
US Employee in China Suffers Brain Injury in Case Recalling Cuba Sound 'Attack' - booleanbetrayal
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-23/u-s-says-china-employee-hit-with-sound-sensations-brain-injury
======
nickysielicki
Getting deeply into amateur radio in the past year has really changed my
perspective on the world around me. You start to get frustrated by cheap power
supplies ruining your reception, you start to curse plasma TVs and power
lines, etc. It gives you perspective for how limited our senses truly are,
relative to the insane amount of general noise that things make. This is
especially illustrated by things like RF-Capture by some MIT students, see
their paper "Capturing a Coarse Human Figure Through a Wall" [1].

Signals are going to be weaponized in ways that we cannot imagine, a very loud
but humanly imperceptible transmitter is only the beginning.

[1]: [http://rfcapture.csail.mit.edu/rfcapture-
paper.pdf](http://rfcapture.csail.mit.edu/rfcapture-paper.pdf)

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _you start to curse plasma TVs and power lines_

Nah. What you need is a transmitter powerful enough that all the cursing is
done by everyone else around you. :)

j/k - I guess I'm jaded because I live in a densely populated area, and
there's no place nearby where there's no RF pollution all the time. And yeah,
while my plasma TV is on, reception is junk on all frequencies.

~~~
swerveonem
You should build a personal faraday cage.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
How am I going to get any reception from a faraday cage?

------
anandkulkarni
Kevin Fu and team at UMich's security & privacy group provided the most
plausible explanation for what's going on here.
[https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-
reve...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/how-we-reverse-
engineered-the-cuban-sonic-weapon-attack)

~~~
jimrandomh
tl;dr: Two ultrasound devices in the same room can interact to produce audible
sound at dangerous volume under some circumstances. Ultrasound devices include
bugs, microphone jammers, and many other things.

~~~
gruez
but if you have two 60db transmitters, the max you can produce (from my
understanding) with constructive interference is 70db , since db is
logarithmic. so does that mean the transmitters in question were already
transmitting at 100+db?

~~~
jhpankow
2x 60dB is 63dB.

~~~
basementcat
If the two sources are coherently phased up you can get 66 dB.

------
huhtenberg
Logically speaking, it's either of:

1\. These are unrelated

2\. The cause is specific to the setup/operation of the US consulates
themselves

3\. Both Cubans (or Russians) and Chinese are using 3rd party spy tech that
causes that

Anything else?

~~~
psychometry
They are related in that it's just a case of mass hysteria.

~~~
throwaway5752
I wish I could be that confident about things that I don't have inside
information about! Working against that theory is consistency of the reports,
the physiological evidence, and the high likelihood that the affected would be
high value espionage targets.

~~~
cpncrunch
There isn't actually any physiological evidence in the China case. mTBI can
only be diagnosed by symptoms; there are no biomarkers for diagnosing it.

The media reports say the symptoms were "subtle and vague, but abnormal,
sensations of sound and pressure" that lasted a year. That sounds entirely
consistent with a psychiatric explanation.

People working in embassies aren't somehow immune to psychiatric issues (and
may in fact be more likely to experience things like this, due to the
pressures of their work).

------
grumblestumble
Holy shit, they finally built the Urine Box.

edit: since I'm getting downvoted, here's a link for the millenials to one of
the greatest BBS-era hoaxes of all time:
[http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/PHREAK/BOXES/URINE.HTM](http://cd.textfiles.com/group42/PHREAK/BOXES/URINE.HTM)

------
themodelplumber
It seems like we'd know by now (I mean here in the US) whether there are
sounds that 1) can cause mild TBI symptoms and 2) are only just barely [0]
detectable.

Mild TBI symptoms include [1]:

\- May remain conscious or may experience a loss of consciousness for a few
seconds or minutes.

\- Headache

\- Confusion

\- Lightheadedness

\- Dizziness

\- Blurred vision or tired eyes

\- Ringing in the ears

\- Bad taste in the mouth

\- Fatigue or lethargy

\- A change in sleep patterns

\- Behavioral or mood changes

\- Trouble with memory, concentration, attention, or thinking

I'm guessing that since this has hit the media via [1] and Pompeo's reporting,
the "employee personal/performance problem" angle has been ruled out.

0\. "subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure" \--
[https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/ha-05232018/](https://china.usembassy-
china.org.cn/ha-05232018/)

1\. [https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/All-
Disorders/Traumatic-...](https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Disorders/All-
Disorders/Traumatic-Brain-Injury-Information-Page)

------
Shank
No matter what the physical cause of the injury is, it's trivial to create
false attribution with it. It happened first in Cuba, so Cuba got a lot of
blame. Now it's happening in China. Did China come up with the same brilliant
idea? Buy it from Cuba? Or did they both just end up with shoddy surveillance
equipment?

If I had to guess, it's probably the latter. No matter the cause, though, if
you knew how to do it you could pull off the attack in [insert questionable
country here] and create suspicion for that country. It would be a really fast
and effective way to create diplomatic tension for a third party who stands to
gain from the breakdown of communication.

~~~
Iwan-Zotow
The only common ground to those cases are americans in US consulates. So
logical conclusion is it is case of self-shooting in the foot - Us spy
equipment malfunctioning etc

~~~
cgh
No, Canadians were also affected.

[https://globalnews.ca/news/3956401/eight-canadians-
sickened-...](https://globalnews.ca/news/3956401/eight-canadians-sickened-in-
mysterious-cuba-attacks-rcmp-leading-investigation/)

~~~
natch
That doesn't say much, because it's not beyond the realm of possibility that
the US shares some equipment (made up example: ultrasonic or other anti-
jamming technology) or other technology with Canada.

If it was a country way less friendly to the US than Canada (or _even_ less
friendly, if you want to make the questionable argument that Canada is not
friendly to the US), that would be a better indicator.

~~~
cgh
I was objecting to the phrase "only americans in US consulates", when clearly
it's not. Kind of pedantic, I know.

That said, asserting that it's not "beyond the realm of possibility" that this
phenomena might affect US allies because of shared equipment is pure
conjecture. Many things about this are not beyond the realm of possibility.

------
ww520
Could those ultrasound based jamming devices used to thwart eavesdropping be
the ones causing the problem?

------
mikekij
Wasn’t the Cuba incident determined to be caused by interference between two
US ultrasound surveillance devices?

~~~
chx
Check
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135349](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17135349)
this answer and thread.

------
alexandercrohde
Seems like the parties with multibillion dollar budgets (i.e. Nations) need to
make a credible effort to work on technologies to detect/track-down these
devices.

Then this eavesdropping arms-race that is hurting innocents can stop.

------
no_identd
Boxspring mattresses have interesting RF properties.

~~~
kawfey
They have been used as antennas before:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/60z2av/the_of...](https://www.reddit.com/r/amateurradio/comments/60z2av/the_official_ny7n_bedspring_challenge/)

------
basicplus2
Symptoms suggest microwaves at work

------
leonkilat
does anyone actually believe in this 'sound attack'? why didn't any of the
Cubans working in the US embassy in Cuba suffer from the supposed ill effects.
Is there something different about American biology that makes them
susceptible to these attacks?

