Spying Devices Found on Thousands of Hong Kong Cars
June 20th, 2011Via: Discovery News:
Note to drivers and passengers travelling through Hong Kong: Mum’s the word.
Chinese authorities have allegedly been spying on Hong King motorists after a device installed on throusands of vehicles was discovered to contain hardware suitable for eavesdropping.
According to a report in Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily, recording devices were installed as “inspection and quarantine cards” in 2007. The devices — about the size of a Blackberry and taped to vehicles’ front windows — were installed free of charge by the Shenzhen Inspection and Quarantine Bureau to streamline inspection status checks at border crossings.
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Dawei told Apple Daily that much cheaper chips could be used to check inspection status for simple border crossings, “but this device uses chips commonly found in Bluetooth and voice recording devices, designed for receiving voice transmission.”
Liming says the listening range is extensive.
“The signal receiving range is up to 20km, which means if the device installer wants to, they can listen even when the vehicles are in Hong Kong.”
Research Credit: Neo
realistically these are probably only used for cases that are already open, rather than starting new cases, political dissidents and personal vendettas of corrupt officials, rape and whatnot. it does seem ominous the scale of this however, considering cellular eavesdropping is already widely available in china, and ive heard talk of algorithmic data mining and multidisciplinary movement out of text and into widescale speech analysis, think i saw something on cryptogon a while back about dropped calls triggered by keywords or some such. maybe this hong kong thing is just a test market for some new system thats still buggy?