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Report: Soccer Ball Putin Gave To Trump Really Does Have A Transmitter Chip

(Photo: YURI KADOBNOV/AFP/Getty Images)

Garth Kant Contributor
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The soccer ball Russian President Vladimir Putin gave to President Trump reportedly does have a communications chip in it, as some had cautioned.

After the Russian president gifted the ball to the American president during their summit last week in Helsinki, Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted, “I’d check the soccer ball for listening devices and never allow it in the White House.”

It turns out that the Adidas AG ball comes with “a chip with a tiny antenna that transmits to nearby phones,” according to a report in Bloomberg.

The article said the NFC (near-field communication) chip is not a spy device but a transmitter that allows fans to access videos and other content by holding mobile devices near the ball.

However, Bloomberg also reported that “Adidas declined to comment on whether the chip could be a vector of a Russian hack.”

The article said it could not be determined from photos of the ball Putin gave Trump “whether the chip might have been removed, replaced with actual spy gear, or, even more remotely, whether the entire ball itself was fabricated for the event and only resembled the Adidas model in question.”

“The security screening process that is done for all gifts was done for the soccer ball,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders told Bloomberg in an email. “We are not going to comment further on security procedures.”

Bloomberg said the chip uses the same technology as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and that, “In theory, such tags can be programmed to initiate an attack on a phone, at least one hacker has shown.”

That was a reference to a Forbes report in 2015 that an engineer had used the chip to send a request to a nearby phone to open a link containing a malicious file.

But the Adidas website states, “It is not possible to delete or rewrite the encoded parameters.”

The chip is an advertised feature and Adidas says it is placed under a logo on the ball that resembles the icon for the WiFi signal.