Matthew Bevan

Oh, yes, they cooked this up in a KGB, you know, lab somewhere.

It was this famous man was kidnapped, invented this thing, which was, by all accounts, an extraordinary leap forward in technology, which was able to spy on the US ambassador for seven years undetected, then dramatically was revealed to the world in...

the UN Security Council.

It was an extraordinary saga.

And the thing about it is that there were so many ramifications of it as well.

Well, Mark, open your wallet.

Pull out a credit card.

Inside that credit card, there is a little tiny version of the thing that was found inside the great seal bug.

The thing that allows you to beep your credit card when you tap to pay.

The thing that allows you to tap your transit card.

The thing that allows you to tap your little fob that gets you into your office building.

All of those things are basically technology that was developed after the creation of the thing based on it.

All of those things use a little what's called a passive radio device, which means it's a little antenna inside your card that radio waves can bounce off and it can send a signal, an identification number, your credit card number or something like that,

when a radio signal is bounced off it.

Look, they've never said what was picked up.

To be clear, this wasn't the ambassador's work study.

If he was meeting with the local head of the CIA or some foreign dignitary or something like that, he would have been meeting in the embassy itself, not inside the private residence of the ambassador.

They've never said that there was some key piece of classified information that the Soviets picked up through the thing inside the Great Seal.

But they've said, look, if they were listening for seven years, then they would have got something.

We're not sure whether it was anything specific, but they would have heard something interesting if they were listening for long enough.