Soviet children gave the US ambassador a plaque of peace -hidden inside was a recording device that drew no power and gave off no emissions - it was activated when the KGB beamed a specific frequency to it and the feedback from it using fancy maths could give a realtime recording.
Actually throw away as in discard and leave behind in China? I thought the logical thing to do would be to put them into a faraday cage and inspect them later in a lab.
Seems odd to “throw the items in a bin”. You’d more likely want to know who was given what, put each item in a sealed container, then analyze them later on. Unless you were dumb enough to think it was a bomb.
The Chinese government would be stupid to not do the exact same thing when departing the US. They aren't stupid, and they aren't going to wage war on the basis of some discarded lapel pins.
Ten years ago, a Dutch company I worked for had a standard protocol after government delegation trips to China: every phone and laptop used on the visit was fed straight into an industrial shredder.
So what happens to the stuff after, I presume the embassy picks it up for processing, or it gets forwarded to US on another flight for processing, presumably some Chinese janitor is not going to have access to Rubios burner phone to resell.
The former, yes. The latter, no, that one was partly paid for by Fauci & co. who also did their best (but failed, [1, page 9 and onwards]) to keep this fact out of the news.