That DEA agent's 'credit card' could be eavesdropping on you
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
- Induce your target to apply for a certain credit/debit card, gym/movie/gallery/store membership, airline pass, then mail them a bugged card
- Blindly mail a $100 gift card to your target along with a plausible sounding cover letter about why they are receiving it
- Give your target a badge to wear when they are visiting your office so you can hear and see what they do when they're not in your presence
- Leave your bugged card on the table while having dinner with your targets at a restaurant to hear the conversation while you go to the restroom
- Substitute one of the targets legitimate cards with a bugged card via covert entry at the target's home or office
- Obtain the cooperation of the target's employer or health club to swap their usual ID card for a bugged ID card
- With the cooperation of the target's bank or credit card issuer or insurance provider, send the target a replacement card or "upgrade" card which is now bugged
- Issue a bugged driver's license whenever the target goes to renew their license. Or send them a fine by mail to force them to visit the driver licensing office and then invent a reason to reissue the target's driver's license when they visit
- Whenever someone applies for or renews a Global Entry, Sentri, or Nexus card, issue a bugged card if they are on the target list
But I find it funny that we can prevent expensive highly-targeted individual bugging by using a ubiquitous worldwide realtime tracking and surveillance system (a smartphone!).
Given those constraints, practical applications would be severely limited. As the article mentions, it's probably undercover personnel who are carrying these. The power budget would likely rule out remote access or remote streaming. I'm guessing these credit card snitches are little more than local audio/video recorders with very limited run time.
It's totally viable to have a device like this with an essentially infinite battery life. You have to compromise on audio quality, recording time, and upload rate, but you can. It's not even anything particularly crazy or difficult.
The more practical way is a remote power supply. You can get a small amount of power at a good distance with radio. Just enough to keep the recorder ticking and to charge a capacitor for transmit bursts.
1. The center of gravity will likely be all off.
2. X-ray or just a powerful enough light
3. My favourite and I wish hamas did this for their pagers: carolimetric analysis (ie: set it on fire and see how many btu’s come out): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorimeter
In one hand these publishers have just cause in complaining about companies like Google and Apple stealing their content, but they really are not helping themselves either. Their website are completely user unfriendly.
With that said:
People will complain about paywalls and they will complain about ads. The money needs to come from somewhere. For ad-supported sites, increased ad blocker use means higher saturation of ads for everyone else.
It's always very nice to see a nonprofit journalism outlet with no ads, but donor funding does not scale up to a large newsroom.
Sure, there are abuses of power. You can disagree with policy of prohibition.
The DEA also has important job to do combatting really bad people. Because there is due process and because they don't just disappear people, they need to collect evidence. They can't walk in with a mic strapped to their lapel. A credit card mic seems pretty clever.
Article states otherwise, at least as far as ICE assistance goes.
The DEA has no justification to exist, and the War on Drugs has been used to destabilize dozens of foreign regimes in order to benefit the US' neoliberal policies. It's now being used to take away even more rights as it's being used in part to justify ICE raids, and Trump's imperialist skirmish and attempted regime change in Venezuela. Additionally, the cartel has destroyed northern Mexico and now Trump is floating the idea of "cleaning up" Mexico.
You just explained the entire justification for it existing.
We've done it here domestically too at least as far back as Prohibition. Prohibition ended in 33, we banned automatic weapons in 34, add in the racially-motivated disenfranchisement of Irish and Italian immigrants and ghettoization of their communities, and you got an unprecedented level of domestic organized crime and subsequent retroactively justified restriction of civil rights. [0]
The same happened again in the 80s with the Iran-Contra affair. [1]
The same continues to happen in my city and in many other cities every day, justifying racial and immigration-focused discrimination and allowing institutions to extract wealth from poor communities while ensuring their continued generational poverty.
I would recommend checking out Jack Herer's seminal The Emperor Wears No Clothes [2], especially chapters 5, 13 and 14. I'd also look into William Randolph Hearst [3], his involvement in drug prohibition, and the racially-motivated tactics used to make it happen, by first convincing Americans they should be racist against Mexican immigrants and then connecting these "dangerous" Mexican immigrants to cannabis.
Now, we're using fentanyl, etc. as an excuse, when the entire fentanyl trade thrives on the fact that secure, regulated facilities and distribution networks do not exist for many recreational drugs. The failings of the War on Drugs are perpetually used to circularly justify its existence, and it's shameful.
[0] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/gangsters-pr... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_coca... [2] https://www.jackherer.com/emperor-3/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Hearst#Critic...
Now, according to federal procurement data reviewed by The Independent, the DEA – which has recently diverted agents from their usual drug-fighting mandate to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement in carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts – is outfitting agents, presumably undercover, with audio-video recorders camouflaged to look like everyday credit cards.I can't imagine it's super common for credit card microphones to be used in complex DEA-led surveillance operations simply to locate ICE targets. They're hitting Home Depots, weed grow farms, factories known to employ foreign nationals in ways inconsistent with their immigration status, etc. — this is low-hanging fruit, and often the only reason the subjects are still in the country is the fact that they're in a sanctuary states so the locals haven't already done the work.