Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 222 posts

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#81

Post by sudosysgen »

tyingq wrote: post #78
lolc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At intensities that would injure, you light up the whole neighbourhood with scattered radiation. There's no hiding this attack from a sensor in the vicinity.

The math would be interesting to see. I haven't seen a directed energy antenna, but you can easily drop 9db with single digit degrees off target with a big dish.

9dB is really not a lot. If you're going to be sending 10kW+ of radiation 9dB of directionality still means you're gonna light up the whole neighborhood.

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#82

Post by pigscantfly »

adwi wrote: post #40
candiodari wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the problem with this sort of attitudes is that governments constantly lie. In a number of cases this is explainable. For instance, one way we do nuclear weapon containment is by lying about certain properties of Uranium (and of course mostly lie about lying, and of course, most researchers don't think it's particularly effective. While you need uranium to find the correct values, uranium + an old tv can tell you…

> one way we do nuclear weapon containment is by lying about certain properties of Uranium (and of course mostly lie about lying, and of course, most researchers don't think it's particularly effective. What is being lied about, and what is its truth?

It sounds to me like GP is hinting that the rate of particle emission for a given mass of uranium (maybe just the more fissile U-235?) is deliberately misreported in the literature. The way people originally determined that value experimentally was to count the light flashes produced over a period of time by a source of ionizing radiation placed at one end of a vacuum tube. I'm not a physicist, so hopefully someone can correct me if I'm barking up the wrong tree here.

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#83

Post by totalZero »

jasonhansel wrote: post #47

A question: why doesn't the government just expose Havana syndrome sufferers to various frequencies of microwaves and ask if it "sounds the same" as the sonic attacks? That would seem like a good way of ruling it out as a possibility.

Apart from that being destructive testing, my guess is that the first time you burn something feels different than the second time you burn it. So you may well end up doing more damage without obtaining conclusive results.

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#84

Post by totalZero »

bigbillheck wrote: post #73
tediousdemise wrote: post #61

During Obama’s term, US-Cuba relations dramatically improved, with fewer travel restrictions and other dealings. Cuba was on track to having the embargo removed. The “microwave attack” story came out in mid-2017 when Trump was in office. Travel restrictions came back and foreign relations languished. It’s trivially easy to blame a nation state for an attack, and then use it as excuse to end political support, agreeme…

The only 'transgression' Cuba's done is its unwillingness to be a US puppet state.

Cuba isn't exactly Switzerland. It has a long history of being a Soviet puppet state during the 20th century, and a nucleation site for anti-US activities elsewhere in Latin America. Furthermore, there would be no Maduro regime without the influence of Cuba, and that regime is expressly pro-Russia and destructive to Venezuela.

Let's not distill away the complexity of the situation.

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#85

Post by tediousdemise »

sneak wrote: post #75

My favorite theory (I think from an HN comment?) about Havana syndrome is simple poisoning. It fits the observed symptoms better than magic, wall-jumping microwaves.

Food poisoning makes sense. I got a bad case of Moctezuma’s revenge[0] when I visited Cuba a few years ago.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Montezuma%27s%20r...

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#87

Post by 252452d »

bArray wrote: post #28

Are microwave attacks something that is proven to exist? Can we replicate the effects on mice from some distance? Given the fact they pass through walls, this kind of bounds the frequency range the attacks could exist in... I would expect to see radio interference on nearby devices, etc (even if operating on a different frequency). I wouldn't be entirely surprised if these could be self-manifesting symptoms from peop…

Yes, it is possible to create the perception of sound and even distinct words in the mind of a targeted individual.

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#88

Post by avaldes »

Why media and government keep calling them "attacks"? If three letters agencies are so eager to call them attacks I suppose they know how that would work and they have similar tech right? If so, is there any documented case of "washington syndrome" in russian/chinese/iranian diplomats? (Sorry for my english)

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#89

Post by whereis »

There's been much skepticism in recent years about whether microwaves were the cause of these officers' conditions.

This news confirms that govt agencies are taking the microwave theory seriously as a confirmed explanation for these conditions. It's reasonable to agree with the conclusion at this point.

Re: Havana syndrome: NSA officer’s case hints at microwave attacks since 90s

#90

Post by ArnoVW »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #68
jchook wrote: post #30

The USSR irradiated the US embassy in Moscow with microwaves from 1953 to 1979. Later analysis showed virtually no health impacts and no increase in mortality. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30676008/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509929/

I just finished "The Spy in Moscow Station" which talks about these signals. Although this isn't a direct response to your point about mortality, an interesting feature of the Moscow (Microwave) Signal is that it -- considered as a surveillance threat, rather than a health threat -- also received a lot of the same skepticism I'm seeing in this thread. The TL;DR is that various agencies strongly resisted attempts to d…

I imagine the conclusion of the book was that the microwave was used to send energy to a listening device inside the ambassy? (same technology as the contactless smart cards used in public transport)

A famous instance of this is 'the thing' :

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
Post reply on HN