US diplomats mysteriously go deaf, Cuba suspected of using sonic weapons | Hacker News Reader

US diplomats mysteriously go deaf, Cuba suspected of using sonic weapons

independent.co.uk

172 pointsabhi3131 comments

Something similar happened to the US Embassy in Moscow. The Soviets smuggled a tiny, unpowered antenna inside and were able to eavesdrop on conversations by bathing the embassy in microwave radiation.

During this period, some of the staff reported feeling nausea, some were found to have notably elevated white blood cell counts, and Ambassodors Stoessel, Thompson and Bohlen later died of cancer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

If you find that interesting, here's a fascinating article about the role the Dutch played in the whole thing:

https://thecorrespondent.com/3789/operation-easy-chair-or-ho...

for a modern take on this, check out this NSA tool that uses RF to illuminate a VGA monitor cable bug:

https://leaksource.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/nsa-ant-ragem...

That's really cool! Thanks for the link.

What would the transmit range on something like that be?

There's no evidence that nonionizing radiation like microwaves can cause cancer. I think that was probably more likely due to the fact that everyone back then smoked about 4 packs a day.

At safe levels, sure. But at ultra-extreme levels it might.

But you're right, smoking probably killed them

Non-ionizing radiation does kill at ultra-high level, but not through cancer, just plain old burning. That's exactly what your microwave over does.

Plus that bug was a backscatter radio. It didn't actually emit radio waves on its own, it just resonated in response to a carrier wave. The Soviets had to illuminate it with a 330 MHz radio signal from outside, but that's not ionizing.

If you look at the design of said device (invented by Lev Sergeivich Termen aka Leo Theremin), you'll suspect that it will require a pretty powerful microwave beam to work.

[Probably] not enough to cause any harm. RF isn't dangerous until it is powerful enough to cause local heating and obviously this wasn't that powerful. I can't really find much info on how much power Theremin's bug took, but modern backscatter radios usually operate at very low power, at the level of ambient RF from normal radio etc but can transmit 10 km or more. Based on other designs I've seen I suspect it wouldn't actually take much, though that is just an educated guess.

One guy had pancreatic cancer and another guy had leukemia, if I googled the right people.

Doesn’t sound like cigarettes?

According to German cancer society, leukemia is associated with smoking but majority of leukemia cases cannot be attributed to a specific cause (https://www.krebsgesellschaft.de/onko-internetportal/basis-i...), and 25% of pancreatic cancers attributed to smoking, with alcohol abuse greatly increasing the risk (https://www.krebsgesellschaft.de/onko-internetportal/basis-i...).

Smoking (and excessive drinking) kills in many ways... and if your family has a cancer history, risk is even higher. Wonder how long I'll live, a relative died after years of battling liver, lung and other cancers due to smoking+drinking.

I had to look this up because it was so crazy and interesting - but sadly (er, well, you know what I mean), the link between microwave radiation and cancer is questionable both biologically and historically. The historical evidence (mortality/morbidity of employees at the Moscow Embassy vs. other Eastern European embassies, or comparisons based on how long employees spent in Moscow, or comparisons based on estimated exposure to the microwave radiation) suggests no adverse affects from radiation.[1] And in general the idea that microwave radiation (emitted by cell phones/towers, wifi, etc.) causes cancer is not supported by the evidence.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509929/

Are you referring to The Great Seal Bug?

CF. → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

I would assume it's been standard practice since then to do regular scans for electromagnetic interference?

Radiation causes a drop in white blood cell counts, not a rise. Nausea only occurs at extremely high doses. Microwaves cause none of those symptoms.

Interesting one. I remember I went to the local One Stop with my son - he was about 15 at the time. He couldn't bear standing outside - he said the noise was unbearable. I said "what noise"?

Apparently they used some kind of sonic device that emits sound that can only be heard by teenagers, and it was incredibly effective - they wouldn't hang around outside the shop more than a moment longer than necessary. I do wonder whether it caused any damage though?

One Stop was later bought by Tesco and they got rid of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mosquito

Teens also have used this frequency as a ringtone in class as most teachers couldn't hear it.

The cell phone ringtone didn't make sense to me when people started using it. Sure, the teachers can't hear it, but they can see an entire class wince simultaneously.

Plus, there's a lot of teachers in their 20s who can hear it just fine.

The whole class may have winced, but I guess it'd be harder for the teacher to pinpoint where the sound came from.

There's no reason to wince - it's just a sound. The wincing is caused by the volume.

Perhaps it was a flinch? I find the tones on this site I found[0] highly unpleasant to listen to at any volume. The ringtones I was hearing were no louder than any other, but I know I recoiled on hearing them.

[0] https://www.ultrasonic-ringtones.com/. Unsurprisingly, I can't hear above 17k anymore. I'm not terribly upset.

In my high school, very strong peer pressure was applied to anyone who tried this as it was generally considered excessively annoying.

For my part, I used a Morse code ringtone that happened to sound similar to the howling noise the radiators made, which everyone had learned to simply tune out.

I (31m) can hear high frequencies

- Last night, an ecigarette's capacitor/resistor (from 20 feet off)

- Home Depot has high frequency bird detractors

- A friend has a heart condition and a phone addon to help manage it.

- TVs w/ bad speakers/signals/lighting

- Some fluorescent lights.

The worst part is that it hurts, it's like nails on chalkboard you feel it inside when it happens, almost debilitating, and definitely hurts the balance.

35 here. I can still pick up the flyback transformer whine of a CRT, electronic fluorescent ballasts (really horrid in the induction ones) and inverters in laptops/LCDs using CCFL backlighting. It used to not be so bad, but then people stopped potting their coils in the name of saving money...

Wow! that comment takes me way back to when I could tell a CRT was about to go bad because of the sound of the flyback transformer leaking ! :)

A few years back I had a monitor at work where I complained to my boss that it was emitting a high pitched whine. I was about 10 years younger than anyone else on the team, and no one else could hear it. The PC technician I called to look at it couldn't hear it. Needless to say it didn't get replaced, that is until we got a summer intern. The first time the intern walked past my desk she asked "how can you stand that sound?" and I had her go to my boss to say the same thing. My boss got another intern from another team to listen and confirm, and I got a replacement the next week.

It's one of those sounds you can never drown out, it's such a unique frequency.

Advice for next time: you don't have to depend on a human's word. You can use a real-time analyzer [1], now available in smartphone apps. They display the frequency spectrum of ambient noise.

We had a similar situation at our office, were the smoke detector was emitting a steady whine that only a few employees (including me) could hear. One skeptic was finally convinced by getting out an RTA app and seeing the big spike at 12 kHz.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_analyzer

Wow, 12 kHz is not audible to most adults? That's pretty surprising.

I don't know the percentiles by age (it's hard to find from googling). Just saying that that one fortysomething adult couldn't hear it.

When I checked this, as a fun experiment to do with kids (they love "winning" this game, after all), is that yes while I'm technically able to hear 15-16 kHz, there's a very steep drop-off in sensitivity already quite a bit below that. I needed to turn up the volume on a pure sine-wave quite high (which the kids hated immediately) to be able to hear it somewhat clearly.

So if you add in ambient noise (in lower frequencies), that could plausibly drown out a 12 kHz noise very well, for older adults (I'm mid 30s myself).

Interesting side-note: Turns out that the low end drop-off (at about 20-25 Hz or so) is not very age-dependent at all (at least when I tested these "against" a 13-year old's hearing). You need quality headphones for this, most speakers will distort/resonate some higher frequency harmonics, which you can always clearly hear. It was very interesting to hear something that was clearly a very very low frequency tone turn into a sort of rapidly fluttering/beating sensation at the cross-over frequency, you can feel it beating slightly on your eardrums, but it doesn't translate into a "tone-like" sensation any more.

And yes we made sure to not do it for more than a few seconds, to not accidentally cause hearing damage--though with good closed headphones we didn't need to turn it that high, as the effect wasn't so much that the perception of the tone "disappeared", rather change into a different type of sensation.

Should have tried changing the refresh rate.

I'm the same way...cheap phone chargers, etc

- CRT tvs/monitors

- This battery charger for a drill I have

Some TI-83 calculators are audible, mostly for special keys like "programs", "apps", and maybe "clear" if memory serves.

I'm the same way.

In middle school, I was sent to the principal's office because I complained to the teacher about a painful noise and the teacher thought I was just being disruptive. There it was determined that the "silent" alarm had gone off.

I also get it when touching some glass surfaces as there's a high-pitched squeak. My parents just accused me of trying to get out of doing the dishes.

Watching the movie 'Baby Driver' was torture. In his attempt to convey to the audience what it was like to live with tinnitus, the director made the film nearly unbearable to people like us.

There's just so many instances where people who can't hear these frequencies ignore the consequences for those that can. And then they disbelieve that anyone's hearing is substantively different than their own.

Interestingly, my tinnitus IS that sound. I can hear up to about 17 kHz and it is still higher than that. Which sucks, since all the available retraining and masking techniques assume you must be able to hear within the range of your T.

Your friend had something like an AliveCor Kardia and you could hear it?

Male, 25, can hear cheap phone chargers and on my crappy old Windows laptop I don't need the CPU monitor to see if it is loaded - just gotta listen and I hear the whine of the CPU voltage regulators. Even worse are old-ish laptop chargers in quiet environments.

Commonly known as "Mosquito alarms" they emit high frequencies that adults have lost the ability to hear. I've never read a study that showed they cause permanent hearing loss, especially in adults, but it's unlikely someone would be exposed to them for long (vs the hypothesis here, that the diplomats were continually undergoing exposure).

That's the Mosquito Anti Loitering Device

http://www.movingsoundtech.com/

It a high frequency that only young ears can hear that sounds like the whine of a mosquito. Old ears lose frequency range so aren't bothered. It's not harmful, just annoying.

These devices still bother my ears even at 37.

Same here, we encountered one in Tokyo and I had to run away. My (younger) friends all thought I was crazy until I sent them the link to the device months later.

That was my son's reaction - he couldn't get out of there fast enough!

At a sufficient volume, the sound would be damaging the ears even if it's above the frequency that you can hear.

Hopefully they'd make it so even cranked to 11 it couldn't hurt anyone.

For a manufacturer it's not as cut-and-dry. The damage caused is a factor of the level (dB) received combined with the length of exposure. Assumptions will have to be made as to how far away the user will be from the device and how long they can reasonably be expected to be exposed.

For example, if you assume that someone will be under it for 8 hours (an employee during a work day), the OSHA approved exposure is 90dB, which will likely not be annoying enough to serve its purpose.

90db is pretty loud and will totally wreck your hearing, which makes the situation kind of messed up because workers might not even know they're being exposed to this sound.

That doesn't seem physically possible since it's based on sound pressure waves.. From your link, mk1 uses 85 db set volume; mk2 uses ambient noise level + 5db.

It's disgraceful to use such a device that deliberately targets the young. I can hear it and it's a annoying as shit and I'm 32. AFAIK they have now been thankfully been banned in the UK/Ireland.

In London, TFL has found the same effect can be hard without some discrimination by playing classical music.

That will drive off the young street punks. But instead you'll have a bunch of old codgers setting up their checker tables, hanging out for hours complaining about their problems, and pining for the good old days.

That's my retirement plans anyway.

At Oval Station (next to the cricket ground), they have an entertaining anti-loitering strategy: they play classical music. I seem to be immune to its deterrent effect, though.

I have heard one of these in San Francisco, CA in the USA. The music had a really high pitched note behind it that sounded horrible.. like a cross between a mosquito and the buzzing of an input jack

If anyone's curious about their hearing range, try the example sound files here:

http://www.noiseaddicts.com/2009/03/can-you-hear-this-hearin...

14khz here :)

I find it hard to pinpoint. 14kHz is pretty clear, 15kHz very faint and 16kHz gets uncomfortable when I turn the volume up but otherwise not really audible. Anything beyond that I only hear the clipping at the start and end with nothing in between.

16 KHz clear but annoying. Nothing at 17 kHz.

18khz, I'm 21

Keep in mind that it's a common misconception that if you're exposed to noise or loud music, you'll lose hearing at the highest frequencies first. Hearing loss due to noise exposure tends to be centered around 4 KHz ("noise notch") -- you lose the higher frequencies with age (presbycusis).

Of course normal computer headphones or speakers aren't a great test for this, since their frequency response rarely goes that high. Especially the samples >20kHz, since that's beyond the normal range of human hearing. Even high-quality headphones won't play high-frequency sounds, the -3dB (half power) cutoff is generally about 20kHz. Having it higher can allow the headphones/speakers to produce unpleasant harmonics, so good devices are built to damp out such high-frequency resonances.

That's not high tech. That's literally just a device constantly emitting a high pitched beep.

As you grow older, your hearing degrades. Especially if you subject yourself to loud noises or loud music (e.g. almost any live concert). The beep the device emits is just outside the hearing range of most adults (kinda like the hum old CRTs sometimes gave off).

Unless it's extremely loud it won't cause any damage, and it's less harmful if you can't hear it (because not hearing it means your ears can't pick it up in the first place) but I wonder if there are concerns about noise pollution.

There's more to this story. Hearing loss is one issue, but Cuban intelligence will do random things to US diplomats just to mess with them. From what I understand, families of diplomats have been sent back to the US because of the problems. One story I've heard from a reliable source is that they'll break in to your home while you're out and shave your cat, just to remind you they're watching, among a myriad of other things.

Hm.

Sounds better than russians, who defecated in living room.

> Breaking in to diplomats’ residences and leaving “calling cards” such as rearranging the furniture or leaving lights on. Nothing is taken, leaving no doubt that it was not a robbery. In one case, the US defense attache’s pet dog was killed; in another, an intruder defecated on a diplomat’s living room carpet

https://qz.com/914634/the-tactics-russian-intelligence-uses-...

Killing a man's dog should be a capital offense.

Cops in the US kill dogs every day.

https://puppycidedb.com/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/what-do...

Curious, I'll be interested to hear what the root cause is if they publish that information.

I played around with 'ultrasonic projection' for a bit, which involved two ultrasonic emitters that were emitting the same carrier wave, then the phase of one gets modulated by an audio signal. At the point where the two beams can be heard at the same time, you get the classic mixing effect where the interference between the two beams is the audible input signal. That "projected" the sound (or transmitted depending on your definition) to a remote location without the intervening folks hearing it. Of course to make it work you need pretty strong carriers and that has the effect of deafening you even if you can't hear it.

Thinking about that experiment though I wonder if you shot a high power beam at a window if you could use the resonance to pull off audio without having a tell tale laser bouncing off of the window. (mix the reflected ultrasonic signal with the echo to extract any modulation from the window).

And all of that has me wondering if it would be useful to create an inaudible sound detector / meter to let you know there was a sound around you that you couldn't hear.

Wow. This sounds horrifying. I have mild tinnitus that causes me endless grief (a lot of it mental: "I'll never be able to enjoy my music properly", but also trouble sleeping.)

This is just many levels worse. And bizzare! What possible gain could you derive from harming some poor sods who are only there to do a job?

They could be testing out a weapon, perhaps not for military applications per se, but for spycraft and special operations.

Sure would be convenient to storm a guarded compound if all the guards were suddenly deaf. Similarly, it would be nice to use something like this as a perimeter fence of sorts. Slow exposure over time would eventually deafen the spies you suspect are surveilling your place.

The theory that the Russians were behind this, and not necessarily the Cubans, seems plausible if indeed this was a weapons test. Russia conducts a lot more SpecOps missions around the globe than Cuba does.

Yeah but you generally wouldn't test something like this on high-level diplomats, right? You'd test it where there would be no press if it worked.

You might want to try some of those :

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/neuromodulationTonesGenera...

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteBurstsNoiseGenerator....

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/impulseNoiseGenerator.php

https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/whiteNoiseGenerator.php

I also find that playing a tone that is similar to my tinnitus for a while and then turning it off helps my brain to ignore the tinnitus. I use http://onlinetonegenerator.com/ and set it around 4020 Hertz

Even better, this free implementation of Acoustic Neuromodulation which seems to work on most people with tonal tinnitus : http://generalfuzz.net/acrn/

I don't want to draw too much attention to it though : it's probably infringing on a patent by the original researchers, who sell the official treatment device for a fortune.

You can get the same frequencies pattern in the first link that I linked if you click on "Try the original sequence — Neural Hack" in the text or if you set all the slider to 0 except for the yellow one.

The website recommends : "Use this sound generator as you like. It probably makes sense not using all sliders at the same time. Start with all sliders set to zero, then select the slider(s) that mask or blend with your tinnitus best. Set their levels to the minimum setting, mixing to your tinnitus so you can just hear it. You will then achieve the most efficient masking sound and the lowest fatigue. When using all the sliders, make sure to try the Animation feature, set to its maximum speed. The effect is interesting."

Yeah, except that the frequency pattern for ACRN needs to be centered around each person's particular tinnitus frequency, which the mynoise generator doesn't allow.

I love mynoise though, when I'm fed up with ACRN this generator does a pretty good job too : https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/windchimesGenerator.php

Or you could try the "Reddit Tinnitus Cure" (https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/63etps/the_reddit_t...) and tell us if it worked for you!

Sadly this never worked for me.

myNoise generators require a considerable amount of bandwidth. In order to keep the service running for an increasing number of users, non contributing visitors are restricted to one full sound every minute. This limit has been reached.

Kind of funny. Tone generators: the biggest bandwidth hog.

I have it as well and will say that the issue IS that grief which causes sensitization ie your amygdala remodelling in response to it. Once you overcome it emotionally you won't care about it at all. I still hear it 24/7 but it doesn't make me unhappy or make my life worse in any way.

I'd really recommend you treat it like psychosomatic problem vs a sensory one.

Have you tried the Reddit tinnitus cure yet?

https://youtu.be/ajb37ie-Juo

"US investigators have concluded that the country's diplomats were being hit with an advanced device that can send out sound that is inaudible but can cause huge damage to the ears of a person around them, which appears to have been left either inside or near the diplomats' houses"

So is this an actual device they found or is it something they theorized existed? Does this technology exist now? If so, that is unsettling!

Sounds that you can't hear can hurt your ears. There is nothing new there and creating such a device would be pretty easy.

I did not know that! It looks like anything greater than 120dB could be entirely inaudible and can lead to hearing loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasound#Safety

You are misquoting the article linked, greater than 120db is definitely audible depending on the frequency and the listener. Even at the frequencies they mention (25k being the highest), those are still audible to many humans (myself included).

Even when not audible this high air pressure would be painful.

I wouldn't be 100% certain but yes, it seems unlikely that sound could damage the part of the ear that is stimulated by the given frequency without you hearing it.

It's kind of a weird story. A bunch of people lose their hearing and the first and only thought is mystery weapon? There are a lot of things, including many common medications and infections that can cause hearing loss.

I wonder if they know more or less than reported

"Does this technology exist now?"

Oh, yeah, easily. You could quite easily put together such a device yourself. Just put out a 130dB noise for someone in a frequency they can't hear. You can still damage their hearing.

You can play the same game really easily with eyes, too. Put out a very, very bright light in some parts of the UV spectrum and the eye completely can't detect it, won't even close the pupil, but it'll still be damaged/destroyed. You may recognize this as "the reason why the tell you to be very careful during eclipses".

I can't guarantee someone hasn't found some new "advanced" spin on this, so maybe it is an "advanced" device, but the simple case is trivial.

If you break into someone's home with the intention of causing irreparable damage, why not just poison them? What's the point of using a fancy high tech device?

Anyhow, it sounds like a device you can't hear can damage your hearing. It also looks like a device you can't see may damage your vision.

(Edit: Got downvoted, oh come-on, you guys can't take a dad-joke)

A $10 PCB is so much simpler than poison. Easier to acquire, safer (for the attacker) to store and deliver, harder to recognize as a weapon (think wifi router case). And perhaps most importantly, you can include a remote kill switch in case you need to abort the op or temporarily evade an inspection.

Wow, this actually is quite horrifying. Makes me want to go full cyborg.

> "you can include a remote kill switch"

Just don't label it "kill switch" or people will get very confused.

Many years of cartoon villains has taught me that including self-destruct buttons on any of your devices will typically cause them to be used prematurely.

And not one of those villains ever thought to trap the button. Pull to disarm, push to receive flashbang.

Hearing is different in that mechanical transduction pathway and even low frequency cilia can be damaged by air pressure that is not detected as sound. However, the damage itself would be painful and even high frequency pressure of this kind could be felt as weird sensation on skin.

Sure, it wouldn't make sense that this would be intentional - it's more likely that the ultrasound (if it's the cause) would be used for something else, e.g. exfiltrating information out of a secure room or as part of some kind of eavesdropping system.

Also people should be careful using UV EPROM erasers

Some of the comments:

> Syphilis, if not treated in time, can cause damage to hearing. That is the most plausible explanation.

> Come on, isn't high tech USA capable of detecting high frequency sound?

And what sense would make for Cuba to invent something like that, and then use it to annoy its biggest enemy so far?

Those are really good points. To borrow from the saying, I'd sooner believe that

a) diplomats to a poor country engaged in risky off-books behavior,[1] than that

b) the same poor country deployed bleeding-edge sonic weapons against foreign VIPs during a sensitive, once-in-a-lifetime reopening of relations.

[1] Edit: okay, never mind; syphillis takes way too long for that to happen. Still, b) is very unlikely and needs a lot more evidence before we believe it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14980882

Bleeding edge? This is just a loud speaker system.

Remember, it's a system that they can't trivially detect with audio equipment that shows that "yep, loud sound with high frequency in that room".

The Cuban regime is despicable, but I don't see what they have to gain by targeting diplomats -- particularly US diplomats.

I'm inclined to believe the theory that the damage is inadvertent.

Perhaps it was not government sponsored, but rather an attack by one or more local extremists, of some sort.

Guerrilla radio? Not rebels, decibels.

Often diplomats are spies that operate in a country under diplomatic cover; perhaps Cuba wanted to frustrate suspected spying?

Perhaps a third party not wanting to see better US/Cuba relations?

I wonder if this was deliberate?

It could be some kind of spy device, for example an ultrasonic mapping device, inadvertently caused hearing loss.

I am not in the industry, but just off hand testing a crazy spy device on embassy staff of another country, on your home turf, in a way they would notice it would seem to sort of let the cat out of the bag.

Maybe they got what they wanted but it seems like it would be strange to test it like this, particularly when the folks using it might be easily identified (assuming it is Cuba).

> testing a crazy spy device

I can imagine they had probably tested it well beforehand, just never done extended tests to discover that it caused hearing loss.

This sounds less like sonic weapons and more like faulty equipment nearby. US diplomats have been gone from Cuba for decades are now only coming back within the last year.

There are lots of devices which emit sounds just outside the human hearing frequency range.

For example, most mobile phone power supplies emit a lot of noise around 25kHz (and a few which are faulty drop down below 18kHz and become audible to young people).

I wonder what hearing issues all these devices together might cause?

When my phone is full and still on the charger, the whine is intolerable. Three chargers so far have done this. Not sure if it is the same thing. I consider my hearing sub par and I'm in my mid thirties.

"Coil whine": Look for chargers which don't have this problem. I've heard that Anker has chargers without this problem though I have not used them and can not, therefore, personally vouch for them.

I've never had this trouble with Apple chargers. I've also heard good reports of Anker products, but never tried them myself.

In extremis, you can open up a charger and pot the coils yourself with hot glue, epoxy, or some other nonconductive polymer. Just be sure to disconnect it from power first, lest you inadvertently get your own batteries charged.

Wow, I've never noticed before that my phone charger makes noise when my phone is fully charged, huh. (Thankfully I can only hear it if my ear is within 1 foot of the charger.)

Perhaps an overly powerful carrier wave for a passive acoustic bug e.g. a non-RF version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device) ?

I'm wondering if very low or very high frequencies are used. Either way you could probably build a detector that emits an audible alarm once such frequencies are detected at high intensities.

Are whales and fish suffering similarly due to extreme noise in the oceans?

Very low frequencies would still be detectable by humans.

You'd get complaints of "my building is shaking" before any hearing loss.

Some evidence suggests sonar may have negative effects on marine mammals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_mammals_and_sonar

One thing not specified in the article (unless I missed something)...is this permanent hearing loss, or temporary?

I presume this is very low-frequency sonar that could therefore penetrate walls. They wanted to know whether the diplomats were at home, so they could enter and explore, plant bugs, etc at will. Including planting very small bugs in clothes that would be worn to work, probably.

Three words:

MKULTRA electronic warfare.

This program tested many electronic devices to annoy target subjects.

The russian also had their own, google the "LIDA Machine" (also patented in the US).

Cui bono?

The US? Cuba? Russia?

> You could quite easily put together such a device yourself. Just put out a 130dB noise for someone in a frequency they can't hear.

Or Real Soon Now™ you'll just be able to buy a uBeam

Please don't post snarky comments about flamewar topics.

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14980809 and marked it off-topic.

A bunch of married men contract STD that goes untreated for obvious reasons sounds a lot more plausible then Russia testing out its new weapon on our diplomats.

Anyone know if any of the diplomats were female?

What STDs make you deaf without any other issues?

Only severe late stage syphilis could do that from my understanding

Syphilis only causes hearing loss in its tertiary stage, if at all.

It takes years or decades to get to that stage, and it's impossible to get that far without experiencing other, serious symptoms first.

So, no: the chances of this being Syphilis is 0%.

Syphilis or oxycontin use?

You think a diplomat wouldn't be able to get medical treatment in a discreet manner?

What the hell. What possible good for Cuba could this do? (Don't answer that, none, it's time to accept the post-war era is here and you should get your power-game urges out in a video game)

However, I think you could make something to pinpoint high-pitch sounds relatively easily (< $200) and get a little more conclusive evidence.

There are lots of things that can cause hearing loss but I think the most illogical reason would be some sort of high-tech spying device or weapon. That's just silly.

A more reasonable explanation would be tropical diseases:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4222184/

My money's on West Nile Virus (WNV) because it can be completely asymptomatic until you suffer hearing loss. Since WNV has been detected in Cuba (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16707068) it seems plausible.

Then plain old opiate/heroin usage:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21586255

...but it's not like we have an opioid epidemic or anything!

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