Today an article ran on ArsTechnica which caught my eye. It’s titled The NSA Playset: Espionage tools for the rest of us and talks about the creation of a collection of NSA-ANT-like devices for doing… NSA-like things. One device — a deceptively simple device — caught my attention. It is called the CONGAFLOCK. This single transistor RF reflector can be implanted into anything that transmits data via wires. The resultant device can be hit with a continuous wave at the frequency of the bug’s antennae, and the received reflectivity can be AM demodulated to recover the signal! I find this simplicity both amazing, and disturbing. A link to the device specifications (what to and how to build it) is below!
CONGAFLOCK RF retroreflector