Former NSA employee Bill Binney talked about these weapons. He said there are acoustic versions and electromagnetic versions of such weapons/devices. Apparently, the sonic versions work both inside and ouside the range of human hearing. Similarly, the electromagnetic version of the device apparently also works on a wide variety of frequencies.
As for defense, it seems that detecting full spectrum weapons requires highly specialized and expensive equipment. It may not be practical to deploy such equipment in the field.
As for treating the inflicted officers, it seems strange that our premier front line agency would not err on the side of caution and allow these patriots to receive treatment from Walter Reed. Could there be more to the story than DCI Haspel remaining skeptical as justification to decline such treatment?
See Steve Perlman's efforts at making a cellular radio system that can focus a 'bubble' of cellular energy around the user.[1] Call 'pCell' or 'pRadio' in various press releases it basically is a MIMO setup that uses many cell towers to transmit a pre-distorted signal that converges into a power signal at a particular point in space. At the time it was announced I suggested it sounds like something that could be weaponized if you wanted to. Being able a turn a microwave on around a person without anyone nearby noticing anything is a pretty capable thing.
If the signal is strong enough, you can easily design a pocket detector. A PCB attached to a pocket protector with antenna tracings for multiple spectrums and a buzzer. No need to get fancy, a few passives off the shelf will do the trick. Or just get a SDR scanning multiple spectrums and have a threshold trigger above a specific power level. This is beginner radio stuff, I am sure their local hardware tech support can whip one up under a day.
I wonder if you could just have a calorimeter and a block of material with similar properties to human tissue? That way you cover the EHF/THF(>30GHz) ranges as well?
Sure but then you have a targeting problem, which in the radio range is not trivial particularly when you've got intervening objects and no receiver providing feedback about signal strength.
Sort of right? I mean how big is the field? How often does someone move the bed in a hotel room? If you were set up outside a hotel where you knew targets slept, you could program constants for the bed in each room right?
Further if you knew what you were trying to do, you could set up your feedback transmitter in a room, record all the parameters for that room, then move to the next room, Etc.
The problem that Perlman was solving was a lot harder (a moving target) but hitting a nominally stationary target?
Embassies are constantly swept for bugs and transmitting radio devices. The security officer in an embassy is always going to be an intelligence officer. Particularly US embassies, are not lax security targets along any dimension.
If it is strong enough to affect the human physiology then it can be detected regardless how short lived it is. If your neighbor honks the car 3 times at 3 in the morning you will still hear it even though it is only for a few seconds. If you are watching a real-time football match on LTE and drives through a tunnel with no signal, there will still be a interruption even if the tunnel is very short.
Depends on how tight the beam is and how high gain on the receiving antenna. For a point of reference: radio transmitter => light source, focused beam => light focused with a lens, antenna gain => strength of lens. If you have any questions, just visualize the system (or draw it out) as a series of light sources and light sensors. RF and light are both radiation and follow the Maxwell equations. (Optics are sometimes considered to have additional properties mostly due to limitations in our current understanding of certain RF spectrums, see terahertz bandgap but by and large they follow the same rules).
Would tin foil hats help? No I'm serious, well that help deflect the waves or something? We can send in all cia agents in foreign countries with tin foil hats on in future
Yes, if it is electromagnetic. A form of mosquito-netting that would create a Faraday cage would be similarly effective depending on where the source(s) were.
What is perhaps even more interesting, eddy currents on the boundaries of the cave could be used to indicate that you were being broadcast at.
Tin foil suits with bell bottom pants and afros + sideburns should be the first aid in such cases. Add some lightning rods headbands to the mix and this ultrasonic weapon is rendered incapable of any harm
Your source, Bill Binney, is not credible. For example he claims he can "prove" Russia did not hack the DNC in 2016.[1] His claims are easily debunked by anyone with basic networking experience.[2]
Wow, Binney's analysis of it being a thumb drive leak is pretty laughable. Apparently the fact that the files came from FAT is a smoking gun, or Wikileaks "conspired" to doctor them like that.
So much more likely that Wikileaks, or one of the hackers, simply copied them to a thumb drive at some point.
Bill Binney is an American patriot and I believe not one person in the NSA would disagree. He is quite simply a legend in no such agency. Not sure what hive mind you crawled out of but please go back.
Bill Binney is a crank who’s been out of intelligence for 20 years now.. read anything “technical” he’s published recently and you’ll see how out of touch he actually is.
The same Bill Binney involved in aiding QAnon conspiracy networks and that appears on right-wing propaganda channels that push COVID-19 denial? I trust him about as much as I trust a broken clock.
Is this supposed to scare people away? Lol, talk about an empty argument. See if you can somehow link him to flat earthers or the anti-vax movement as well.
Folks should know that Russia is currently occupied by a criminal gang. Criminals do stuff, so adjust expectations: you can be poisoned if you're working for American (or allies) government. Citizens are trying to eliminate the gang (Khabarovsk, Minsk protests), but it's nowhere near the end.
What would you do if the world's most powerful state sent undercover agents to your country? This is a powerful message to send. It says, "We know what you're doing. Moreover we known who's doing it. And there's a risk and a price for doing that on our sovereign soil." This message isn't just sent to the leaders and higher-ups, who has most likely already gotten protests through diplomatic channels. Instead it's directly targeted at agents, of whom many will have second thought about accepting such assignments if they know they're putting their own life and health at stake. On the other hand, I'm not truly convinced about case. It also sounds a bit like American made spin, to increase hostility towards Russia. On the other hand, Russia has indeed increased their undercover activities, and some of them might be eager to show or warn the world that they're capable and dangerous. But death rays? Sounds like something out of an old James Bond film lol. So if nothing else, perhaps more people will write good spy flicks from this...
> This is a powerful message to send. It says, "We know what you're doing. Moreover we known who's doing it.
I’d suggest you read the article. He was in Russia to meet with Russian intelligence, presumably to discuss whatever it is that the CIA and Russian intelligence have to talk about, which the article describes as a common thing for CIA agents to do.
I'd suggest you make fewer unsubstantiated claims about people you do not know, AmericanChopper. How does meeting opposing intelligence officers diminish the power of the "message"? It still sends the message that they not only have that capability, but that they're also willing to use it. And it may still have the desired effect of discouraging Americans from wanting assignments in Russia. That is if the agent here dind't just get food poisoning... As I wrote in the original comment, there's still some chance that this is only NPR spin.
Your parent comment is just a dramatic fan fiction. This man wasn't in Russia on some clandestine mission. He was there as a CIA agent to meet with Russian intelligence. They didn't need to send him a message that he knew who he was, or what he was doing, because his identity and the purpose of his visit was already in all of their calendars. You'd presume that message was sent when they RSVP'd the meeting.
> What would you do if the world's most powerful state sent undercover agents to your country?
This opening line? Where you say he was an undercover agent? Even though the article explicitly states he wasn't? I mean, that's why I suggested that you should actually read it.
Yes. I'd suggest you read up on what a hypothetical situation is. Also, did you notice where I wrote about American spin? Yeah, I'd highly suggest reading that part too. :)
Since the world's most powerful states have been sending undercover agents to their adversary states for millennia, that is hardly a (new) reason to take action against them. Both states have plenty of tools to simply kill every identified agent of the other side, so how far they go in their actions is always a policy decision, balancing goals with retaliation. Plausible deniability helps, at least for awhile.
So tell me, if you got three choices, Russia, Ukraine or Afghanistan, which one would you preferr? The one that actively hunts agents, the one where you might die to an IED, or the one where they're more likely to try to pay you huge sums of money to look the other way?
As someone who suffers from infrequent migraines, I can attest to the fact that they are completely debilitating to me. That seems reason enough. I haven’t had the time to read this particular story but a recent one I did read claimed that this led to the retirement of a CIA officer.
Ok, but this officer can't be THAT important to U.S. goals in Russia. Let's say they did give him migraines, ok, now what? The U.S. just sends in 5 other agents with protective headgear. It just doesn't really achieve anything.
Because it disables a person that CIA has spent years and countless $$$ training. Since symptoms are psychological, there no way to even prove that you did anything.
One person. That's an awful lot of coordination and risk and planning to pull it off for one guy. No offense, but he can't be that important. There's tens of thousands of agents in the CIA. He still has his memory, so it's not as if there's some secrets being protected there.
While I very much believe in Russian political maleficence (and am aware of Cuba incidents)
This could honestly just be something like a very small CSF leak caused by the plane trip. It's a legit thing that can happen, especially in older folks (for it being brought on by a plane trip, that is)
It's a condition that is very often missed by even the best of medical professionals.
While there's an absolutely miniscule chance this is the case, I just sent him a message with a large amount of info in how to look into this with the centers pioneering treatment (Stanford, Cedars-Sinai, Duke) as it's a very fucking shitty condition to deal with.
But yeah, not to put on a tinfoil hat... I believe we're most definitely past the point of technological ability to do something like this. However, using it in a case like this does seem a bit odd to me.
I can also believe there would be reasons the CIA has long standing beef with Walter Reed. Politics are unfathomably nasty.
> Walter Reed is cutting-edge when it comes to treating traumatic brain injuries, a testament to its vast experience in dealing with wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I've asked [the CIA] repeatedly over the last year to send me to Walter Reed, and they have actively rejected this, which to me is is kind of mystifying," he said.
I'm interested to know the motivation behind the CIA's refusal to send him to Walter Reed. My theory is that they fear that this might turn into a diplomatic incident. Also, questions might be asked as to whether the CIA/intelligence community even know or are able to detect whatever it is that the Russian government did here.
The relations between USA and Russia are not friendly at all. With all the sanctions going on and threats of new one diplomatic incident looks like something the US would actually welcome. Would give more reasons to put even more pressure on Russia.
As for inability to detect whatever Russia might have done to the guy - what on Earth does that have to do with the refusal of medical help?
>The State Department commissioned a study last year by the National Academies of Sciences, which handed in the report in early August.
>Dr. Relman expects the report to be made public, as is the tradition of work done by the academies.
When the report is made public it will show no evidence of any malicious action. The idea that there is some microwave or sonic weapon being used against agents is a sensationalistic conspiracy theory.
There's a real possibility that many of the problems are a result of the placebo effect. If you started hearing that your workplace had potentially been attacked by some secret weapon, it would not be surprising if the stress caused many of the listed symptoms.
It's also possible some US training or accident is involved. Just because a trip to Russia or Cuba was when the problems became unbearable doesn't mean those trips were at fault. Years in combat zones can eventually cause problems.
A Canadian study linked the illness symptoms of Canadian and American diplomats in Havana to heavy use of the pesticide used against mosquitoes for Zika virus.
Send the “not loyal” officers to places where your friends in the foreign countries can neutralize them and make them ineffective to the point of quitting.
Nah, that would be too convenient.
Also Pompeo said the suggestion is “patently false”.
So there you have it folks.
He said he was having meetings with his Russian counterparts. So it does not really make sense for them to hurt him if they want to meet him. A better explanation, suggested in the article, is that it could be some attempt to hack his phone.
All Valid points. We can only really speculate since any information that could answer it definitively is not available.
For example, how many officers or operatives have come back from these countries with no symptoms. Is it simply people whose job it is to keep an eye on Russia?
Or maybe it’s more weighted towards people with certain known political views.
It could be as simple as Russia watching Pompeo tear down the state department and then saying, let’s do that to the CIA too.
The president can just fire people. There's hundreds of agents and state officials in Russia. You're falling for the journalist's framing of the story while only having an extremely tiny window into the big picture and all sides of the story...and you're extrapolating from there.
Yeah I agree. I’d just say I’m not falling for the journalists framing so much as applying past behavior to current events. It’s difficult not to be cynical when looking at the general state of things.
Wasn't there a bit of research on viruses that could introduce genetic material capable of producing light sensitve ion channels in neurons?
Mayhaps that combined with near or far infrared? Might explain the uncontrollable migraines due to the relative prevalence of thermal sources, and over stimulation of neurons is definitely an invitation to metabolic stress. The body's reaction may very well be vasodilation to remove excessive waste product.
You'd have to crack open the skull for photopsins to work. Infrared would scatter wildly unless it were modulated like a hologram. Getting a virus to cross the blood-brain barrier and widely and precisely transfect neurons without killing the victim from encephalitis is extremely challenging. I started writing a sci-fi story about taking this approach to telepathy a while back.
Giving your victims chronic health conditions rather than outright killing them is quite an effective tactic though. Organizations are terrible at accommodating chronic illnesses, and they're seen as not serious if you're not visibly disabled.
Optogenetic stimulation I think was the term, if I recall AAV was mentioned as a vector for introducing the requisite genetic changes, and if I recall, results were claimed outside of any sovereign defense context of 7mm depth.
I really wish I could remember where I was reading about it, because it was novel enough to leave an impression, but also at the time I was going through it I had other things I was thinking through.
Regardless of the origin this is a terrible outcome to live with. If it is being used as an offensive weapon it is truly diabolical. In many ways it is much worse than simply killing somebody. Not only have they degraded the performance of an operative they are also causing us to consume resources on medical treatment. There is also the mental and psychological terror of knowing you may be next.
It's the US medical complex that makes medical expenses even a remote concern. For other first world nations, the medical costs would be a drop in the bucket.
That said, even for America the costs would fade away into the intense military spending budget if they were willing to spend it.
If neural interfacing technology (such as neuralink) becomes mainstream and widespread, let's hope they are properly grounded and tuned else you will be walking with a timebomb in your head.
Spoke in person with HR office couples years back and finished with crippling headache for days. Then car dealership. Then bank office. Then airlines office.
Maybe CIA knows what it is but does not want to tell Putin that they know.
Isn't that the modus operandi of most intelligence operations, you try to learn their secrets and protect your own and one of your secrets may be you have discovered theirs?
is it wrong that i hear about these attacks and i am utterly disgusted? i get that american CIA operatives aren't exactly the cleanest of the clean, but he was on a diplomatic mission and basically had the rest of his life ruined. is that just how life goes? same goes for the Havana cases, which are so obviously connected that it hardly even needs further evidence to substantiate at this point (and seem even more dubious than this one from a moral standpoint?).
i guess what i'm saying is that if i knew Putin were doing this to my people i would be apoplectic-- what am i missing? are we up to dirty stuff like this too? i mean, i guess something like Guantanamo counts as "dirty", but seems somehow in a different circle of hell from this... (maybe this is just my own ignorance talking).
...and by the way I think that the world is fortunate at the moment in its superpower you know.
We basically you know, with all the occasional errors that your country makes as all countries do,
I am glad that the preponderant power in the world is a liberal capitalist democracy rather than being
Russia or China, right, or the European Union.
I don’t think the CIA does diplomacy. It uses the role of a diplomat as a soft-front for getting intel. I highly doubt the CIA/USA is ignoring this matter.
All Russian propaganda based on hatred and de-humanazing Americans. Video of Russian mercenaries attacking US Army vehicle has been met with nation-wide jubilation. That's Goebbels-style with 21century technologies. US appeared to be unprepared for this round of Cold War.
Well the US's M.O. would normally be regime change leading or regime propping leading to tons of abuse of civilians. Clearly in utilitarian terms that is way worse.
But I don't know of an example of messing with the personal well-being of diplomats/spies/goons/whoever who are in their country's compound rather than deployed in the field? Perhaps a taboo is being violated here?
The proposed mechanism of microwave or sonic waves is completely implausible, to the point of absurdity. The only way either could incur brain damage would be through either heat or mechanical stress, both of which would be readily apparent.
If this is a genuine issue then the mechanism is almost assuredly completely different, and personally I don't think it is some scary communist death ray that they would, for some reason, use on US and Canadian diplomats.
Unless the diplomats are all actually covert staff, in which case there would be a motive, but then some kind of chemical is much likelier.
This is IMO so implausible as to put the entire story into question. There is no way this is a microwave or sonic weapon. A microwave or sonic weapon could not cause occipital nerve damage so specific and without leaving any obvious traces of mechanical trauma and/or heat damage. It would also very probably be quite notioeable.
Physics degree. I find it plausible. Wave mechanics are strange. Several effects can produce surprisingly high energies at a distance: constructive interference (nodes) and cavity resonance. Phased arrays are modern ways to produce these effects. These are all phenomena being used for wireless power transfer with EM, I don't see why you would doubt on first principles that the same thing with sound (the skull being a resonant cavity). I mean, I would tend to prefer a biological/chemical explanation myself, but to say "physical implausible" is wrong, IMHO.
And this wouldn't be the first time the Russians designed something like this. There is that famous passively powered bugging of the American embassy in Moscow story, where they anticipated RFID technology, in the 60's.
The claim isn't EM in general, it's specifically microwaves or sonic waves.
Sonic waves would have to be of relatively low frequency in order to not be reflected or otherwise attenuated, so you would need low frequency waves, which, no matter what kind of interference you try to use, will never have effects moreso localized than the wavelength itself. If you were trying to get resonance with the skull at n<8, you'd be well within the audible range, too.
As for microwaves, the same issue is still there, I can't think of any interference pattern for waves of lambda>1mm that would somehow have effects that would have no detectable thermal characteristics yet be extremely localized to only a few specific parts of the brain.
Same for resonance, you'd need a wavelength comparable to the dimensions of the skull, and for that you couldn't have effects as localized as damaging only the optical nerve.
It's not out of the question that very high-powered microwaves could have some kind of electrical impact on the brain, but those impacts would not be localized to only the optical nerve and instead hit the entirety of the brain, and if you were able to get a machine that could create strong electrical currents throughout the brain the idea that this could happen enough to degrade a nerve without being somehow noticeable, for days to weeks is extremely implausible. Plus, a thin line would have not to be crossed where a lot of waste heat could be dumped in the room.
In all experiments done, effects were either wildly different or extremely rapid, and are thought to come from a completely different mechanism of rapid variations in temperatures causing physical vibrations. But again, this would need energies in the order of multiple watts applied to the human brain for quite a while, and would definitely be noticeable.
Not only that, but this would be incredibly easy to detect, you'd only need an antenna. The energies necessary for any of these effects are exceedingly high.
Wireless power transfer is done through magnetic induction, which is well understood. The range on wireless power transfer is very small. If this was a targeted attack, the device would have to be within a short range and be targeted at this specific individual.
And ultimately, what for? This agent appears to have retained their memory but can no longer work in the field. Why would this one field agent be so important to debilitate in this way? What benefit would Russia get from it?
I get the motivation behind killing people (dead men tell no tales), but inflicting migraines just seems useless.
Perhaps it's not that there's some property of physics that we don't understand, but some aspect of brain biology we don't understand. Perhaps exposure to electromagnetic fields of a certain type could cause progressive damage to the brain somehow. Obviously there's a lot of hysteria around "EM Sensitivity" but there seems to be something going on here and our knowledge of how the human brain works is still quite limited.
Perhaps. It would be exceedingly unlikely that no one knows this except for Cuba, Russia, and China, which were only politically connected from 65 years ago, and no one else.
Any plausible mechanism for how this could happen and not be happening in dozens of easily verifiable ways would either cause a lot of heat or be very easily detectable.
People seem to only accept mass hysteria as a thing that happened in the middle ages. Anybody who doesn't believe that contagious fears can cause serious physical symptoms in relatively normal people should look at the endless semi-recent coverage and video of puking, shaking, crying, and fainting fentanyl cops. This was something that was so widespread in the US police (I don't know if it spread worldwide) that the fact that it was just hysteria is so embarrassing to a wide variety of authority figures that it just stopped being covered and was pushed into the memory hole.
The reason the media seized on and perpetuated it (the bizarre rumor that touching something that had been invisibly stained with fentanyl would make you deathly ill) at the time was a combination of the law-and-order right insisting that the drug war was still vitally important, and the liberal left's concern for drug users during the "opiate epidemic" needing more official protection and care lest they be exposed to these Chinese-poisoned drugs. It worked for both sides, so was reported endlessly, and induced people all over the country to somatize.
Now, we have an anti-"Russian" narrative that can be attached to this that makes both the Democratic Party left and warhawks happy. I put Russian in scare quotes, because it's clearly a revival of anticommunism without the communism. Russia, Cuba, China...
re: @sudosysgen: "The proposed mechanism of microwave or sonic waves is completely implausible, to the point of absurdity .."
Very reasonable and well thought piece. It is highly irresponsible for of NPR talking up the next cold-war. But I figure without a foreign bogeyman to scare the American people, the spooks wouldn't be able to justify the budget.
Undiscovered bullshit. A wideband electromagnetic (or acoustical) detector is trivial to construct, especially if the levels are high enough to cause physical damage.
Undiscovered physics that somehow only Leninist states have their hands on? Which, in this case, would have to be discovered before the Sino-Soviet split of 1956, but not by anyone else?
Isn't it obvious? adjusts tinfoil cap The ruskies have figured out a way to attack anyone who has breathed in our freedom air. They pumped their censored/locked air with specific anti-freedom(terror loving) characters which causes immediate discomfort to our free minds. Freedom.
I suggest everybody to search the older news stories which quote the said “officer”. He seems to be very active in giving his opinions on many issues and, it appears to me, seeking media attention under any possible premise.
Often, the background story to a mystery is: there’s a motivation for presenting it as such.
It's widely acknowledged and understood that Russia is deploying some kind of acoustic weapon: the damage among multiple Cuban embassy staff has been quantified and described in medical journals.
All these recent attacks on the CIA and other government officials by Russians in Russia and elsewhere in Europe have just confirmed that they were behind the Cuba attacks, and some originally suspected.
Edit: Looking into the research, there are dissenting voices who believe that explanations other than a weapon are possible. But the authors of the two studies I saw published leaned toward some type of offensive weapon. After WMD debacle, I should be more careful with my conclusions.
> Subsequent studies of the affected diplomats in Cuba, published in the journal JAMA in 2018, found evidence that the diplomats experienced some form of brain injury, but did not determine the cause of the injuries.
The crickets may have just happened to be singing at the time.
Or some person had the brilliant idea of making a brain damaging weapon also produce cricket noises to send investigators down the wrong track.
maybe, but this isn't the first report of this. russia has been pulling this crap in several countries for several years now. Our Cuban embassy is making the news every six months for this same problem.
If you've been a ex-pat you will have seen it before, if you look.
Mass hysteria is about the health of populations. Often about stresses that are not necessarily obvious but also obvious.
Travel and living in a foreign country is stressful. (Havana syndrome)
Working in a factory on a low wage is stressful (mass fainting)
Sex Stuff (Penises stealing)
But while you ignore the real reason and blame something else, that's not good. It's why we still hurt witches for instance. Which you will see articles on HN that are witchcraft and people still believe them and worse people don't call them out as untrue.
As for defense, it seems that detecting full spectrum weapons requires highly specialized and expensive equipment. It may not be practical to deploy such equipment in the field.
As for treating the inflicted officers, it seems strange that our premier front line agency would not err on the side of caution and allow these patriots to receive treatment from Walter Reed. Could there be more to the story than DCI Haspel remaining skeptical as justification to decline such treatment?