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Comment by libria | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are you referring to The Great Seal Bug?

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

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?

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

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