UPDATED 03:12 EDT / OCTOBER 31 2013

NEWS

Bugged teddy bears, electric irons & the Pope: Spying just got really, really silly

If you’ve been following the NSA’s spying saga over the summer, you probably thought you’d seen it all by now. Well, you couldn’t have been more wrong, because this was the week that the torrent of spy allegations went completely over-the-top.

The NSA has been eavesdropping on The Pope; the Russians are using bugged teddy bears to spy on G-20 officials; Wikileaks’ Julian Assange has been sending packages of spy equipment to jailed activists; Oh and the Chinese are equipping electric irons with spy chips – all this and more in just one week.

Perhaps the most scandalous allegation of the past week, at least if you’re at all religious in any way, is that the NSA has almost certainly been spying on the Pope. The Italian publication Panorama reports that the NSA managed to infiltrate the Vatican’s phone systems, eavesdropping on calls made during the Conclave that saw Cardinal Jose Bergoglio chosen as the new “Pope Francis”. According to Panorama, the NSA wasn’t just interested in getting a leg up for its private betting pool. Instead, its surveillance efforts were all about trying to determine the intentions of the Vatican’s new leadership.

Of course we’ve see this aspect of the NSA’s surveillance come into question already this week, when Director of National Intelligence James Clapper dismissed spying allegations against Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel as ‘part and parcel’ of the agency’s operations. Luckily, the Vatican wasn’t nearly as peeved as the Germans were by the allegations. “We don’t know anything about this, and in any case we don’t have any concerns about it,” said a spokesman for the Vatican.

More incredibly (yet strangely also more believable) spy allegations arose from Italy later in the week. According to the Corriere della Sera, the Russians hit open the novel idea of handing out bugged teddy bears, USB storage drives and cell phone chargers to officials attending the G-20 summit. The plan was that these sensor-equipped freebies would be able to clandestinely intercept and download data from officials’ cell phones and computers. However, the Russians’ plot was undone when Herman von Rompuy, the president of the European Council, had his security guards examine the gifts he and his staff had received.

“These devices are adapted to the clandestine interception of data from computers and mobile phones,” declared the council in a report.

As to what Julian Assange is up to with this latest political performance art/activist project in support of imprisoned Bahraini dissident Nabeel Rajab, that’s anyone’s guess. The Wikileaks founder was reported to have mailed a rather odd package to Rajab, containing a camera, a GPS tracker and an appeal for his release. Described as a “live mail art piece“, the package contains a hole in the box for the camera to record the whole journey from London to Bahrain. It’s apparently just landed in the Middle East, following a “mysterious” 24-hour delay at London’s Stansted Airport. It’ll be interesting to see the looks on the befuddled Bahraini prison officials faces when the package arrives, as they try to figure out what to do with it. For those who’re curious enough, the whole thing is set to be live-tweeted as it happens.

Bahrain’s Jaw Prison isn’t the only unexpected place where surveillance gadgets have been cropping up. Even more absurdly, if Russia’s Rossiya 24 news agency is to be believed, is that the Chinese are now shipping electric irons containing spy chips into that country. Rossiya 24 shows technicians retrieving a so-called spy chip, together with what appears to be a small microphone, from one of these Chinese irons. According to the report, the chips are used to spread malware over unsecured Wi-Fi networks, and have also been spotted in mobile phones. Assuming this particular story is genuine and not just some ridiculous piece of anti-Chinese propaganda, it serves as a kind of weird confirmation that the uber-paranoid worldview of someone like Pynchon might actually be pretty justified.


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