10 ms·
Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
- madeuptempacct 8y agoI just want to point out that this is an exceptionally well-researched and cited article, didn't expect that (which is funny - I just realized I set a lower standard for mainstream media than the tech blog posts I read that people write in their free time).
- taneq 8y ago(In response to your aside - if someone's writing about something in their free time they probably care about it so expecting a higher standard than you'd expect for someone grinding out a dime does make sense.)
- baxtr 8y agoI’m not a fan of standard media, but I think that’s an unfair assumption. The least it is too general. I’m sure there are many journalists who care deeply about topics they write about.
- taneq 8y agoMaybe my phrasing was imprecise - I didn't mean they don't care about it at all, just that after the initial rush has worn off, often you do your job because you have to, while you work on your personal projects only when you're impassioned.
- sitkack 8y agoI am sure the author appreciates that back-handed complement, I appreciate that you reinforce the facade of programmer arrogance in tech-pop.
- canhascodez 8y agoI'm told that there's a great deal of automatically generated sports reporting. Good reporting is actually much rarer these days, because no one online wants to pay for it. Recent years have also seen the rise of Buzzfeed and Breitbart. The journalists seem to think that there's a journalism crisis. I might suggest that you have been confining yourself to high-quality news sources, to where you don't see that this is a problem, but I don't think many of those exist. If you have strong feelings about the image of programming in tech-pop, you may reflect upon the varying levels at which people might value such a thing, and try to be constructive in your criticism.
- fjsolwmv 8y agoBuzzFeed News is one of the best journalism projects today. BuzzFeed buzz feed is infotainment that makes no pretensions.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoWhere is the evidence that it's actually happening?
- cycrutchfield 8y agoIt’s a newspaper not a scientific journal. What makes you think they would have access to any evidence? They are merely summarizing the research that others have done.
- kurthr 8y agoSince the article title says Theory and the described effects happened in the past, what specific evidence would you accept? Do you expect that evidence to be forthcoming in any eventuality? Does that mean that this topic should never be discussed?
- baybal2 8y agoThere is a point to bring: during the WWII and later cold war, Soviets were extremely vocal about untouchability of top political leadership, and immunities provided by Vienna convention being absolute. And they uphold that dearly. Now my Western friends, try spending some time to think why they did so.
- themodelplumber 8y agoAre you referring to their desire for immunity in ordering crimes against humanity?
- baybal2 8y agoYes, so they thought. It was their desire to make the West to believe that is a "West vs East" conflict, not "the West vs them personally." All Soviet leaders were quite paranoid when it came to assassination fears, and the West going after right/left hand person.
- madeuptempacct 8y ago"The 9th division of the KGB (responsible for the safety of all the members of Politburo, including the leader of the USSR) had 3000 personnel." "After the fall of the USSR, the president (Boris Yeltsin) had a private guard of 18,000 personnel. Far more government leaders were guarded than they were during the USSR." Quotes above from "From the KGB to the FSB" by Eugene Michalevich If you are interested, there is a biography by Victor Medvedev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Medvedev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Medvedev) about his time guarding various leaders of the USSR. If the book is to be believed, security was very light.
- baybal2 8y ago>If the book is to be believed, security was very light. Light compared to what? Numerically, yes. It was making no sense to have more than a regiment of them in a country where the total number of 3 letter agencies staff was comparable to standing army. But the level of paranoia was not light whatsoever. Yeltsin on the other hand had to live under a constant threat of armed uprising by the same three letter agencies. The internal threat had an entirely different nature.
- neuroma 8y agoOkay I'm skeptical. On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons. That narrative conveniently fuels paranoia and makes for good reading. Alternative explanations exist, based on well established medicine, which I think need air time, link below. Now, I'm all for exciting stories but this one keeps being resurrected without evidence I'd find compelling (namely lesions on MRI, quantifiable deficits in function, or signs and symptoms that prove neural damage). Indeed all the features of this particular syndrome appear better explained by functional, rather than structural, disease. Of course the possiblility of acoustic or electromagnetic weapons being used exists until proven otherwise, but in light of what is known, it seems unlikely to me. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/14/cuban-acoustic-attack-report-on-us-diplomats-flawed-say-neurologists https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/14/cuban-acoustic... Declaration of interests: I've worked with Prof. Stone.
- prolikewh0a 8y agoEspecially knowing the USA has been a thorn in Cuba's side since the 50's, repeatedly trying to kill Castro and undermine their economic system. Americans live under constant propaganda from their own government, deployed by their own mainstream newspapers and TV media. Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' is an eye opening look into the continuous war/regime change drum that's beating inside the USA. This is just more the same, NY Times writing anti-Cuban articles as propaganda, with no evidence to back up their nonsense claims.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thefounder 8y agoCuba has been led by a dictatorship regime so I can see why US would like to change it. You don't need propaganda to see for yourself that Cuba has no free elections. So far US used sanctions instead of war and it seems it didn't work.
- 8y ago
- lostlogin 8y ago“In dictatorships, you often have factions that think nothing of going against the general policy if it suits their needs. I think that’s a perfectly viable explanation.” Frey. I’m not sure that’s a thing unique to dictatorships at all.
- tw1010 8y agoMy spookometer isn't going off because of what happened with the diplomats, but why the story is covered so darn much in the news.
- shindog 8y agoEasy it’s casus belli to create (likely already exist) and use similar weapons.
- jessaustin 8y agoThe fact that such alleged attacks are reported both in Cuba and in China, which nations have very little history of technical collaboration, makes it more likely that the alleged weapon was actually used by elements of USA bureaucracy. USA diplomats are the common thread here, no matter what purpose is assumed. It will certainly not be the first case of those serving the military-industrial complex being directly victimized by same. If Russia had just wanted to play with their new toy while victimizing people with no local sympathy, they could have hit e.g. guest workers in Dubai and Western expats in Thailand. Actually they have lots of isolated communities in Siberia they could have observed more easily while staying out of the news completely. Even if the "what", "where", and "when" ends up conforming to current "journalistic" speculation in these cases, the "how", "why", and "who" will probably never be really known. It's fine to be suspicious when Russian media are blaming USA, because they are "rivals". In the reversed case, why wouldn't one retain that suspicion?
- scottlocklin 8y agoOr, as I said above, it's simple USGov incompetence. Which, sadly, is almost always correct. https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-likely-explanation-for-the-sonic-weapon-used-at-the-us-embassy-in-cuba https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-l...
- jessaustin 8y agoThat's an interesting article, but in fairness it's at least as general as TFA. Yes that is one plausible explanation, but verifiable facts are so hard to come by on this topic, and there are so many powerful interests involved, that we ought to be quite skeptical of everything we see.
- madengr 8y agoRF/Microwave EE here. I actually tried this on myself several years ago with no effect. Specifically 20W at C-band into a 10 dBi standard gain horn a few feet away, pulse mod to 1 kHz. That was still not near enough power density. While it’s plausible, it would take a big effort to affect this many people. The peak power densities, as described in the paper, would be tens of W/cm^2; e.g. radar transmitters and big antennas. To direct this power, you’d have to track someone with a high gain antenna, and once you are non line of sight, it would attenuate greatly. That, or you’d have to place covert equipment in close proximity, in many locations. It would also be very easy to detect with basic test equipment, as the desired peak power levels are huge. Maybe there could be some organ resonance effect with mmWaves, such as bones in the ear, but that is sketchy too. Here is the link from the article: https://braincontrolhedge.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/auditory-system-response-to-radio-frequency-energy-technical-note.pdf https://braincontrolhedge.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/audito...
- baybal2 8y agoMoreover, that would've certainly affected all unshielded electronics. Even older GSM phones had enough power to some times hang well shielded desktop PCs. And at the time all laptops were plasticky unshielded contraptions, that was even more evident.
- tomjakubowski 8y agoI miss being able to hear incoming calls over my car's stereo before the phone even rang.
- raziel2701 8y agoI can still do that with my cheap computer speakers!
- subcosmos 8y agoIn my headphones, when I pause any music that is playing, I can hear data transferring too/from my nvidia GPU while training deep neural networks. Ive used this technique to get a greater sense of the memory performance.
- russfink 8y agoIs there a defense against this kind of thing? Not to sound cliche, but would a tin foil hat work?
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoA simple experiment result published by the MIT Media Lab, found tinfoil hats are not really effective. https://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csa... > For all helmets, we noticed a 30 db __amplification__ at 2.6 Ghz and a 20 db amplification at 1.2 Ghz, regardless of the position of the antenna on the cranium. In addition, all helmets exhibited a marked 20 db attenuation at around 1.5 Ghz, with no significant attenuation beyond 10 db anywhere else. Full electromagnetic shielding of the entire building perhaps? Like those at the NSA headquarter. It should give you a heavy attenuation on the microwave frequency. BTW, why don't the intelligence agencies install a software-defined radio in suspected US embassies to log the entire microwave spectrum? It will definitely yield something.
- kurthr 8y agoYou don't even need SDR... a really simple LED and a few variable antennas would do a good job into the GHz.
- bcaa7f3a8bbc 8y agoFor detection, yes, it can be done by an extremely simple circuit. But you would need the raw I/Q sample data over a broad frequency range to perform a technical analysis to identify the nature of the microwave. Here's when a SDR comes handy.
- kurthr 8y agoThe LED just reveals power (detection of radiation over many visible orders of magnitude) ... it doesn't need to detect coherent I/Q, because I don't think neural effects are sensitive to phase either. Selectively cooking a brain would require relatively high power and beam forming, but not high data rate. Audio frequencies are visible (use multiple band pass filters if you like) . You'd also want a controlled test source so you'd know if the attacker had burned it out.
- prmph 8y agoWhy is this effect not used to develop a device that converts normal sounds into such microwaves that the deaf can hear?
- krapp 8y agoI would imagine the negative health effects caused by long-term exposure of the brain to microwaves strong enough to produce the desired effect might be a factor.
- ObsoleteNerd 8y agoBecause of that minor (/s) side effect of brain damage?
- gregshap 8y agoCochlear implants do perform a similar bypass [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant]
- greesil 8y agoLooks like the tinfoil hat crowd has been right all along.
- vat 8y agoThis may sound crazy but I think I have the solution: we make hats out of tin foil to block the microwaves. Nice try
- snorrah 8y agoSo in this thread we have mrtksn calling this lousy journalism, and madeuptemcappt saying it’s a well-researched and cited article. So which is it?
- scottlocklin 8y agoIt's a series of fairly unlikely assertions backed with plausible looking narrative and interviews. Pretty typical for the NYT these days, and very sad. IEEE Spectrum did a series of articles on this; I thought the mostly likely explanation was ultrasound jammers and intermodulation distortion. Aka defective gear; which is why the same thing seems to have happened in China as well as Cuba.
- tim333 8y agoThere's a link to one of the IEEE articles here https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reverse-engineered-the-cuban-sonic-weapon-attack https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reve... with a recording of sounds recorded at the embassy and their attempts to reproduce it. To me the microwave theory seems a better fit.
- scottlocklin 8y agoThis is the one I had in mind: https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-likely-explanation-for-the-sonic-weapon-used-at-the-us-embassy-in-cuba https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/finally-a-l...
- MrTonyD 8y agoI keep reading about quantum entanglement - and how it has been used in practice to transmit secure messages. Seems like it is a technology that might somehow be used to induce frequencies without leaving any evidence. A lot of that works is secret, so it's hard to tell what is really being done.
- driverdan 8y agoQuantum physics only works at the quantum level. It's impossible for it to do anything like this.
- flycaliguy 8y agoMy theory remains that a couple Americans were paid to fake symptoms which others then grew convinced they also suffered.
- aaron695 8y agoI don't buy the theory, I think one person convinced everyone else by accident. But if you want to do this I'd run with a few people got a some sort of disease not common (STD / a parasite) and the others then grew convinced they also suffered. Less of a conspiracy, an STD works well cause it means people will lie. The evil country X could never have guesses at the USA's incompetence in dealing with this.
- aaron695 8y agoLol it's 100% mass hysteria ( "contagious anxiety" ) EVEN if it wasn't, it WOULD be in part. We KNOW it would infect people who weren't actually interfered with through this magic. So media..... an example of a story that would be believable would be we think x% were affected and y% was through "contagious anxiety".
- tim333 8y agoThere's also a Science Daily report with some other info including >"We have seen this before when the Soviets irradiated the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the days of the Cold War," he said. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180829115456.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180829115456.h...
- raykel337 8y agoHello everyone, my name is Raymond and I want to recommend a reliable hacker who helped hack my wife’s cell phone remotely, which gave me full access to her phone and not just that he”s a professional and can hack into social media platforms just name it like whats app, facebook, emails, school hack grade, just name it he’s , good at what he does and I will say like he’s the best out there. If you require his service, contactEmail: oneofonehack At G mail dot com Whats app contact:+15187400715 Text num:+15186284630