Sticks and Stones may break your bones but did you know they can spy on you?

This week at the annual AUSA Army meeting in Washington, D.C., Lockheed Martin showcased developments in their surveillance technology called SPAN (Self-Powered Ad-hoc Network), a “covert, perpetually self-powered wireless sensor network” that can provide “unobtrusive, continuous surveillance” in units so small they can fit in a rock.

SPAN is a mesh network of self-organizing sensors that, when triggered, can cue a camera or an unmanned aerial vehicle to further study an area, or summon an engineer when a pipeline or bridge structure is in danger or fractured. It uses proprietary algorithms to reduce false alarms.

Lockheed touts the “field-and-forget” technology as providing maximum coverage at minimal costs, claiming that the sensors can remain in the field for years at a time without maintenance, powered by solar technology.

The defense contractor is hoping to sell its spy rocks for surveillance, border protection, pipeline monitoring and bridge security, among other things.

The SPAN system was originally introduced last year, but this isn’t the company’s first attempt at making smart rocks.
WIRED

Seems we may have been using these for a while as one report says.

RT
Iranian troops patrolling the perimeter of a secret uranium enrichment site have reportedly found a monitoring device disguised as a rock. The spy gadget exploded when disturbed, probably on a self-destruct trigger.

This isn’t the first time spy equipment has been disguised as rocks MI6 planted one in Moscow for communications.
youtu.be...

Well who knows if Iran was making the story up because there was some publicity over a pulled project rock spy piece earlier this year being sold on E-bay by the subcontractor who designed one. But it will be one of those things only the people who were involved will actually know.

Unless this is thrown at someone or lands on them when dropped from a plane it isn’t dangerous in the military sense but in conjunction with drone and missile tech it could be.

this is old tech ..

back in the early 70's they could fire a round from a artillery or tank piece and have it set up into a bush which was a listening device ..

We've been snooping on the apes and lions wiuth this tech for decades.

I've seen documentaries on it.

Those animals are so stupid.. ahaha..

Afghanistan is full of these things. They are on every trail that exists in that country. But it kind of begs the question. What good are they if you're too stupid to properly utilize the information they send back to you?

The rock is old hat. You can leave messages on a NFC tag. The only problem I see is there is no way that I know of to "crypto lock" a NFC tag. That is, you leave the tag locked or rewriteable. There is no way to allow a certain user to unlock and rewrite the tag. But they can be hidden very easily underneath a nonmetalic surface. Poster on a wall for instance. The big advantage is they require no power.

If you have a smartphone other than Apple, you probably have NFC already. The trick is to get the right tags. I've found NTAG203 to be the most compatible. You need to determine if you will be attaching them to a metal surface or not, and if you want it to be waterproof.

These are about the most rugged I've seen:
ABS plastic ntag203
ABS plastic is what your landline phone handset used to be made of, or in my case, what I still use. You can hammer nails with the stuff.

DEFCON has videos on reading NFC tags from a distance. I keep one handy with a nasty message for the NSA just in case.