner phones after China trip (techcrunch.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 16 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Do you know what 'passive' means? It's a basically a mirror for a specific frequency. There's no way to "detect" it other than tearing apart whatever it's hidden in.

The fact that it was made with 1960's Soviet analog tech should tell you that China could plausibly make something better and smaller now.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago*

    It would certainly be detectable. You could do an X-ray, sweep the RF spectrum and see the energy disappear at the right frequency, things like that.

    They had that tech in the 60s too.

    Also when the bug was in operation it was definitely not passive. It was being fed by what must have been a really strong signal to power it, and transmitted the results back.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    There's no way to "detect" it other than tearing apart whatever it's hidden in.

    The Wikipedia article describes how they detected it at the time, with two different mathods. It was first stumbled onto accidentally then there was a focused attempt to pinpoint the source which was successful. Now that technique can be used any time a thorough check is required.

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