Congo mine deploys digital weapons in fight against conflict minerals

A man displaying a handheld scanner used by government agents to upload tracking data for bags of minerals to the cloud at the SMB coltan mine near the town of Rubaya in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. — Photos: Reuters

RUBAYA, Democratic Republic of Congo: In a small shack overlooking muddy pits hewn out of eastern Congo's rolling green hills, a government official puts a barcoded tag on a sack of ore rich in tantalum, a rare metal widely used in smartphones.

With a handheld device linked to a server in the cloud, the agent scans the barcode, uploading data including the sealed bag's weight, when it was tagged, and by whom.