Where’s the part where they send a device to detect microwaves or sonic waves, and find them? How come it doesn’t occur to journalists to ask this? As per the article, they found the signal in Moscow, and there weren’t even symptoms to prompt them to do so. Another commenter mentioned “triangulation”. It’s less than that. There is no reported observation of a signal of any kind. History Channel “ghost hunters” are more serious than this.
> Prof Golomb says high levels of radiation were recorded by family members of personnel in Guangzhou using commercially available equipment. "The needle went off the top of the available readings." But she says the State Department told its own employees that the measurements they had taken off their own back were classified.
But that's the only mention of physical measurements in the entire long article. It should be relatively easy to equip a large number of potential targets with a handheld device capable of measuring and recording peak RF levels and that would at least allow the government to know whether or not it is on the right track. It does seem strange that this hasn't been done already and the whole thing remains just as mysterious now as when the public first heard about it.
“Off the top of the available readings” isn’t very helpful either, though; it may be the case that the upper limit of that experiment is far from an important level of radiation. A description of a “needle” is good visual persuasion but what does it mean really?
Yep, detecing microwaves is easy, and the equipment cheap and available to everyone (relatively cheap, compared to other stuff embassys buy). Depending on the frequency, it should be detectable even with $10 rtl-sdr sticks with direct sampling. I'm fairly sure that most electrical engineering students could find out if their dorm rooms were targeted by microwaves, so why not the embassy of one of the richest and most powerfull countries in the world?
Then the US government is also at fault for knowingly putting their employees in dangerous positions without their knowledge.
That's potentially worse, as it basically would mean the US is using the same techniques on god knows who else. The entire thing could have been friendly fire in that case.
Maybe somebody was playing with the current or future generation of the portable continuous wave generator we know the NSA has...Things got out of hand? Surely there is one deployed in each Embassy?
But that would be a plausible reason for why nobody gets to the bottom of this: they do find the source, but are immediately informed that it's a classified US weapon and they're not allowed to talk about it. Including telling their fellow US embassy employees who are experiencing headaches.
It's not uncontroversial at all that microwaving people leads to health problems (the article seems to act like that's a contested idea, it is not). The US also has microwave weapons, not secret at all, even approved for use on humans and apparently also used in the US prison system (did they get the paperwork for use on animals?).
Obviously, any CW-capable transmitter may be used for microwaving things, as long as it is sufficiently robust and outputs enough power somewhere in the GHz-range (preferentially). Within that range, anything works really. Penetration goes way down as you increase frequency, but that doesn't have to be a problem. The US Active Denial System uses 95 GHz radiation (at up to 100 kW) to selectively burn the upper 0.3 mm of skin, because this tends to discourage folks from sticking around, for example. This is also why microwaves are 2.4 GHz (besides this being an ISM band), it gives you just the right penetration depth to be quite useful at evenly cooking stuff.
Has anyone noticed this kind of sound at certain positions when swimming around a boat with it's radar on near shore?
Just anecdotal I don't know for sure, but I've experienced it a couple of times, at first thinking it was dolphins or whales, but it's more of a continuous noise and seems quite positional as if it is a reflection and superposition... pretty much all boats have some kind of radar that operate in the microwave frequency range, so it seems like a strong candidate for the source.
It wasn't so strong to be nauseating, just noticeable and weird sounding... then again I wasn't trying to sleep through it.
The explanation of why these cases are increasing is simple: mass hysteria caused by articles that pretend to investigate something they don't know anything about.
Interestingly enough in the unexplainable podcast episode a doctor suggested a functional disorder- when the brain reroutes itself and assumes it’s damaged when it’s not. It seemed to a layperson, myself, more reasonable than a superweapon deployed internationally that fucks with but doesn’t kill people.
A previously unknown functional disorder that stumps the government experts but this guy has figured it out, presumably from his armchair?
It seems to me that this is a person who thinks they can explain everything as a consequence of their field of expertise.
The biggest mystery to me is why the hell someone would do this. What are they gaining? Are they trying to frame someone else? Just disrupt operations? For the spy vs spy lulz?
Second biggest mystery is how they haven't just triangulated these. Someone in signals intelligence told me once that signal jamming is not a big problem on the battlefield because a signal jammer is also a bright RF beacon that says "shoot missile here." Seems like this should be the same. A microwave beam powerful or weirdly modulated enough to do this should also be an arrow that says "send camo dudes with big guns here." That's definitely going to happen if you are targeting the Vice President. Or maybe it did happen and it's secret.
This is why: “ Five years on, reports now number in the hundreds and, the BBC has been told, span every continent, leaving a real impact on the US's ability to operate overseas. ”
Exactly. Russia's modus operandi for dealing with the West is asymmetric warfare designed to interrupt, hamstring and confuse, without ever crossing the line into conventional warfare - which Russia cannot finance or win. This would fit neatly into that category, not that I have any idea of who is responsible. The point is that if there is an attacker, the motives are far from inscrutable.
For the second, I get the impression that this is less of a case of a building being bathed in EM radiation (as a jammer might) but (excuse my unscientific attempt at this description) several beams of EM radiation creating a superposition at their point of intersection in 3D space.
The latter case would be harder to triangulate as you'd need to have multiple detectors positioned along each beam line in order to determine the range of each emitter.
One reason to do this is to disrupt activities of foreign intelligence services, increase their paranoia, decrease their morale. The key is to do it randomly and not too often. That is under the assumption it's not a side-effect of surveillance tools, which would also be possible.
To give you a comparison, the East-German Stasi used to enter the homes of dissidents and do things like re-arranging towels, replacing fresh milk with rotten milk, etc. They also occasionally forced or convinced personal physicians to hand out the wrong medication to dissidents, worsening conditions of the patients or creating strange side-effects. They also radiated political detainees in prison to cause cancer. These were called Zersetzungsmaßnahmen.
I'd consider it credible that modern successors of the KGB like GRU and SRV, as well as related or allied agencies, could do something nefarious using technical equipment. That's why US agencies are investigating the reports, I guess.
Why would you test it this way? And to be clear, "this way" means all over the world in many different places but always from afar and usually without any obvious way for the distant operators to know what the effects are.
Surely you could either test it domestically or against low profile targets in situations where you could closely study the effects.
Many possible reasons. If Russia is behind this, it's a great proof of concept test of low traceable weapon that can target and disable high value targets of relatively high profile.
Yep, you test it on your own homeless people, so if you fuck up, noone finds out. If you target a powerfull enemy, you do that intentionally. And with all the speculation about microwaves, noone ever though to actually measure/detect them? EE collage students could do that, ham operators do that (and triangulate them) for fun and competition, and the USA/CIA/... couldn't?
Sometimes with these things I wonder if it might not be a marketing demonstration, sort of like how DDOS as a service providers used to try to take down GitHub to demonstrate their power to potential clients.
"Look at what we did to the US diplomatic corps! For only a few million or a few suitcases of cocaine you too can have this power to use against dissidents in your own country!"
Why do folks keep insisting it's microwaves that cause the illness when no one has found any physical evidence for that? This is just such a hysterical nonsense story in my opinion all meant to grab attention with nothing to show for it.
Od that Robert Baloh who with his colleague Robert Bartholomew has written a whole book on the subject - Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria - is only mentioned in passing. The author of the BBC article clearly believes that the microwave theory is more interesting than the mass psychogenic illness theory. I think it's embarrassing that mainstream media is selling this nonsensical story. If it was some Trumpist outlet pushing it, it would have been rightly deemed a baseless conspiracy theory.
I am a little bit skeptical about the microwave theory. The transmitters would have to be very powerful and very close by. Also, the signal would be very easy to detect with a cheap receiver. Since this problem seems to be around for a while, I would assume that embassies would be equipped with receivers.
why the downvotes? mass hysteria is the most likely explanation, and would still be even if you had evidence of a couple non-hysteria related cases (Such is the power of nocebos), but we don't even have that.
First, I don't know of any "brain damage"; and second, yes, it can result in brain damage. Simplest way, by inducing insomnia, but there are many others.
You’re absolutely right. One of the affected people claimed in an article that I read that they were attacked in the street in the middle of DC. If this tech exists and is really so portable, seems like you could do a lot more damage than just making some CIA and State Department employees retire early.
believe it or not, denying enemy spies from operating in a location, either directly, or via fear of direct action, is really useful for your own covert operations
This New Yorker article from May alleges that somebody was hit on the grounds of the White House, one of the most heavily surveilled areas of the world... it's really hard for me to accept that there is a secret, highly portable tech that leaves no clear evidence and this is how it's being used.
Why would you assume that we would hear anything if the sensors were tripped? It would be considered an act of war and would promote real hysteria in the general population if that were the case. It’s far more plausible that it was an attack that is being covered up for national security purposes.
If it’s safe to pretend it’s not happening than it isn’t a useful attack. If they can detect it, they should be able to apply some kind of countermeasure, shielding or (if necessary) threat or sanction.
This 1000%. I have been following this story closely and there has been no evidence of anything happening except symptomatic reports from government staff. It is all paranoia about Russian brain rays. Incredible.
I say something like this every time I see a Havana syndrome article, but their summaries of the US National Academies of Sciences report is just ridiculous.
>The panel looked at psychological and other causes, but concluded that directed, high energy, pulsed microwaves were most likely responsible for some of the cases,
The panels ruling on a psychological cause was basically "all the available evidence fits it being a psychological cause, but as we didn't specifically test for that we can't rule it's the cause." How they completely ignored that and ruled microwaves the most likely cause is a mystery.
It is not a mystery, the media is creating a narrative, and acknowledging this fact would prevent them from continuing this narrative that seems to be profitable. Now, millions of people around the world believe in the existence of a mysterious "Havana syndrome", and will continue reading articles that try to "investigate" it.
But a psycological cause wouldnt result in the damage found on the victims, right?
Didn't one doctor who examined some of these people describe damage that looked like "a concussion without a concussion"? I.e. damage to the brain you'd see on people who had conxussions, but they experienced no physical trauma?
>But a psycological cause wouldnt result in the damage found on the victims, right?
A psychological cause absolutely could have physical effects. It'd be really hard to develop an ethical experiment to test if these specific injuries could have a psychological cause, but other damage has had such a cause.
Also, like two people had concussion like brain scans without knowing they had a concussion. They could have just unknowingly had a concussion, it's not like they had brain scans before and after the "attack" to compare.
This would have been part of the evidence the panel ruled could fit a psychological cause anyway.
That article was much more informative than I thought it would be, there's some interesting background on previous public research on the topic of microwaves, but what was completely new to me was the fact that such cases go back decades.
Slight off topic, but I do see a bit of a parallel between medical teams claiming that those are psychogenic illnesses and the way "long covid" has been considered by some practicians. There's a bit of "if we can't measure it, you must be (unconsciously) making it up". It's rationally convenient.
In the "Havana Syndrome" case, the article claims that some blood markers have been found recently that correlate with brain damage (as long as measurements are done immediately), which certainly helps. But the mix of secrecy inherent to diplomacy and classical governmental bureaucracy makes considering it psychogenic a very satisfying solution to push the problem aside for years.
