Feeling mischievous today

Thinking of print security gave me another idea. How about printing surveillance electronics onto paper such as gift vouchers? People like gift vouchers and happily put them in their wallets and purses, or on the kitchen pinboard.

Moore's law isn't going to stop any time soon. Your eyes can only see items bigger than 0.1mm, that's 100 microns. Electronic components are hovering around the 0.65 micron level today. So you need 75 of these in a row (plus gaps) to be visible to the naked eye, i.e. 5625 in a nice square as small as the smallest dust particle you can see - if you're looking for it. And you probably aren't. That's a lot of electronics. The Apple 2's processing chip, the 6502 - ah, I remember it well - had about 9000 transistors. So a coup,ke of tiny specks of dust on a voucher, or inside a voucher, could easily conceal such power. And a nice little aerial using very thin wire could be printed in the voucher too.

So, someone gives you a gift voucher, or better still, sells you it so that you trust it. From then until you use it, it sits in your wallet, picking up your voice and intercepting any electronic communications you make. Maybe even the signal from the processor in the cash machine or credit card pad as you type your PIN. And of course, sitting right next to your credit card, it can also read the magnetic strip. And when you use the voucher, it also collects your fingerprint. And having got all this, even if it didn't send it by radio already, the voucher is eventually returned to the people who made it, who then sell all this information to the highest bidder.

Strange thing is, this isn't futurology any more, it is all entirely possible today, with today's technology. Yikes! Hope you are worried too.

Ian