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Comment by mandragon | Hacker News Reader

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?

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> it seems that detecting full spectrum weapons requires highly specialized and expensive equipment.

This is nonsense. If the power level is high enough to do damage, detecting it would be trivially easy.

Just a wire dipole, a diode, and a simple meter will do the job. At most it would require a set of dipoles to cover each band of interest.

Most radio hobbyists could make a set of dipoles from an a old coat-hanger in a few minutes.

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.

[1] https://patents.justia.com/patent/20080130790

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.

I don't suppose the embassy received any gifts of plaques recently? Is playing the Theremin a popular pastime among diplomats?

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.

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?

Parent comment still applies. A detector would be cheap, small, and could be issued to everyone on a team.

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?

I guess semiconductors are covering pretty high frequencies these days though(http://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/2019/may/knu_2...).

Terahertz doesn't penetrate walls particularly well but if they managed to get it to work, then that would be very interesting.

Yeah, also if anyone wants external proof of the concept:https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3214268

It's election season, and Russian hijinks are in vogue.

Remember, bog-standard corruption in Ukraine is a crazy conspiracy theory which should be banned from social media.

But mystical microwave illnesses? Very credible.

You have permission to re-engage your bullshit detector after all the votes are in.

What if the transmission was very short lived?

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.

What if it's focused/targeted at a specific window? Would a detector on the roof detect it?

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.

I think we've just solved detection and prevention in one go

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]

[1] https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/02/...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180802/07182740351/as-dn...

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.

Wouldn't such bullshit accusations just make him more of a legend in the NSA? It's not like they have a record of speaking honestly to the press.

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.

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