Canada Is Issuing Spy Coins? Targeting U.S. Contractors? Why?

OK, here's a strange story. That the U.S. government is so upset about it simply makes me wonder if they're pissed they didn't get to implement it first because if there's anything the Bush Administration doesn't like is some foreign Johnny-Come-Lately (and especially if they parlez vous Francais!) breaching the civil rights and privacy of U.S. citizens before Bush & Cheney do.

From AP:

Money talks, but can it also follow your movements?

In a U.S. government warning high on the creepiness scale, the Defense Department cautioned its American contractors over what it described as a new espionage threat: Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters hidden inside.

The government said the mysterious coins were found planted on U.S. contractors with classified security clearances on at least three separate occasions between October 2005 and January 2006 as the contractors traveled through Canada.

Intelligence and technology experts said such transmitters, if they exist, could be used to surreptitiously track the movements of people carrying the spy coins.

The U.S. report doesn't suggest who might be tracking American defense contractors or why. It also doesn't describe how the Pentagon discovered the ruse, how the transmitters might function or even which Canadian currency contained them.

Further details were secret, according to the U.S. Defense Security Service, which issued the warning to the Pentagon's classified contractors. The government insists the incidents happened, and the risk was genuine.

We should keep our ears to the wall on this one. A lot of crap is going down. From Canada, I expected better but since it's now completely impossible to believe the U.S. government on anything, I don't know whether this may be just another way to point fingers and punish our northern neighbors.

[Ed. note: And yes, we have ways of tracking American currency now, too. Except we usually don't need to because we know it all flows into the Bush-Cheney-MegaCorp pockets anyway.]