Do Your $20 Bills Explode In the Microwave?

msaulters writes "After repeatedly setting off RFID scanners in a truck stop, the author discovered the culprit was a wad of $20's in his back pocket. In a paranoid attempt to keep the government from tracking him, he attempted to fry the embedded chips in his microwave, with interesting results." Alex Jones has interesting theories about a number of things, but evidently a lot of readers were interested in this one.

'Quotes'

The part of the 'article' that should probably be 'most' ignored is Denise's 'compulsory' use of 'punctuation.'

And GEEZ. I remember being 12 and having a twenty burn a hole in my pocket, but...

*smacks forehead* Sorry.

Re:'Quotes'

Did he learn from GRC [grc.com]?

Re:'Quotes'

Your computer is broadcasting an internet address!

Re:'Quotes'

Oh no it's not you monkey puppet, I just pulled out th=20 ]} $}1}&..}=3Dr}'}"}[NO CARRIER]

Re:put down the crackpipe

If the money's in the bank, then the Feds already know how much you have. The IRS gets a 1099 for every interest bearing account. Divide by the likely interest rate and they'll have a ballpark figure for the average balance. For a non-interest bearing account, your records are just a subpoena away, which is a pretty minor obstacle these days, but at least they can't data mine your finances they way they can with 1099's.

Re:put down the crackpipe

That is incorrect. From Bureau of Engraving [moneyfactory.com]

"Defacement of currency is a violation of Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code. Under this provision, currency defacement is generally defined as follows: Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined not more than $100 or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

Defacement of currency in such a way that it is made unfit for circulation comes under the jurisdiction of the United States Secret Service."

Destroying it completely may be ok, since you have no evidence it happened.

Re:put down the crackpipe

Coin and bill collectors might disagree with you there. So if I own a 1900 Silver Dollar, it's not my property? By your logic the Treasury can reclaim any rare coins by buying it back at face value.

Re:put down the crackpipe

Considering every bill already has a serial number, I fail to see the problem.

You need to be within about 4" to communicate with most RFID tech anyway. And US Govt certainly does not have extra money to add this technology.

Likely the burn is from the different concentrations of ink in the face of the bill.

They've gotten to my eggs too

hey, I just put some eggs in the microwave and they exploded - damn chickens have started putting RFID tags in their eggs already!

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

Ha! You should see what happened when I put my /tinfoil hat/ in the microwave!

Re:Haha

As my EM prof put it - putting tin-foil into your microwave turns it into a spark plug, and god help you if the sparks strike any explosive elements.

Thank goodness you posted that. I've been storing gasoline in my microwave for years thinking it was safe.

F.Y.I. The worst you could do to a microwave by putting metal inside is break the magnatron, and when it breaks, it will just die, not explode or any cool shit like that. This urban legend was debunked like last season. [discovery.com] I can't even find the listing for it anymore.

Re:Haha

F.Y.I. The worst you could do to a microwave by putting metal inside is break the magnatron, and when it breaks, it will just die, not explode or any cool shit like that.

I can vouch for this. We went to the county fair every year I was in high school and every fucking time the Magnatron was broken and it just sat there like some shitty UFO exhibit cum Christmas lights. This sucked because I heard they played Floyd inside and you could crawl on the walls like a spider. At least that's what all the kids a grade higher than us said. We usually ended the night at someone's house, stoned and eating microwave popcorn, the message here being that everything comes full circle (except of course that Magnatron).

Super Happy Microwave Fun.

metal inside is break the magnatron

Tell me about it. I broke my Magnatron, and totally fried Optimus Prime too. That's the last time I play Decepticon Rays From Space with my Transformers.

Re:Haha

> Microwaves are non-ionizing anyway, so the worst that will happen in that situation is that you get a little warm. Well, ok, if you're expose long enough you could probably boil all of the water in your body, but that would take a really long time.

STOP.

Correct. Microwaves are nonionizing.

Correct. The only damage you will take is in the form of localized heating of your body parts.

Incorrect. There is a risk. There are no nerve endings in many places that are highly susceptible to heat damage - places like your brain, the vitreous humor in your eyeballs, and internal organs. If there's a warped/open door, or if you've gone one step further and defeated the safety interlock to power up a magnetron externally, you could be (relatively) safe in location X,Y,Z, but six inches next to X,Y,Z, the big reflecting metal plate of your fridge, your stovetop, and the hole in the homebrew shielding you created have created a local "hot spot" node where localized heating is much more rapid.

Play with a magnetron if you like, but be aware that by the time you feel warmth, it may already be too late.

(As long as the door is intact, as long as the safety interlocks are intact, and as long as you're not afraid of damaging the oven and/or are prepared with a Class C extinguisher to deal with a small fire that manages to escape the confines of the oven, there's relatively low risk. I'd consider the "fry a $20 bill" and "spark a CD" experiments safe, but your mileage may vary.)

Re:Haha

F.Y.I. The worst you could do to a microwave by putting metal inside is break the magnatron, and when it breaks, it will just die, not explode or any cool shit like that.

What happens is the lack of anything to absorb the microwaves causes all the energy to be re-absorbed back into the magnetron, heating it up. Fortunately, the designers of microwave ovens put heat fuses on the magnetrons so they stop working (hopefully) before the tube itself dies. You can heat lots of unusual items relatively safely by putting a mug of cold water in the oven to absorb the excess energy.

Once upon a time I was employed to actually do microwave oven research, and the duties involved microwaving all kinds of odd things to see what would happen. (Wood pencils are my favorite since they exhibit burn marks at a nice half-wavelength intervals, or about 6cm. Put one in your oven with a small mug of water with the turntable off and see). The research was done in a jury-rigged "oven" that had no safety interlocks or heat fuses.

When a magnetron is overheated to excess it doesn't explode. The ceramic permanent magnets can crack badly, but I've never seen one explode. It simply doesn't heat up fast enough.

Most things are unexciting when microwaved. In general, metals just get hot. Tinfoil and neon bulbs were both fun. (foil sparks, bulbs flash.) The only thing I tested that actually exploded was chicken wire wrapped in aluminum foil, and even then it's not a movie-style explosion but simply a nice capactitive buildup until finally the resulting arc rips the foil apart rather dramatically.

It does make a really nice bang when it goes.

A far more dramatic explosion could be had by simply heating a thick 1L bottle half-full of water until the steam pressure built up enough for an explosion.

Re:Haha

Dude, that would be the coolest job evar...

Yeah, they PAID me to do that. Not a lot, mind you, but it's definately good for storytelling after the fact.

Best part: burning things for money
Worst part: accidently burning myself (for money)

You've never felt a burn until you've been RF-burned. It hurts all the way through.

Accidently brushing the 4500 volt RF-modulated power supply was also pretty unpleasant.

But again, both are great for stories. ;-)

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

I was microwaving my tinfoil hat when it was like, 'Beep Beep Beep Beep' and then, like, half the hat was gone.

And I was, like, "uuuunh?"

It DEVOURED my tinfoil hat.

It was a really good tinfoil hat.

And then I had to nuke it again, and it wasn't as good because I had to do it fast before the Illuminati came.

It was... ...a bummer.

My name is Ellen Feiss, and they're all out to get me.

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

I acctually did this once, I thought it would be cool to work out the exact amount of time it would take to blow up and then do it for a couple of seconds less every time.
Super convienient hard boiled eggs!
Unfortunatly on my first attempt I discovered what a mess it made and abandoned the project... (who whoulda thunk it!?)
It was acctually on the last second of the pre-set time I had given it which made it quite dis-hartening to hear a -BANG- and then immediately a BEEEEP of the microwave having finished.

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

Have you ever actually tried it? This really doesn't work. The first time I blew up an egg in a microwave I thought of this and set a heavyish plastic jug over the egg. One minute later and the force of the explosion blew the door of the microwave open and slammed the jug against the opposite kitchen wall. Seriously, there's a lot of power in these things.

Saved by a second

actually, had you set it for a second or two less, and opened the door- it would have gone off in your face.

Re:Saved by a second

actually, had you set it for a second or two less, and opened the door- it would have gone off in your face.

Show of hands: How many of you are going to run off and try this now?

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

the issue that this guy has run into has to do with metalic particals suspended in the ink. the particals are used to give the bills a magnetic signature. to my knowledge this is used in many bills around the world. This has nothing to do with rfid, or the goverment tracking you, this isin't even a valid arguement if it were, the bill has a serial number that can be read by machine.

The store tracking sensors that this guy is talking about aren't even rfid, and only have a fleeting resemblence, all they can tell is the presence of a tag moving through them. The system is called electonic artical survalance and most are made by sensormatic [sensormatic.com] to my knowledge the only thing that these machines keep track of is the number of times they're triggerd daily.

the only way to get the effect that this guy got would be to do just what he did, microwave a big tightley packed stack of brand new bills. once they're not stuck together they won't burn nearley as well, as for the exploading thing, they look more like they caught on fire from getting too hot, not like they blew up.

I'm not terrorably concerned with the goverment tracking the movement of money, they do allready. The real concern that we need to have with rfid is that we can be essentially fingerprinted based on the unique blend of objects that we carry around with us every day.

anyone correcting my spelling should find something better to do.

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

well... my first clue that they had no idea what they were talking about was when I looked at the picture. The article clearly said that it was over $1000 in cash. There's only $600 in the pic. It also said that it was burned uniformly... it clearly isn't.

in response to the tracking of money... people even do it voluntarily... Where's George [wheresgeorge.com]

this isn't interesting, insightful, or anything else... I just wanted to point it out

Freudian slip of the year?

I'm not terrorably concerned with the goverment tracking the movement of money

You are not TERRORably concerned with the government? Hm...

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

Yes, and the burn pattern relates to the pattern of standing waves in the oven. It would only take one second (actually a lot less, but we are dealing with oven timers here) to fry an RFID chip. It looks as if he gave them a lot longer.

They don't know who is actually spending the money, only where it is going, if indeed they have a tracking device, and in any case they will only be able to track within a very short distance (inches) so they can't tell where you have been, only that maybe you pass a sensor occasionally. That tells them very little, conventional surveillance would give them a million times more.

Of course if it helps catch drug dealers, who then get a life sentence, I am all for it, although I doubt that the technology is that useful somehow.

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

the only way ... microwave a big tightley packed stack of brand new bills.... they look more like they caught on fire from getting too hot, not like they blew up.

I can back this up. well, anyone can, of course. Ever microwave a stack of paper? like a small stack, call it money sized, call it index-card sized ...

same effect.

I once microwaved some old monopoly money (to kill mold spores, naturally). If i zapped one bill at a time, no big deal. a couple seconds a piece, and they come out warm and mold-free. But do a whole stack .. .. don't do a whole stack.

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

I don't usally respond to trolls but the artical you link to has nothing to do with rfid, and it's not the gvmt tracking it was the guy's bank, I don't know about you but if my bank didin't keep track of my transactoions I'd be concerned.

The patriot act is a different matter, but has nothing to do with rfid chips in money, as far as I know there are not any. When you handle money you leave dead skin cells on it, in your paranoid world, this is much more damming than simply knowing how much cash you carry past a recever.

Here's my system for goverment tracking of money, all serial numbers are logged to each bank (as they are), but from there the bank logs wich costomers the bills are givevn to (my bank has these weird cash machines, you don't get money from the cashier, but from the machine). The next step would be to log the deposits coming from various buisness, This way the gvmt, can trace not only how much money just went by a location (like you'd get with rfid) but who it was, and where they spent it.

This method would be undectectable, by anyone other than the upper management of the banks, and the gvmt employees who monitor the data. it would be easy to track patterns and connections, not just count money, wich seems pretty pointless.

Not to mention the fact that rfid can be blocked, read by any concernd party, is easy to detect, costs money to embed in the bills. Why not track the bills by embeding chemicals in them, this would be more usefull, you could tell how much money a person recentley handled, how much they have, track cash using dogs.

Rfid in money is pretty pointless, and I'd be supprised to see it implimented in the next fifty years, I'd be less suprised to see the end of cash all together.

So in conclusion, be worried about the goverment spying on our personal financial data, library records, making illegal searches, locking people up in prison with no trial, reading your e-mail, tracking your internet use, knowing that you like to dress up like a woman, but don't be concerned with them wanting to know how much money you have on you.

Re:They've gotten to my eggs too

Just to clarify one thing for the tin foil hat people...

all serial numbers are logged to each bank (as they are)

Serial numbers on cash are only logged by the Federal Reserve when shipping an order of new currency to a bank. It would be extrordinarily difficult for a bank to record the serial numbers on incoming deposits. Especially business deposits, which are normally shipped via amoured courier directly to a processing center. These deposits can have anywhere from 1 - 25000 bills.
The deposits are counted by large Toshiba currency sorters (Toshiba [toshiba.co.jp]

Most banks are more worried about the volume of counted bills rather than capturing the serial number off the bill... It would simply take too long.

Re:'Quotes'

Just a quick run-down on Alex Jones and his Infowars.com site.

This guy is viewed as a Class-A crackpot in Austin, Texas. He has a cable access show twice a week in which he rants about conspiracy theories of all kinds of varieties. He has run numerous shows on how the government literally has black helicopters following him around South Austin. He was predicting armageddon when the Y2K bug was supposed to hit. He fully espouses the notion that Bush not only had previous-knowledge of 9/11 but planned it. He did a special [yahoo.com] where he claims that all presidents past and present meet at Bohemiam Grove, worship an owl god, and sacrifice children. He also believes the United Nations is preparing to occupy the United States any day now (according to him it has been for at least the last ten years). A quick look at his shop [yahoo.com] will give you a pretty good indication of his beliefs.

Keep this in mind when judging the validity of this article

Re:'Quotes'

FEMA boxes in every radio and television station in the land allow Washington to take control of all of the media in the entire country with the flip of a single switch. The individual broadcasting stations cannot bypass the FEMA equipment; the best they can do is to just shut off the transmitter and stop broadcasting completely. The FEMA boxes effectively turn the tens of thousands of individual broadcast stations into a single government propaganda channel. When activated, there will be only one version of the news: the government version.

I'm not sure but I think that's called the Emergency Alert System ;)

I don't know about my fellow tinfoil hat readers out there but I'll take the slight chance of the Government using it for propaganda (like they'd actually get away with it) if it means I'm going to know when that tornado is about to wipe out my house or those nuclear weapons are inbound. In either case I'll have enough time to put my head between my knees and kiss my ass goodbye ;) (my house wouldn't stand up to a dust devil let alone a tornado and we are 2mi from a major target)

Sarcastic point aside I do realize the AC was quoting from it just to make fun of it. I still couldn't resist tossing my own two cents onto the fire.

Re:'Quotes'

I'm not sure I understand his concerns at all.

Frankly, it has been years since local or national news programs had any real content other than the weather and sports. The rest is all who shot who, what burned down, and wildly inaccurate stories on science and technology. I fail to see how his feared FEMA takeover would make much difference.

As for being impossible to bypass, I doubt that very much.

Re:'Quotes'

the absolutely hilarious part is that the clod knows nothing about the EAC boxes. they are capable of displaying white text on a grey background only with an audio track. they are not capable of "hijacking" for any longer than 60 seconds at a time ( although the CATV versions are cool.. able to transmit on 400 different frequencies PLUS generate digital tv signals)

I.E. the statement was made by someone that knows absolutely nothing about what they are talking about..

the only thing the EAC boxes can be used for is alerts... so yes the Govt. could subvert the populace by having them display " John Kerry is a donkey lover"

Re:'Quotes'

When activated, there will be only one version of the news: the government version.

And this differs from Clear Channel's version how?

Re:'Quotes'

FEMA boxes in every radio and television station in the land allow Washington to take control of all of the media in the entire country with the flip of a single switch. The individual broadcasting stations cannot bypass the FEMA equipment; the best they can do is to just shut off the transmitter and stop broadcasting completely.

that's BS. my college radio station was only required by the FCC to have the equipment on hand and receiving alerts. and if you did have it hooked up to your transmitter, most alerts you could schedule yourself within a 15 minute window. and you *couldn't* just flip off your transmitter, because intermittent operation would get your license revoked by the FCC. and if a particular radio station wanted to rebel and remove their equipment, it's about as difficult as removing your VCR from between your cable box and TV.

Re:'Quotes'

that's BS. my college radio station was only required by the FCC to have the equipment on hand and receiving alerts. and if you did have it hooked up to your transmitter, most alerts you could schedule yourself within a 15 minute window

Not true. Your college station may have been operating illegally, but all US stations, commercial or not, are required to maintain EAS equipment, monitor two other stations (unless they're one of the primary entry points), keep logs of tests, and participate in required monthly and weekly tests. Weekly tests must be forwarded within 1 hour, monthly tests must be regenerated within 1 hour (this is an expansion of the 15-minute rule - got passed last year). All stations are required to broadcast EAN alerts immediately (though, they do give you about one minute leeway). EAN, incidentally, has never been activated. That's the one where the President gets on the line and tells everyone to stick their heads between their knees.

Flipping off your transmitter will get you in trouble, and so will not rebroadcasting EAS alerts and tests... And both will be picked up not just by your listeners, but by the stations that are monitoring *your* station as one of their required 2. They'll report that you didn't forward if the FCC asks them, and when the inspector comes around to look at your logs of transmitted EAS tests and you have nothing to show, he'll walk out with your license. And most of your equipment.

-T

Re:'Quotes'

I still couldn't resist tossing my own two cents onto the fire.

Careful, those two cents may contain RFIDs and could therefore explode if tossed onto a fire.

Just lookin' out for y'all.

Re:'Quotes'

The FEMA boxes effectively turn the tens of thousands of individual broadcast stations into a single government propaganda channel. When activated, there will be only one version of the news: the government version.

I'm not sure but I think that's called the Emergency Alert System ;)

Not so fast! I've heard of this before, and it does turn thousands of individual broadcast stations into government propaganda outlets. But I think he got the wrong acronym for Fox News.

Hey, Slashdot higher-ups...

Weren't you looking to hire another news editor?

Re:'Quotes'

Yeah, sure, all the rest of that stuff is pretty wacky...

but it's true about the owl god.

[wink]

Re:'Quotes'

Mightn't the fact that we judge him to sound crazy have quite a bit to do with the total lack of evidence and fact?

As a trivial example, this article presents no evidence or fact that RFID is at all involved, but is instead portrayed that way to mislead others. For those not quite so easily mislead, the author sounds like a nut job.

Re:'Quotes'

What do you propose we use instead? How he smells? "He smells CRAZY today!".

Re:'Quotes'

I remember being 12 and having a twenty burn a hole in my pocket, but...

In Capitalist America, YOU burn a hole in money!

Re:'Quotes'

Mod great grandparent up for being so stupid that it's funny.

Mod grandparent down on general priciples.

Mod parent up, because we do really care that he doesn't think anyone gives a crap what the grandparent poster thinks.

Don't give me mod points. Instead, give me those twenty dollar bills you suspect of having chips implanted. I'll test them for you. To preserve anonymity, you may send them to me via Pay Pal.

And whatever child or grandchild posts appear here (if any) mod them up, again, on general principles.

Re:'Quotes'

Quotes like

We then wrapped our cash in foil and went thru the same monitors. No monitor went off.

make me want to travel to the location of the web server and smash it with a hammer.

no dice

I tried it... it didnt work.

Re:The most cursory inspection

Has anyone tried a control experiment of plain inkjet paper in the same form factor?

What, are you kidding? And ruin a perfectly good crazy conspiracy theory?

Better control experiment...

Did he try passing his wallet through the detector without the money?

I have a Kastanza wallet - I put everything in there, and it's waaay too big. The wallet I had was falling apart, and eventually my girlfriend pretty much forced me into buying a new one. Which I did, at the retail store she works at.

It just so happens that after this, I could no longer get through the metal detector at airport security. The wallet would set off the wand, and the TSA agent would spend a good 3-5 minutes examining the wallet, but couldn't find anything amiss and would eventually let me through.

The *FOURTH* time I went through security an agent finally managed to find the source of my problem: An anti-theft tag placed in some obscure fold of the wallet.

As it turns out, the guy at the store responsible for putting the anti-theft tags in things has a reputation for being able to hide them very well.

So I'd be willing to bet something similar is afoot here.

As for the money burning all in the same spot, it's pretty obvious why: Metal heats up in the microwave, and paper has low thermal conductivity. Put one bill in the microwave, the heat escapes from both sides of the bill fast enough that you don't get enough heat to initiate combustion. Stack 50 of them on top of each other, and now you've got a buncha metal in the middle of a buncha paper, the heat builds up in the center, and now your bills combust. The bills didn't all burn in the same spot - one bill started burning, and then the other bills - all stacked neatly on top of each other - burned in the same spot as the fire spread up and down the stack.

A conpiracy theorist needs to be smart enough to connect a bunch of unrelated facts, but not smart enough to realize that they're unrelated.

Re:Better control experiment...

The *FOURTH* time I went through security an agent finally managed to find the source of my problem: An anti-theft tag placed in some obscure fold of the wallet.

As it turns out, the guy at the store responsible for putting the anti-theft tags in things has a reputation for being able to hide them very well.

Many items come from the warehouse with 4-5 tags in them in different places. I bought a bottle of aspirin the other day that not only had them on the underside of the label, it had one on the inside of the box, one on the outside of the box, and one under the cap. Excessive for a mere $3 bottle of aspirin.

This is why professional shoplifters go through the trouble of sewing in foil lined pockets & pouches in their clothing. Once these systems are in place, the security tends to rely on them. It stops some of the amateurs, but professionals can come in and rob the place blind. They never set off an alarm and the first the store is aware of it is when an entire shelf of goods is missing.

Re:Better control experiment...

Thats nothing, one day me and a few (lady) friends decided we would go to our local adult bookshop for a look around for an 18th birthday present. Obviously I had no problems being seen entering such a place with two attractive women at my side so we went and had a look around. A few giggles and $15 later we emerged with a plastic... massage... device deftly sealed up in a brown paper bag. We were pleased with our purchase and decided to get along with our day.

Our next stop was at the local Target supermarket so we entered and had a look around bought some CD's and went to leave. Not so fast unfortunatly a hidden anti-theft tag was atached to the phallus of my girlfriends new best friend. This lead to an interesting conundrum, we had the option of:
a. Showing a 14 year old girl (who was clearly working her first day) and a few interested onlookers what was in the bag.
b. Waiting for the Cops to rock up and then showing them what was in the bag.
c. Attempt to tell her what was in the bag whilst keeping as diplomatic as possible.
It should also be pointed out that it was infact me holding the bag and this was not something I would like to be seen with.

Ultimitly we were able to communicate the contents of the bag and one quick peek and a sheepish smile later we were on our way. I learnt a valuable lesson that day my friends. Don't forget your towel (of al foil).

Re:Better control experiment...

I learnt a valuable lesson that day my friends. Don't forget your towel (of al foil).

Shouldn't the valuable lesson be "leave the dildo in the car when you go into Target?"

Re:Better control experiment...

Shouldn't the valuable lesson be "leave the dildo in the car when you go into Target?"

Heh. Yep! Leave it to a geek to learn the impractical lesson. "Never leave the house without your cross-spectrum radio-frequency jammer, tin foil, and collapsable antennae, because otherwise you won't be able to take dildos with you into Target."

Which, granted, is advice I could have used on several occasions. Where was he then?!

Re:Better control experiment...

hummmm. He wraps the cash, walks through with wrapped cash and a wallet and it quits beeping. I would say that is good enough for an experiment.

I would be far more interested in seeing their cash spread out rather than stacked in the microwave.

This could create and interesting market for wallets though; Foil lined to prevent signals. They are not passed through metal detectors.

Re:You are, of course, correct...

But there is an easier way of knowing there are no rfid tags in 20 dollar bills. Basically it is that if there *were* rfid tags in $20 bills, then we would already know about it. I'm sure $20.00 bills have been completely disected with a microscope/metal-detector/mass-spectrometer-to-det ermine-ink-composition/whathaveyou by entrepreneurial money hackers ( aka counterfeiters ), and if they found anything this nasty, we'd know.

Just look at it!

I always knew Andrew Jackson was giving me the evil eye.

Not the evil eye...

He's flirting with you.

illegal?

Isn't destroying US currency against the law?

Seems pretty smart to me: 1)Committ a federal offense. 2)Post the proof on the internet.

-Nick

Re:illegal?

No, that's a myth.
The only thing that would be against the law is defacing currency and attempting to use it in commerce. So we learned in Business Law.

But is it art?

The only thing that would be against the law is defacing currency and attempting to use it in commerce.

What if I draw moustaches on the presidents and sell the doctored notes as artistic portraits of Saddam Hussein?

Re:But is it art?

What if I draw moustaches on the presidents and sell the doctored notes as artistic portraits of Saddam Hussein?

That's legal as long as don't put Andy Warhol's signature in the bottom right corner.

In particular...

The only thing that would be against the law is defacing currency and attempting to use it in commerce. So we learned in Business Law.

Actually, what's illegal is attempting to use it in commerce after defacing it in a way that would let it be passed as currency of higher value.

You're entirely welcome to deface it in a way that doesn't promote fraud. In particular, some defacements are legitimate political speech and protected by the first amendment as interpreted by the courts.

My favorite defacement is to give the portrat of Hamilton on the (old) $10 a Hitler moustache and hair. Hamilton is the founding father who was the ideological head of the Federalists - the group that promoted the changes to the US central government that eventually led it to become the powerful and often oppressive machine it is today.

Not so much deliberately, of course. For instance, his opposition to the Bill of Rights was predicated on the idea that explicitly acklowledging certain rights would create the expectation that the government could stamp out any others. The proponents of the Bill claimed that, absent an explicit list of those that are particluarly important, the government would have no guideline and would stop 'em all. (Of course they were both right.)

But you know what they say about good intensions and paving.

Re:illegal?

It is against the law. Men with earpieces and black suits could come knocking.

Defacement of currency is a violation of Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code. This comes under the jurisdiction of the United States Secret Service.

Here's the relevant bit [house.gov] of the US Code:

Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note,or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

Re:illegal?

I think the most relevant section is this:

"...with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note,or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued..."

Intent is the key -- if the intent isn't to make the bill "unfit", the defacement is perfectly legal. This is why the "Where's George" folks can write their URL in the margin of a $1 without a problem. The bill is still perfectly usable.

Now, writing "VOID" over it, or blacking out the denomination -- that would most likely fall under the 'unfit' definition (although unless you tried to pass one, I can't see where the suits would come knocking)

Uncle Sam Wants You to Destroy Money!

I am surprised the government doesn't encourage people to do more destroying of money. When you lose or destroy a dollar bill, the government can print and spend a replacement without causing inflation.

You know, all of those State Quarters that people collect with fervor are almost pure profit for the mint. I mean, it's like the mint has a license to print money!!!!

Re:illegal?

How was he supposed to know the money would start burning?

Maybe because he put it in an oven..?

Re:illegal?

Why should it be illegal?

A $20 bank note is your receipt for lending $20 to the government with no interest.

If you'd like to lend $20 to the government and then not claim it back later, I'm sure that the government will be very happy.

Re:illegal?

In Sweden it's illegal to destroy (swedish) currency.

Re:illegal?

Yea, Yea

and in Soviet Russia ...

We got already :P

Re:illegal?

Not really [riksbanken.se], but amazingly, you instantly get fined the same amount that you destroy. :-)

Riksbanken kan vagra att losa in sedlar eller mynt som avsiktligt andrats eller skadats. Dar star: "Har en sedel eller ett mynt avsiktligt andrats sa att dess format eller utseende avviker fran vad som tillkannagivits kan inlosen darav vagras." Denna vagran att losa in tillampar Riksbanken som regel for infargade och inplastade sedlar, for avsiktligt sonderklippta sedlar, for sedlar dar sakerhetstraden rivit ur och dylikt.

Most unhelpful helpful post ever.

I particularly like the emphasis through bolding. It's a subtle and yet clear way of saying, "This is what I mean" in a way that also says, "I speak Swedish and you don't".

It's truly an inspired effort to be very clear and yet say nothing at all to your largely English speaking audience. Kudos.

Re:illegal?

Nonono, that's a simple mistranslataion. That offence, gravy as it may be, is not punishable by death, but by diet. That's right - you kill the meatball, you pay the price. No more meat for you!

Re:illegal?

It is illegal [house.gov] in the United States too.

Re:illegal?

In a country where peanut bags come with may contain peanuts printed and microwave ovens must tell the owner explictly not to use it to dry pets, to avoid liability with very stupid customers, I wouldn't be surprised if someone accused of currency destruction sued either

• (a) The oven manufacturer, for not stating that it may damage currency in the manual; or
• 
  (b) The government, for not printing do not microwave in the currency; or
  (c) The bank who gave them currency without a proper usage manual.
  

or all of them, and won some.

Re:We pay interest on all money in circulation.

How in Greenspan's name did this get modded to +5, Interesting when it contains almost 0 factual information. The Federal Reserve is not a private corporation. It is a Division [federalreserve.gov] of the Treasury Dept. [treasury.gov]. From the site:

As the nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve derives its authority from the U.S. Congress. It is considered an independent central bank because its decisions do not have to be ratified by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branch of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms. However, the Federal Reserve is subject to oversight by the Congress, which periodically reviews its activities and can alter its responsibilities by statute. Also, the Federal Reserve must work within the framework of the overall objectives of economic and financial policy established by the government. Therefore, the Federal Reserve can be more accurately described as "independent within the government."

The Federal Reserve is funded by interest collected on U.S. Govt. securities and services to banks, such as check clearing.

You are correct that our currency is not backed by precious metals, and is only worth whatever someone will give you for it. However, gold is only worth what someone will give you for it as well, but fiat currency has the advantage that the government can control the total supply of money, and thus limit inflation.

Will someone please mod the parent post back down? Maybe, "-1, Skipped Economics Class?"

Federal Reserve is not a private institution

http://www.federalreserve.gov/faq.htm#frsq3

Who owns the Federal Reserve?

The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone and is not a private, profit-making institution. Instead, it is an independent entity within the government, having both public purposes and private aspects.

Re:illegal?

Once you aquire the money by legal means, it becomes yours so you can do to it as you please.

I once worked at a cutlery corporation where they demonstrated scissors by cutting up coins. and they told us its legal, so if the company gets fried for that, not my fault.

Re:illegal?

Actually it was my understanding that it was still illegal to melt down coins to redeem the base metals. I was under the impression that the metals in the penny are more valuable then the penny, but I may be mistaken.

Re:illegal?

No. According to these guys [usmint.gov] it's 97.5% zinc, not aluminum. It's got a 2.5% copper skin.

What pennies are really made out of...

The history and composition of pennies! [hypertextbook.com]

Re:illegal?

I was under the impression that the metals in the penny are more valuable then the penny, but I may be mistaken.

The metals cost less than the penny. The reason pennies are still made is that the mint makes a profit on each one made. Once they stop making money, they'll stop making pennies.

Re:illegal?

Actually it was my understanding that it was still illegal to melt down coins to redeem the base metals. I was under the impression that the metals in the penny are more valuable then the penny, but I may be mistaken.

In 1966 Australia introduced its new decimal currency. The 50c coin included a lot of silver, and shortly after the price of silver rose so that there was 58c worth of it in each coin. So the government quickly redesigned it with a new alloy with no silver at all.

Re:illegal?

The $2 bill [cnn.com] isn't just something from back in the days of the silver note.

It was brought back into circulation in 1976, and has at least one other printing since then. They're even less popular/used than the $1 coin, so it's not surprising that you think that they're relics of the past instead of mundane, valid currency.

A picture for your pleasure [moneyfactory.com]

Re:illegal?

Coming soon to thinkgeek.com: Tin foil pants!

Re:illegal?

In this case, it's a $20 fine per bill destroyed. Unlike most crimes, there's no need for police, judges, etc. to enforce this.

Re:illegal?

Isn't destroying US currency against the law?

Not a problem. Just make a photocopy first.

Re:illegal?

In fact, there's an address in Washington D.C. to which you could send the remains of destroied bills and they'll do their best to piece things together and redeem the value of the pile... yep, it really exists. [ustreas.gov]

Re:illegal?

I always thought that as long as you had more than half of the bill, you can just take it to a bank and have it replaced...

Wow!

1) Take 4 * 1$
2) Break it into: 4 * ( 3 * 1/3$ )
3) Group it into: ( 2 * 3 ) * 2/3$
4) Now you have 6 * 2/3$
5) Give it to bank
6) Get 6$ from bank

Profit = 6$ - 4$ = 2$

And now repeat.

Re:illegal?

>> Group it into: ( 2 * 3 ) * 2/3$

Dang, they've thought of EVERYTHING.

US Code, Title 18 Sec. 484. [house.gov] Connecting parts of different notes

Whoever so places or connects together different parts of two or more notes, bills, or other genuine instruments issued under the authority of the United States, or by any foreign government, or corporation, as to produce one instrument, with intent to defraud, shall be guilty of forgery in the same manner as if the parts so put together were falsely made or forged, and shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 10 years, or both.

Re:illegal?

Which, ironically, is the same thing that happened in Japan a few years ago. The law, at the time, was that 90% of the bill had to exist to have it replaced. Some clever criminal types decided to cut 10% off of 9 10,000 yen ($100 dollar) bills, and reassemble it to be 10 90% complete bills. These were then redeemed (mostly at gambling institutions) for proper bills, and the cycle was continued. Needless to say, the law has since been changed.

Re:illegal?

That would be such a nice theory if all the thirds were equal. They aren't. You can't stick the two front thirds of a note together and claim you've got 2/3 of a whole one... Actually I'm wrong there: you could claim that.

Idiot.

This person isn't very smart. Why didn't he try it on one $20 bill to start with rather than all of them?

Re:Idiot.

Heh, you know what they say, "In for a penny, in for a pound!"

Re:Idiot.

That's what I was thinking. Maybe he did, and it didn't do anything, and the mechanism is only meant to "activate" when someone is carrying around a buttload of these. Drug dealers, terrorists, etc...

Re:Idiot.

There could be a simple explanation for that. If you microwave a single bill heat is still produced but it's easy for it to get out. If you stick a bunch togeather and microwave that more or less the same amount of heat is produced per bill meaning a lot more heat, and paper is a good insulator, so the middle gets really hot and starts burning. Note how the amount of burning seems to have a progression from large to small.

Beowulf cluster

This person isn't very smart. Why didn't he try it on one $20 bill to start with rather than all of them?

Well, I guess he wanted to try out a Beowulf cluster of them. . . :-)

I'm skeptical.

First off, having worked at a Kmart for several years, I have a pretty good idea how the antitheft systems currently in place in most stores and libraries work, and they don't yet use RFID tags; they use some sort of magnetized strip that is then demagnetized by a magnetic pulse or a powerful magnet at the counter (thus the warning not to set credit cards on or near the demagnetizers, lest they be demagnetized too). In fact, RFID tags as the retailers are thinking of using them are partially intended to replace such a system (and partially to replace bar code scanners). Given that RFID tags are barely even starting to be used by distributors, you're not going to convince me that a truck stop of all places is at the head of the technology curve using this expensive equipment that almost no manufacturers even support anyway. Thus, even if an RFID tag was embedded in the money, that shouldn't set off a magnetic antitheft system at all, because the system is looking for something entirely different altogether.

Second, these magnetic antitheft systems are capable of being set off by odd things, such as items of personal electronics or odd bits of metal. (Heck, I even remember seeing one recent news story about a kid who sets off those scanners just by walking through them without anything in his pockets at all, just because his body happens to generate the precise frequency of electromagnetic energy they're keyed to.)

Third, RFID tag or not, those new bills do happen to have a strip of metal foil running through them, right at about the point of Jefferson's left eye...to make counterfeiting harder, you see. And when you subject metallic material to microwave energy, it heats up quickly...that's just basic physics.

So I'm willing to believe that the bills set off ordinary electromagnetic anti-theft detectors just by reflecting the microwaves in some funky way. (Or heck, maybe they even are magnetized in a way that anti-theft detectors can pick up...or at least can become so magnetized, since I doubt that they're all that way...if everybody shopping with new twenties was setting off anti-theft systems, we'd be hearing about that on the news, and the anti-theft system manufacturers would be making hasty adjustments or going out of business.) I'm even willing to believe that those foil strips will cause the money to scorch in the microwave. But it's one heck of a leap to conclude that this is because of Evil RFID Tags That The Nasty Gum'mint Is Sneaking Into Our Money.

Re:I'm skeptical.

those new bills do happen to have a strip of metal foil running through them, right at about the point of Jefferson's left eye

Jackson. Jefferson is on the two dollar bill.

Re:I'm skeptical.

Yeah right, there's no such thing as a two dollar bill. Taco Bell [digiserve.com] helped disprove this silly statement of yours.

Steve Wozniak, $2 bills, and the Secret Service

Yes, they do. You can even buy uncut sheets of them from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.

Steve Wozniak has an interesting story [woz.org] about how he uses sheets of $2 bills on his site. I got a kick out of reading this a few weeks ago:

You can purchase $1, $2, and now $5 bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving on sheets. The sheets come in sizes of 4, 16, and 32 bills each. I buy such sheets of $2 bills. I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It's just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets. They cost even more at coin stores.

I take the sheets of 4 bills and have a printer, located through friends, gum them into pads, like stationery pads. The printer then perforates them between the bills, so that I can tear a bill or two away.

He ended up raising the suspicions of a casion manager in Las Vegas, who called in the Secret Service because he thought the bills were counterfeit...

There are $10,000 bills, too

As the US Dept. of Treasury informs us here [treas.gov], they no longer produce $5,000 and $10,000 bills. but they do accept them as legal currency.

Re:I'm skeptical.

A couple more quick points I just thought of:

1) Even if the money was designed to set off anti-theft systems (which would be dumb, for the reason I parenthetically enumerated above) it could only deliver one bit of data: on or off, yes or no, it was or was not tagged with a theft prevention device.

2) Even being able to track money at all is not new. [wheresgeorge.com] Why d'ya think mobsters need to launder it?

Re:I'm skeptical.

just because his body happens to generate the precise frequency of electromagnetic energy they're keyed to.
Actually, the tags work passively (not requiring onboard battery) because inductors and capacitors can be printed on foil/similar materials, so a LC (or RLC) circuit can be designed to resonate at whatever frequency the antitheft system uses. When this resonant circuit passes between the detection gates (a receiver and transmitter), it resonates, causing a change in the received signal intensity at the gate (the circuit is now picking up energy originally flowing to the transmitter). Small electronics could set it off if some random connected inductor and capacitor on the circuit board form a resonant circuit - clothes or someones body could conceivably do this as well. The magnetic pulse in the store either permanently breaks the circuit (used in stores, etc) or bends a foil-type contact open (used in libraries so they can bend the contact shut again to activate the tag when the book is returned).

Re:I'm skeptical.

Should anyone still be confused on how these devices work...

This should clear it up for you [howstuffworks.com]

Re:I'm skeptical.

First off, having worked at a Kmart for several years, I have a pretty good idea how the antitheft systems currently in place in most stores and libraries work, and they don't yet use RFID tags;

First time working at Kmart has qualified anyone for anything....

Re:I'm skeptical.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that all US bills had a metal strip embedded in them somewhere.

I'd be happy to help check this out. I think the easiest way would be for everyone to send me whatever bills they happen to have. I'll carefully check them out, inspecting them for any metal strips. To ensure that whatever bills I receive are in fact legal tender, I will then proceed to the nearest Best Buy or Fry's to see whether these fine institutions accept them as such.

I know, it sounds like it will be a lot of work, but its the least I can do to furhter the knowledge of teh Slashdot crowd.

Re:I'm skeptical.

I used to set off these anti theft systems in some stores, but not every store. Couldn't figure out what was going on. Finally at one store, an employee told me it was my wallet. I had bought a new wallet about 9 months before, but never thought it was the cause because I left the store I bought it at without setting off the alarm. He deactivated my wallet and I've never had this happen again.

My guess is this guy had the same problem, but because of a bit of paranoia, he blamed his cash. Microwave money long enough and I bet it starts to burn near the center. And if you have a stack of them, I bet you might get a little explosion like they wrote about.

I think he needs to loosen his tin foil hat, it's starting to cut off circulation.

Re:I'm skeptical.

I used to work at CompUSA (four years ago). We found a roll of those square antitheft stickers commonly found in DVDs and Microsoft software boxes. We then set about 100 of them, sticky side up throughout the store. Asshole (as we call him, the guy who checks your reciept as you walk out the door) couldn't figure out what the hell was going on when 95% of the customers (shoes, unknowingly) would set off the beeper on their way out. Best day of work ev-ar. To be 16 again...

Re:I'm skeptical.

Those large, flat, square ones are also easy to peel off items and lay on the floor sticky side up; or even "accidentally" stick to one of your friends or perhaps the person in front of you with 24 items and a checkbook... in the 12 items or less, Cash Only lane. You got lucky, a roll would be interesting to play with.

Jonah Hex

Re:I'm skeptical.

... a kid who sets off those scanners ... because his body happens to generate the precise frequency of electromagnetic energy they're keyed to.

Like hell. That's a stolen kid! Put his parents under arrest!

No. They don't.

From the article:
So we chose to 'microwave' our cash, over $1000 in twenties in a stack, not spread out on a carasoul.

Now, looking at the second picture, and knowing a bit about how microwaves heat stuff... looks to me like the approximate center of the stack charred up nicely in the microwave. Notice the bills near the top and bottom of the stack are nearly untouched. The reason the center of the bills charred in the same place in all the bill is because it was the center of the stack.

I sincerely hope this article is intended as a joke, or at the very least "we did something really dumb and we're going to at least make it funny" situation.

And for the record, I just zapped a $20 bill for 20 seconds and it's barely even warm, on Jackson's right eye or anywhere else.

Re:No. They don't.

And for the record, I just zapped a $20 bill for 20 seconds and it's barely even warm, on Jackson's right eye or anywhere else

Well, I can't fault your methods, you've got every base covered. It would appear that you've conclusively proven this experiment to be a hoax!

Another peer-review success story.

Re:No. They don't.

And for the record, I just zapped a $20 bill for 20 seconds and it's barely even warm, on Jackson's right eye or anywhere else.

You expect us to take you seriously when you don't even know the basic recipe for heating a $20?

Quack.

Hey everyone....

I'm broke. I just burned up $1K in the microwave, now please COME SLASHDOT MY SERVER AND MAKE MY HOST COMPANY CHARGE ME EXTRA FOR THE MONTH. ;)

Boy, when it rains, it pours.

Then would these notes be classified as...

Explosive devices and would you be allowed to take them onto planes. 'I'm sorry Sir, we're going to have to confiscate your bank notes'...

Gee, where's the logical problem here?

$20 bills burn in a microwave.
Ergo, $20 bills have embedded RFID tracking chips.

More likely, the metallic anti-counterfeting strips just formed a dipole resonant near the frequency used by the truck stop's anti-theft tag scanners.

Move along, nothing to see here, just some idiot with more money than brains.

That's solid logic...

Belvedere: Quiet, quiet, quiet, QUIET! There are ways of *telling* whether she is a witch!
Villagers: Are there? What? Tell us, then! Tell us!
Belvedere: Tell me. What do you do with witches?
Villagers: BUUUURN!!!!! BUUUUUURRRRNN!!!!! You BURN them!!!! BURN!!
Belvedere: And what do you burn apart from witches?
Villager: More Witches!
Other Villager: Wood.
Belvedere: So. Why do witches burn?

(long silence)
(shuffling of feet by the villagers)
Villager: (tentatively) Because they're made of.....wood?
Belvedere: Goooood!
Other Villagers: oh yeah... oh....
Belvedere: So. How do we tell whether she is made of wood?
One Villager: Build a bridge out of 'er!
Belvedere: Aah. But can you not also make bridges out of stone?
Villagers: oh yeah. oh. umm...
Belvedere: Does wood sink in water?
One Villager: No! No, no, it floats!
Other Villager: Throw her into the pond!
Villagers: yaaaaaa!

(when order is restored)
Belvedere: What also floats in water?
Villager: Bread!
Another Villager: Apples!
Another Villager: Uh...very small rocks!
Another Villager: Cider!
Another Villager: Uh...great gravy!
Another Villager: Cherries!
Another Villager: Mud!
Another Villager: Churches! Churches!
Another Villager: Lead! Lead!
King Arthur: A Duck!
Villagers: (in amazement) ooooooh!
Belvedere: exACTly!
Belvedere: (to a villager) So, *logically*...
Villager: (very slowly, with pauses between each word) If...she...weighs the same as a duck......she's made of wood.
Belvedere: and therefore...

(pause)
Villager: A Witch!
All Villagers: A WITCH!

(they do consequently weigh her across from a duck on Bedevere's largest scale, and she does indeed weigh the same as the duck.)
Witch: (to camera) It's a fair cop.

Re:That's solid logic...

Now look here, my good chap.... [quinion.com]

Amazing thing, this Google. I just did 'British slang "fair cop" ' and hit "I'm feeling Lucky!" (because I was), and there you have it. Fair cop, eh wot?

It'll be a shame when SCO sues Google out of business...

Re:That's solid logic...

<John Cleese with a German accent>
Good evening. The last scene was interesting from the point of view of a professional logician because it contained a number of logical fallacies; that is, invalid propositional constructions and syllogistic forms, of the type so often committed by my wife.

'All wood burns,' states Sir Bedevere. 'Therefore,' he concludes, 'all that burns is wood.' This is, of course, pure bullshit. Universal affirmatives can only be partially converted: all of Alma Cogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogan. Obvious, one would think. However, my wife does not understand this necessary limitation of the conversion of a proposition; consequently, she does not understand me; for how can a woman expect to appreciate a professor of logic, if the simplest cloth-eared syllogism causes her to flounder?

For example, given the premise, 'all fish live underwater' and 'all mackerel are fish', my wife will conclude, not that 'all mackerel live underwater', but that 'if she buys kippers it will not rain', or that 'trout live in trees', or even that 'I do not love her any more.' This she calls 'using her intuition'. I call it 'crap', and it gets me very irritated, because it is not logical. 'There will be no supper tonight,' she will sometimes cry upon my return home. 'Why not?' I will ask. 'Because I have been screwing the milkman all day,' she will say, quite oblivious of the howling error she has made. 'But,' I will wearily point out, 'even given that the activities of screwing the milkman and getting supper are mutually exclusive, now that the screwing is over, surely then, supper may now, logically, be got.' 'You don't love me any more,' she will now often postulate. 'If you did, you would give me one now and again, so that I would not have to rely on that rancid Pakistani for my orgasms.' 'I will give you one after you have got me my supper,' I now usually scream, 'but not before'-- as you understand, making her bang contingent on the arrival of my supper. 'God, you turn me on when you're angry, you ancient brute!' she now mysteriously deduces, forcing her sweetly throbbing tongue down my throat. 'Fuck supper!' I now invariably conclude, throwing logic somewhat joyously to the four winds, and so we thrash about on our milk-stained floor, transported by animal passion, until we sink back, exhausted, onto the cartons of yogurt.

I'm afraid I seem to have strayed somewhat from my original brief. But in a nutshell: sex is more fun than logic-- one cannot prove this, but it 'is' in the same sense that Mount Everest 'is', or that Alma Cogan 'isn't'.

Goodnight.
</Cleese>

One Liner

The Department of Homeland Security would like to remind you that you love Big Brother.

Conspiracy theorists unite...

So THIS is why conspiracy theorists never seem to have money.

Duality

While I can't believe this conspiracy theory made to to slashdot, I find myself wanting to experiment too.

More conspiracy images on currency

There's an even easier way to see the twin towers hidden in U.S. currency. Take two $20 bills. Hold one in each hand so the long sides are oriented vertically. Bring your hands together. Notice that the bills look like two identical skyscrapers right next to each other!!! Clearly this proves the US government had prior knowledge. Why, I'll bet it was actually Dick Cheney at the controls of both airplanes. He wanted Halliburton to seize the Iraqi oil fields.

What's the matter? That's a hell of a lot better than the Slashdot story that actually got accepted!

I can remove the RFID Tags for Free

Send all of your $20s to: PO Box 7565 Jackson, Wyoming 88096

Mirror...

...AKA karma whoring for fun and profit

Mirror w/ pictures [cox.net]

According to NetCraft [netcraft.com], Alex Jones' site is hosted at EV1Servers.net... I wonder if the sum total of the ruined money is $700? I guess it would save a lot of time to just burn the money rather than give it to SCO, yet you would still have the same end result: out $700, and nothing much to show for it.

Convert your tin foil hat to a wallet? Not yet...

Nothing like a Slashdot post to jump to a conclusion.

Clearly, there's something funny going on with the microwaved bills... but stores don't have RFID scanners at the exits yet. They have an acousto-magnetic [phonelosers.org] sensor that gets deactivated by a pad at the cash register so that paying customers aren't supposed to set them off. Big difference here is that the tags in a store system don't yet emit an identifying signal... they all emit the same reply. The store doesn't know what a shoplifter did to trip the alarm, just that they did trip it. There's not quite proof that each bill is emitting its serial number yet.

Also, having microwaved everything in a stack makes things a bit unclear. Did every eye burn on its own, or did just one or two bills in the middle of the stack catch flame which in turn burned all of the bills above and below in varying degrees. Notice that the top and bottom bills were unharmed. Could one bill alone be microwaved safely?

And, BTW, if you so much as put slightly crumpled tin foil in your microwave, you get a similar effect. Could there just be a small metal content in the bill designed so that somebody who has $1000 worth of $20 bills (rather than simply 10 $100's) in their wallet is sure to set off an airport security alarm until they show their wallet to make sure they get an extra security questions?

It's interesting, but I think more research needs to be done. Microwave carefully, people.

No money lost

They may have exploded, but they're still valid currency. The treasury has an entire department which is solely for processing damaged money. I remember seeing an interview with one of the inspectors. I believe the essential part of it was that you had to have more than the majority of the bill material in OK condition to prove that you didn't just cut it up and try to claim all the pieces.

Since the bills are intact all the way around and it looks like in many cases the serials are OK, I'd say he's OK, and can get them exchanged for non-exploded ones. Of course, he better not go saying he microwaved them, as destruction of currency is a federal crime(the penny-mangling machines are 'licensed' to do it, to nip one question in the bud...)

What is interesting is that they burned so readily- US currency is supposed to be decently non-flammable(it's one of thousands of tests done on the paper and ink- that's why your bills make it through the laundry OK, for example). It's probably the toughest paper in the world, able to survive virtually anything. Except microwaving, apparently :-)

Re:No money lost

While it is true that you can only purchase the exact blend used for US currency if you are the treasury department Krane Super White cotton paper feels identical so you can use that if you wish to simply pass the feel test =) You would lack the off color imperfections, watermark, and foil strip but you would probably be sucessfull 99+% of the time. Not that I advocate passing false currency, that's just dumb. The Secret Service WILL have your ass for it.

The actual law on mutilation

Note the use of the words FRAUDULENTLY and REISSUED, that is to say, the treasury will not be able to replace the bill. Slightly fscking up the currency is not likely to be sufficient to land you in federal-pound-me-in-the-ass prison unless by some monumental feat of idiocy you were trying to mutilate a $20 into something passing as a $100 as when people try to turn $20 into $60 by cutting off the corners and taping them to $1s. THAT is the kind of "mutilation" the law speaks of. Flattening a penny is not illegal. Melting it into something resembling a quarter, on the other hand, is quite definitely illegal.

US Code Title 18, Part I, Chapter 17

Section 331
Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or

Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened -

Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both

Section 333

Whoever mutilates, cuts, defaces, disfigures, or perforates, or unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.

Re:The actual law on mutilation

Christ, everyone is a damned contrarian.

No I'm not!

two words

metallic ink. same thing will happen if you microwave checks, I expect, around the numbers, which are printed in magnetic MIRC ink.

Way to find the the microwave's focal point, Mr. J

Get yourself some thermal fax paper and put it in the microwave for a few seconds. The parts hit most strongly will turn brown. I am fairly certain the same thing is happening here, although one shoud just try it with a $20-bill shaped piece of paper to be sure. Microwaves are far from uniform in their energy output -- that's why the carousel has become so ubiquitous.

Now, you should go look at Alex Jones' apparent infiltration of Bohemian Grove [infowars.com], an annual meeting of powerful people -- now that's intriguing.

Hmm.

What we resent is the fact that the government or a corporation can track our 'cash'. Credit purchases and check purchases have been tracked for years, but cash was not traceble until now...

I'd just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that there have always been serial numbers printed on bills, for the purpose of tracking them. An RFID tag would make it easier to do so electronically, but being able to uniquely identify a particular bill is nothing new - in fact, see Where's George? [wheresgeorge.com]

Having said that, the possibility that someone could scan the contents of my wallet while my wallet is in my pocket is rather disturbing for a number of reasons. If I were carrying $1,000 in twenties, I wouldn't want to advertise that fact to those around me.

Hmm...

Okay... got brand new twenty... (loans are up $20! yeay!)
- putting it in microwave now...
- you can now see my proof on www.___.com
- [clatter]
- thats a white van pulling up
- secret serv..aisdjfl;fjal;rrfrawwef;

[Dons tinfoil hat... and tinfoil jimmy hat for money.]

No tin foil hats here

Umm, either my twenties are borked or my microwave... or... these guys are full of shit!! I can't reproduce the effect at all here. There must be something else going on here. Like an attempt to create an urban legend...

groan...

1. Maybe it was the wallet which had a hidden rfid, not the money. This possibility was not even broached.
2. Aside from any exploding rfid tags, and aside from the fact that the money was microwaved in a stack, all twentys would likely burn in the same pattern when microwaved simply due to their identical ink distribution.
3. Is this the Art Bell show now? Can we expect an interview with Hoagland tomorrow?

*Dons tinfoil wallet

Forget the tinfoil hats, now I need a new wallet.

Re:Complete bullshit

Sorry, but you are mistaken, there are RFID Readers [google.com] available for ANYONE to buy. Wallmart has used RFID tags and readers to track Gillete razors (look it up yourself).

What makes me wonder is how 'complete bullshit' gets modded up...

Defacing Money

(No pun intended.)

I'm taking this article at face value, though I probably shouldn't... (ooh, another pun!)

Is defacing currency legal in the US? Here, if done on purpose it carries a fine.

And I think you'll have a very difficult time convincing someone you burned the right eye of 50 bills by accident.

Not a real surprise

That little strip inside of the bills appears to be aluminized mylar. We all know what happens when you put aluminum foil into a microwave oven.

I made that mistake once, about 20 years ago. My mother gave me a Wendy's Kid's Meal, I didn't eat it right away. Later, I wanted to warm it up so I put into the microwave. I didn't open the box, and I forgot that they wrapped the burgers in a foil type wrapper. It was like fireworks. Bright flashed of blue-white light were coming out of the Kid's Meal box.

I nearly soiled myself out of fear. In those days they led you to believe that if you put metal in a microwave it would be like the Ghostbusters crossing the streams of their proton packs.

LK

Burning towels in the microwave

One morning, several years ago, I woke up with a stiff neck. It occurred to me that putting something warm on it would help. I lived in a dorm room, and had little around, other than a small microwave. So I grabbed a dry towel and put it in. Now, we all know that microwaves heat up the water in a substance. And the towel was dry. So I figured 30 seconds would just about do it. When I opened the microwave 30 seconds later, I was stabbed in the eye by a cloud of black smoke. Immediately threw the towel, with hole burned through it, into the sink.

Moral of the story: don't put a wad of cash into the microwave.

You fool!!

Clearly the government secretly placed an RFID tag in your paper towel sheets in order to track your every spill!!! Placing the towel in the microwave obviously caused the tag to explode, and from now on you should wrap all of you paper towels in tinfoil to prevent the government from spying on you!!!

This story reminds me of a song...

"Paranoia, paranoia, everybody's coming to get me!" I guess i can't blame them to much though....

You've got to question the source

I hate to question the facts based on the source, but this is like linking to an Omni article about the discovery of alien civilizations on Mars - it's such an unrelible source, that it's not really worth paying attention to their outlandish claims.

Looking around the website, one can find this choice quote by Alex Jones:

AJ: And that also happened- where you aware the New York Times and Chicago Tribune reported this in '93, the FBI cooked the bomb and trained the driver[s] and had an Egyptian security agent doing it for them, had two retarded Muslims, literally retarded, drive the truck and park it, let the bombing go forward. At Oklahoma City, the same company that destroyed the remnants of the World Trade Center, blew up the remnants of Oklahoma City [and] had that buried under machine gun guard at a private landfill to this day. And they hauled the rubble away from the W T C to China! They wouldn't let you take photographs. Yes, exactly.

what?!

I think we're overlooking one very important question here...

Why the hell was someone carrying around $1000, mostly in 20s, in their wallet?

Maybe I'm the only one that doesn't get that part...

RFID tag killer

Information Unlimited sells Tesla coils. [amazing1.com] I can speak first hand of how effective they are at frying electronics. I built their BTC3K Tesla Coil when I was in 10th grade, it is fantastic. On days with low humidity purple sparks 10-12 inches in length are not out of the question. I figure that 250,000 volts is more than enough to fry RFID chips.

LK

HOAX, HOAX, HOAX

There are no RFID tags in US currency. There is no METAL in US currency. I just microwaved a new $20 for over two min. in a 2000 watt microwave oven to no effect (aside from being warm). And lastly, the new $20 bills do NOT set off anti-theft systems. The photos are obvious photoshops. Slashdot is slowly becoming the new Weekly World News.

Re:HOAX, HOAX, HOAX

The photos are obvious photoshops.

No. Try putting a STACK of 20's in the microwave. Or even a stack of newspaper for that matter. A single bill is thin and any heat gets carried away rapidly by air currents and/or infra-red radiation. A solid block of paper will build up heat in the center and then work it's way outward. You'll get the exact same effect he got - bills from the center will have big fat holes and bills at the top and bottom will hardly be charred.

BTW, I don't think it's accurate to call it a hoax. If you look at other stuff by this guy it's clear he's a genuine fruitloop and probably believes all his paranoid nonsense.

-

conspiracy theorist loonies

would anyone explain to me why conspiracy theory loonies seem hell bent on obsessing over radiowaves, microwaves, etc?

what i'm getting at is, your average pop psychology understanding of paranoid schizophrenia suggests that people are "out to get you", so, controlling your thoughts, tracking your movements, etc. through invisible waves is a wonderful example of this kind of thinking

but what about viruses? why not nanobots?

what i'm getting at is these loonies seem inordinately obsessed over invisible rf waves, but there are a million other "invisible hand" type illuminati control mechanisms they can obsess over

perhaps rf is just easier to understand, reflecting the general low intelligence of paranoid schozophrenics in general i guess

Article translated into "Bubbaspeak"

Original transcript of article before it was "prettied up" for public consumption.

Me and Bubba was hanging out in this truck stop. We had just escaped a pack of UFO's on highway 66 in our Kenworth while hauling grapes from Florida to Nevada! I saw em! They had lights on them and these strange whirling blade above them!

At this point we had been on crystal-meth for about 46 hours, so obviously our minds were a-clear. So there we were in the truck stop counting all the money we done made transporting meth across state lines for this "mex" called Jose. We had a huge wad of cash! As we left, this young pencil-neck (probably an alien in disguise) started hasseling us about how we hadn't paid for some chewing gum in out pockets or something. That's when I started a wondering how they KNEW?! Must be one of dem R.I.D.E. tags I hear the guberment is using to control our minds! They know our thoughts!

So, Bubba and I bought us some shiney tin foil and wrapped it on our heads. Thank the lord Jesus for the Crystal Meth! We couldn't have come up with this idear ta stop em without it! Well, we started to leave again, and the lil alien started bugging us again about the gum. THEY STILL KNEW! I figured right about then that it must be OUR MONEY! Sure, Bill Gates controls the money, and Jose must have put tracking devices in it fer him!

So we gots real smart and put our money in the microwave! Now it's OK to spend. Sure, it's brown and burnt, but we can still spend it at the titty bar! Thank god for Crystal Meth! Next time, Bubba and I will make sure we bring extra, just in case the guberment tries to bug our coffee.

Re:Somebody

The sparks that fly off metal objects like pop tart bags and CD's are caused by poor insulation in the microwave cavity.

Kinda, but not quite.

Sparks on metal objects is caused by uneven voltage developed on the surface of the object because of an uneven surface, uneven radiation pattern, or both.

Because microwaves are such high frequency and the wattages of most ovens is high (most are around 1 kilowatt), high voltages are easily developed and can leap short distances.

Once the spark leaps once, it ionizes the air along the path making subsequent arcs occur at lower voltage.

Once current flows, as in an arc of this type, the metal will heat up very rapidly and could easily burn paper. I suspect uneven radiation (or even minute flaws) of the metal strips in the bills caused arcing between them, which burned through the paper.

There's normally no insulation in the microwave cavity of the oven because the goal is to reflect the microwaves off ground (the metal surfaces surrounding the cavity) until they can be absorbed by water molecules, causing them to heat up, thus cooking the food.

This is why you are normally advised not to run the microwave oven with nothing in it: the microwaves can bounce around the oven and manage to heat the magnetron instead, causing it to burn out spectacularly.

I just tried this. It's bullshit.

I just nuked several new 20s and several mid-20s (the last generation but not the really old ones), for 30 seconds each. Nada.

Feeling with fingernails over Jackson's eyes yields no bump, either.

I get a feeling that IHBT. IWHAND.

bullshit.

Microwave radiation won't affect RFID. They are too small. Try nuking some ants and see what happens.

Secondly, who is STUPID enough to ruin that much money?

Third, I suspect this is FAKE and if so, someone may be guilty of counterfiting. If they printed up fake bills to make this fake "news" report, the Treasury folks may be interested.

And lastely, Alex Jones is a FLAKE that is in serious need of MEDS..

JMO..

RFID tags going into Japanese Y10,000 notes first

US currency doesn't have RFID tags yet, but it looks like the Hitachi Mu-Chip [hitachi.co.jp] RFID tag may be going into the Japanese 10,000 yen note soon. This device runs at 2.45GHz, and is 0.4mm square. Early versions required an external antenna (which could be a line of conductive ink), but the newest version [simmtester.com] supposedly has an onboard antenna and is suitable for embedding in currency.

This chip doesn't have collision avoidance, though. So a stack of bills wouldn't be individually readable.

So the technology isn't quite here yet to do it right, but it's getting close. Currently, you can get collision avoidance or tiny size, but not both. Good collision avoidance combined with fast data transfers is hard, and it's wanted by retailers, who want to be able to read out each box in a carton individually. That could be thousands of items. That's do-able, but not with the low-cost tags yet. Retailers want to get tag costs down to around $0.02. Realistically, today RFID tags cost upwards of $0.25.

True public key challenge/response hasn't made it into the smallest tags, either. Challenge/response is available in keyring size and in credit card size, and is used for access control applications. But the low end tags can't do that yet.

Two more years, and this will really be happening. But not yet.

Re:RFID tags going into Japanese Y10,000 notes fir

Japan is such a cash based system, that this actually suprises me if it is true. The bank machines used to shut down here at 7:00 PM because the banking computer systems could not keep up with processing over-night transactions. Some are open now, but you cannot make deposits via a bank machine after 3:00 PM. At a bank machine in Tokyo, you can take out up to 1,000,000 yen (around $9000USD) per transaction, and it is common here for people to have $500 to $1000 in their pockets. To actually track all of this cash take a huge amount of processing power.

If this actually does happen within two years, then it will certainly make life easier for muggers. Carry a small silent scanner with you and you will know who has the cash.

"Hey you, Show me the money!"

slashdot effect

In recent manifestation of so-called "slashdot effect" power consumption in western united states peaked 200% around 11pm today after bunch of geeks tried to fry their 20 dollars bills in microware ovens in attempt to uncover government conspiracy to track them via hidden micro chips (called RFID tags) in their bills.

alternate explanation

Microwave radiation won't affect RFID. They are too small. Try nuking some ants and see what happens.

This guy seems to be closest to the target, I think. The reason ants don't fry is that the majority of the microwaves 'miss' them. The ant is smaller than the microwave wavelength (which varies between 10^-1 and 10^-4 meters), and so can miss the crests, so to speak, and avoid frying.

I think it fried all of the bills in the same spot because all of the bills had similar orientation and position, and Jackson's eye was right over a spot of peak intensity. Microwaves don't cook evenly; that's all he's demonstrated.

Microwaving money for fun and profit

Actually, being very forgetful, I often leave my wallet in my pants when I take them off, and then end up washing it. What do I do if I'm in a hurry and have a wet wallet? I leave the wallet to dry itself, but I microwave the money so I don't pay for things with soggy bills. Am I the only one who does this? I've never had any problem with this exploding stuff, btw...

FYI

Just so you know, metal does the same thing to microwaves that it does to other electromagnetic radiation: in the absence of a ground, the metal (such as aluminum foil or metal strips in bills) will simply reflect the microwave radation.

The issue is when there is not a sufficient quantity of water (food, glass of water, etc) to absorb the microwaves; they will collide, cause sparks, etc. The metal will resonate and eventually heat up.

Cover your food with aluminum foil and you get sparks. Leave a spoon lying on the plate next to a helping of food and you've got no problem. You just need a sufficient quantity of water inside the chamber to absorb the radiation.

Printing process is the culprit here...

US paper currency is printed with an intaglio process whereby the (slightly conductive) ink is rolled onto plates and then the paper is pressed into the plates (rather than the plates being pressed into the paper on most presses.) IE the RECESSED parts of the plates hold the ink, not the bits that stick up.

The effective result of using this printing method can be felt on the bill. On a new bill the ink will be coarse and raised off of the paper. The lines will be very crisp and solid. There will be no 'breaks' even microscopic in the ink.

Since it's slightly conductive (it has some metals in it and whatnot) and the lines (and crosshatching etc) are pretty well continuous it's going to be an excellent absorber of microwave energy. Without anything else in the microwave to absorb the energy better than the money, it's likely the ink near the portrait is going to get really hot really fast. This is pretty much what I'd expect from microwaving money.

All that being said, the RFID equipment or the security equipment that this money was falsely triggering must be some of the cheapest crap on the market!

This is exactly why

I never carry anything but quarters. This was a bit troubling when I paid the deposit on my house, but it's a small price to pay for keeping the prying eyes of The Man out of my financial transactions.

Guv'mint conspiracy?

From the article:

We could have left it at that, but we have also paid attention to the European Union and the 'rfid' tracking devices placed in their money,...

Maybe in X-files country, but here in real life, euros do not have 'rfid tracking devices'. What they do have is a metal strip which makes it more difficult to counterfeit.

Of course I fully expect now to be told that my government only wants me to think that that's just a metal strip... :-)

man, how dumb can one get?

microwaves don't cook evenly. they're *waves*. they resonate and form standing waves in the chamber of the oven. just like sound. jackson's eye happened to be at a peak of one of these standing waves. since the bills were in a stack, the peak was in the same spot on all the bills.

put any old piece of paper (or more fun, a plate of marshmallows) into a microwave that doesn't have a working turntable. you'll get a pattern of burn marks. you can even measure the distance between them to calculate the wavelength of the microwaves if you want to. basic physics.

this isn't even a *good* conspiracy theory.

RSA RFID Blocker Tag

One of the interesting things at this year's RSA trade show was an RFID Blocker Tag [rsasecurity.com] that RSA Labs designed. It was recently discussed on Slashdot [slashdot.org]. You can read the above paper, but the summary is that it impersonates all 2**64 possible serial numbers, confusing the readers. (It basically answers "yes" when asked if the next bit is a 0 or if it's a 1. Mu!) So carry one in your wallet, and stick one in your luggage as well.

The paper describes fancier options, such as only impersonating numbers in some given range so that it only blocks reading some kinds of items, like the serial numbers on 100 Euro banknotes.

Re:RSA RFID Blocker Tag

"it impersonates all 2**64 possible serial numbers"

Oh gee, I can see that being *really* helpful when the Homeland Defense automated luggage checking system asks your luggage "Are you a suitcase nuke?" and it answers "Why, yes I am!"

No RFID in Euros

People seem to think there are RFID tags in Euro bills. Let me clearify that they are not there (yet). They try to add them by 2005, according to the eetimes [eetimes.com].

Sorry to rain on their parade...

...but they are openly admitting to committing a felony. It is highly illegal to damage or destroy money intentionally.

This is most likely a false story

This article [rfidjournal.com] at CNN's website was the closest article to the topic introduced here that I could find on CNN, Google News, or Yahoo News. Given the popularity of the RFID issue in the United States technology realm, I would expect it to be in a larger news source such as these. I don't know much about this www.prisonplanet.com place, but I don't have any reason to believe it's highly professional. I get the impressino that it's somewhat of a conspiracy theory website.

The most apparent points of conjecture about this story, in my mind, are:
1. Why, if these tags are in $20's all across the nation, are not people setting off alarms for "no reason" all across the nation?
2. It appears that other /.ers have tried the same microwave experiment, with no ill effect to their bills. Personally, I'm more inclined to believe my fellow /.ers than this story.

Perhaps these bills were part of a scheme, or an elaborate set of counterfeits with a specific devious purpose in mind. Or perhaps they were never microwaved at all.

Truckstop or Airport?

You know if I kept setting off a store alarm and I knew damn well I hadn't boosted anything I'd keep right on walking. "Would you step over here, sir?" would be met with a quick "Fuck you. Call the cops if you think I stole something. Who the hell do you think you are?

Retail employees with hand-scanning wands. Give me a break. If there's a living, breathing witness that saw me steal something, that's one thing. But no machine is going to bear false witness against me. I would refuse to cooperate. A truckstop is not an airport where the guards are employees with authority and jurisdiction to prevent "dangerous" items on board aircraft. I refuse to recognize that they have any authority to search or probe my person.

Those magnetic tag detectors you see in stores have only one valid purpose as far as I can see. To act as a deterrent and scare would-be thieves away. They convey no authority to perform a body scan.

Um... try it

I was, to say the least, intrigued, by this story, so, I wanted to experiment. I grabbed a new $20 and stuck it in the microwave. I started with 1 second intervels and slowly increased and increased. And, in the end... nothing happened. I longest interval I tried was 4 seconds on high, but nothing happened in the end. The total amount of 'on' time for the microwave was about 30 seconds.

I don't know if my bill was defective, or if I didn't put it in long enough, but I seriously doubt this story. The bill never even got toasty, and the right eye was just as warm as all the other parts of the bill. As other people have said, there are tiny amounts of metal in bills normally, so I find it very unlikely that there is any relatively large strip of metal in as well.

Anyone remember their EE or ME classes?

What happens when you stack a bunch of metal strips on top of each other with a fine gap in between? How about rolling them up? ... Congratulations, you just made a capacitor!

Now place in a magnetic field to have it possibly resonate at the frequency that it resonates at.

Or like others suggested, a leftover security strip in the wallet.

People really should learn how to troubleshoot properly. Which reminds me of a story... in short, grad student doing research on fleas, trains his flea to jump when he yells out "Hop!". After much testing and mutilation, one by one, all of the legs get pulled off the flea. He yells out "Hop!", and nothing happens. Hence he begins to write his conclusion:

"When all of the legs are pulled off the flea, the flea becomes deaf".

Andrew Jackson's rolling in his grave...

Ouch....
My...
Eye...
!!!

Australian Money

Australian Money is much more fun. As it is plastic, it melts in the microwave, and as a definate bonus it also releases toxic fumes!

Re:Australian Money

So do your microwave plates spin clockwise, or counter-clockwise down there mate?

Replacing the Bills

Just imagine the scene at the bank when the intrepid couple goes to replace their cash:

"Umm, I want to replace my 20's because I was dumb enough to burn them in the microwave."

Actually, I'm not sure if banks will take seriously damaged cash. I know that there is a Dept of Treasury office [moneyfactory.com] that will replace damaged bills (as long as there is 51% of the bill left), but would a bank take a stack of them since they'd have to turn around and do the replacement? I imagine that the conspiracy couple would just love having to send their money into the government.

Security alarms..

Well, this news may or may not be a hoax. However, I have personally had problems with a couple stores and their security devices crop up suddenly in the last few months. I tracked it as far as my wallet. Nothing had changed about my wallet's configuration. It had the same credit cards, id, etc. Suddenly I ran into a problem where I was setting off some security gates when going into or out of a couple of stores in the city where my girlfriend goes to school. So, after some trial and error, I eventually tracked it to my wallet (I tried going through each time I visited her and took one item at a time out of my pockets.. cell phone, loose change, gave her my car keys and had her walk in before me, etc. until eventually I got rid of the wallet and the problem went away--which presents a problem when you want to go to the store to buy something...).

So anyway, there might be something to this although it could be related to the partially conductive ink on newer bills. I haven't bothered to track it any farther (as to specific money arrangements) as I've grown tired of the murderous looks I get from other customers as I walk through and the alarm sounds. (Oddly, the employees never seem to care...)

anonymity of cash

The anonymity of pound notes [or dollar bills] is a point in their favour. Imagine if it was possible to trace the history of every note in your wallet?

Suppose some supermarket chain decided not to accept money obtained by gambling; so, say, you couldn't spend money won fairly and squarely at William Hill's in Asda. Or a brewery decided that pubs selling their beer should not accept money that had been used to purchase, shall we say, products that compete with alcohol? If traders could refuse to accept money that had been won in a lawsuit, suing people would become less attractive {maybe there is an upside to this after all}.

There would be a brand new market for "clean" notes, which would go for more than their face value. Meanwhile, some establishments -- and I suspect they would be the posher ones -- would not be so fastidious about checking where money had been.

The end result of knowing the full history of every piece of money would be a situation where money would have different nominal values in different establishments -- and the reason why money was invented in the first place was so that you had something whose nominal value was the same everywhere you went.

I guess it's already possible to do this sort of thing in theory, since every note already has a unique serial number; but the infrastructure just isn't in place to do it. However, you can bet that the infrastructure would find its way into place right as they were in the process of deploying RFID-ed currency.

And just who is going to protect you from all this? In the beginning, only criminals will be affected. That is the way all these new control-freak measures are introduced. But then, the effects will be extended to a group of law-abiding but universally disliked citizens; and then, gradually, throughout the whole of the working class. History has shown that the people will tolerate any abuse of liberties, as long as they can be persuaded that it will only affect those they consider as being somehow inferior to themselves.

Alex Jones

Is a fucking nutjob. Anyone in the Austin Area who has TWC and watches his access program for more than 5 minutes can tell you the same.

Maybe its the tracking device the CIA implanted in his skull, or maybe its bad genetics, I don't know. Either way, its sad (yet humorous) to watch the fucker rant.

I've never actually seen him foam at the mouth, but he's gotten close.

convenience store fun

i work at a convenience store/gas station. this provides many opportunities for microwave experimentation. when it rains outside, people tend to pay with soaking wet bills. i regularly dry them by microwaving them for about 10-20 seconds. (we have a higher-wattage industrial microwave.) i have never witnessed any burning like this before, but i usually just microwave smaller bills like 1s and 5s (which, of course, have the older design).

i have, however, seen paper napkins burn and look like this when left in the microwave for a rather long time---say, several minutes. usually this happens when drunk people heat something and forget to turn off the microwave (when not using the timer). since wood pulp napkins would mostly be cellulose, and U.S. paper currency is made from a special blend of cotton (about 90% cellulose) and linen (about 70% cellulose, i think), then i would expect any bill to burn similarly if microwaved long enough.

oh---another fun thing to microwave is halogen bulbs. just about one second and they glow brighter than when they're plugged in.

They arent new notes...

go look at the picture... some were new, some were older...

makes mugging more efficient!

A mugger can get an RFID scanner, hide in a alley and only step up for business when he gets a strong signal. This eliminates the possibility of mugging people with only petty cash!

Bet you didn't even think of this !

What an idiot...

RFIDs did not cause his money to burn. Microwaving the money caused the cloth to burn. I'm guessing that the microwave didn't have a carousel in it by the way the microwaves burned through one spot... What a jackass. The author never even mentions if he tried to take the money out of the wallet and walk through the scanner with just the money or just the wallet... There is probably an RFID embedded in the WALLET. I see these things all the time and sometimes they are well hidden, like under a flap. I hope the bank refuses to take back his burned money and then calls the FBI on him for destroying currency.

Foil Strip?

If I remember right, US bills have a mylar/foil strip running thru them. You can see it when you hold them up to the light. It also contains a blacklight sensitive dye. If this guy is afraid that strip is being used to track him, he can just throw the gummint off by sending his money to me.

Warning

Take it from someone who's learned it the hard way; DO NOT microwave your Visa card!

It's not RFID

The store theft detectors are not RFID scanners - they are highly "tuned" metal detectors. If it was the 20's setting it off, then it was probably the "USA $20" strip which has minute traces of metal.

Though I would add that this is a good one for Mythbusters!!!

The bills, the bills, the bills are on fire!

We don't need no water let the Andrew Jackson burn
burn Andrew Jackson, burn.

This was in X Files

There was a scene where the conspiracy theorist guys pulled the strip out of a 20 dollar bill and revealed a transmitter in it.

Paper money? Who cares, they have your plastic.

Why would they bother with paper money that they can't tie to any specific person? That would be pointless to say the least.. It would make much more sense (and is MUCH easier) to use cell phones and credit cards to track people. Try sticking your credit card in the microwave you clod.

How to replicate this effect.

Get a stack of small sheets of paper (helps if they're slightly absorbant, blotting paper is ideal) and place a small drop of water on one, ensure that is it soaked up by the paper. Put the piece witht he wet spot somewhere near the middle of the stack and leave for a while (let the water soak into the adjacent sheets). With the paper still in the stack put it in a microwave oven and heat on full power for 30 seconds. Depending on the amount of water you put on the initial sheet you might see the paper catch fire in the oven and explode or when you get the stack out you might see a scorch mark on the sheet you put the water on and the sheets either side of it. Very much like the photographs of the $20 bills in the article.

Metal reflects microwaves, water is heated by microwaves. Seeing a burned spot demonstrates the presence of water, not an RFID chip. Microwaves destroy RFID chips much like static electricity destroys CMOS chips, the electric field generated (several thousand volts but tiny amounts of current over very short amouints of time) destroys the P-N junctions. The heating effect is negligable.

I've seen similar effects wiping magnetic tapes in a domestic microwave.

I can only assume that the affected spot on the writer's $20 bills had gotten damp (maybe there's something about the way the bills are made that makes that spot more absorbant).

Stephen

Check for a security tag in your wallet.

I had the same problem, I walked into a store once alarms went off. It turned out my new wallet had a security tag tucked under the lining that was never deactivated.

Stew Visits the Airport...

Here in CT there's a famous grocery store whose founder was charged with skimming $17M from the corporate accounts in order to avoid $6M in taxes. He decided one way to get out with some of the money would be to head for the Carribbean with $80,000 in lots of pads of $20s hidden under baggy clothes. What he failed to take into acount were the metallic printed threads on the newer 20s - the aggregate of which managed to set off the metal detector. What they really got him for was not telling anyone he was leaving the country with more than $10,000. Then it got really bad.

Stack of Punch Cards

That a stack of $20 bills burns in a microwave is not proof of an RFID conspiracy. If you take a stack of ordinary paper and put it in the microwave long enough, it burns from the middle. This is an old hacker prank. Back in the days of punch cards, if you put a stack of punch cards in a microwave, they burned from the middle. The top and bottom cards were fine, but the middle ones were charred. (It was a mean prank to play on the card feeder.) Notice the photograph of the bills. Some are charred a little, some are charred a lot. I would lay freshly baked $20 on the fact that the amound of charring is dependant on the depth in the stack.

I have one follow-up question for Dave and Denise: do the charred bills set off the scanner? This would not be proof, but it may provide contrary evidence to their claim.

Poor misguided fellow

Wait a minute. This guy is trying to determine whether cash has RADIO FREQUENCY ID's embedded in it... by exposing them to MICROWAVE FREQUENCY radiation?

Something tells me he slept through his Physics for Crackpots lectures.

(semi) conductive ink

An interesting thought occurred to me- what if the bills don't just *contain* a tag, but *are* the tag. The engraving was redesigned- how difficult would it be to arrange it so that the printing on the bill becomes a viable circuit (antenna, capacitors, whatever else is needed)?

Not that I mean to fan the flames (puns not intended) of conspiracy theory...it is my opinion that "The Government" already has too much information flowing in and not enough ability for analysis. As mentioned elsewhere, every bill has had a unique identifier (serial number) for quite some time. The printed versions can't be read remotely, but could be tracked whenever the bills changed hands. Whether this data could be rationalized into information is another question.

A friend of mine had a similar run-in with an airport metal detector and his stack of traveler's checks- each had a foil seal on the face, and collectively these created enough of a signal to set it off. Maybe a simple precaution would be to ensure the bills are oriented randomly (i.e. some with A.J. facing right, others turned 180 degrees and facing left, still others face down in the stack...)

All true paranoids and patriots unite- pay for everything using old quarters...or better yet- pennies!

Microwave

Will the microwave oven work on the chips in my head too?

If he cooked them stacked, this is to be expected

A stack of 50 $20 bills is thin enough that they are headted essentially uniformly by microwaves. It may be that there's differential absorption in the inks, but the important thing is that a stack
of paper is a damn good insulator.

So apply heat uniformly to a block, but only let it escape (slowly) from the sides. The middle of the block is going to get really hot.

Do you notice how his disassembled bills have some less-injured ones on top? They had better cooling.

There's no magic RFID receiver with explosive anti-tampering protection; it's just that if you pump 1000 watts of power into a small space and don't let it escape, you're going to get some really dramatic heating! Lots of energy in a small space is basically the definition of an explosion.

The guy left the bills in the microwave too long. You put less than an ounce of anything in the microwave for a minute at full power and see if it doesn't get awfully damn hot...