The Cold War Espionage Technology we All Use Today.
This place is Moscow and the day is August 4, 1945. The European chapter of World War II was over and the United States and the Soviet Union were considering their future relations.At the US embassy, a group of young boys from the Soviet Union's Young Pioneer Organization presented a gift as a token of friendship between the two world powers.
He then presented a handmade American seal to US Ambassador to Russia Avery Harriman. It was later simply called The Thing.Apparently, Herrmann's office may have searched the decorative piece made of wood to see if it had hidden devices, but no wires or batteries, so what harm could it have done?
So Herrmann hung the object in a prominent place on the wall of her study room, from where she listened to his private conversations for the next seven years.They would never have realized that this device was created by Leon Thierryman, one of the most intelligent minds of the 20th century.He was known for his revolutionary electronic instrument that could be played without touching.
He lived in the United States with his wife, Livinia Williams, but returned to the Soviet Union in 1938. His wife later said Leon had been abducted. But in any case, he was immediately sent to work in a prison camp where he was forced to design 'The Thing' along with other hearing aids.Some time later, American radio operators found that the US ambassador's speech was being broadcast on the airwaves. But the broadcasts were unpredictable: a search of the embassy did not reveal where the radio waves were coming from. The search for this secret was about to begin.
The device that could hear the ambassador's speech was inside The Thing. And it was a very simple antenna with a silver membrane made into a mic, and hidden in a small box. It didn't have a battery or any other source of energy, because The Thing didn't need it.The device would be activated when Soviet scientists sent radio waves to the US embassy. It draws energy from the incoming signals and broadcasts the conversation back. This device would also be muted when the Soviet signal was turned off.
Like Thiruman's mysterious musical instrument, The Thing may seem like a technological puzzle, but the concept of a device that sends information back by activating radio signals is much broader.In the age of modern technology, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are being used almost everywhere.
I also have a tag in my passport, and a similar tag in my credit card that allows me to turn to an RFID reader for payment.Library books also often have tags, while airlines often use it to track passengers' luggage, while shops use it to prevent luggage from being stolen.Some of them have a source of current but most of them get energy from a radio signal coming towards them like a therapeutic device. This lowers their value and the low price is the reason for their popularity.
Allied
aircraft used the same form of RFID during World War II. When radar sent waves
to an airplane, a device called a transponder would send a signal back to the
radar, meaning "we are your companions, don't hit us."
But
as the size of circuits made of silicone began to dwindle, so did the idea of
tags that you could apply to items much cheaper than airplanes.
Like
bar codes, RFID tags can be used to quickly identify something.
But
unlike barcodes, they can be scanned automatically and do not need to be
aligned with specific lighting. Some tags can be read from several feet away,
some with errors but also in groups.
And
they can store a lot more than just a bar code so that not only can an item be
identified, but the tag can also be stored where and when that particular item
was prepared.
RFID tags were also used in the 1970s to monitor train cars and cattle.But by the early 2000's, Tesco, Wal-Mart, and the US Department of Defense began demanding that their suppliers affix tags to the supplies. As a result, RFID tags began to appear everywhere.Some enthusiastic people even put RFID tags on their bodies, which made it easier for them to open doors or get on the subway with just a hand gesture.
In
1999, Kevin Ashton, who worked at Procter & Gamble, a home appliance
company, coined a new term for all the excitement surrounding RFID. "RFID
will eventually lead us to the Internet of Things (IoT), a world in which
everything is connected to something else," he said.
But
soon all the excitement about RFID turned to flashy products, including
smartphones, smartwatches, smart thermostats, smart speakers and even smart
cars, introduced in 2007.
All
of these products are innovative, have immense computing power, but are also
expensive and require a lot of energy.
When
we talk about the Internet of Things today, we are not talking about RFIDs, we
are talking about these devices. It will be a world of sophisticated
engineering in which your toaster will be in touch with your refrigerator for
no reason, while remote controlled sex toys will also have information about
your habits which we consider to be very personal.
We
may not be surprised to find ourselves living in an age that sociologist
Shoshana Zubov calls surveillance capitalism or 'spy capitalism'. In this day
and age, keeping an eye on people's personal lives is a popular business model.
But
in the midst of all this excitement and thought, RFID is quietly engaged in its
work and I can bet that its heyday is still ahead.
Ashton's
view of the Internet of Things was simple: computers would need data if they
were to understand the real world, not just the electronic world.
Humans
have other tasks better than working with this data, so things will be created
that will provide this information to the computer itself, which will make the
real world more understandable in the digital sense.
Many
people now have smartphones but things do not have smartphones. RFID can be a
low cost way to track these things.
Even
if most of the tags just say 'I'm here!' To the RFID reader passing by, that
would be enough for computers to learn about the real world.
RFID may not have as much power and flexibility as a smartwatch or a self-driving car, but it is low cost and small technology, so low cost and so small that it can be used to tag hundreds of billions of things.
And it doesn't even need batteries. Anyone who thinks it doesn't matter should read about Leon Thirimanne again.
Note: The caption of the image contains information about each image
