Scientists Believe US Embassy and CIA Officers Hit with High-Power Microwaves | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Believe US Embassy and CIA Officers Hit with High-Power Microwaves

scitechdaily.com

37 pointspaulyg17 comments

When I worked in radar, the people in the transmitter lab had little, hand held, microwave detectors as an additional layer of safety. If a wave guide hadn't been assembled correctly and was leaking microwaves, they would be warned before they were cooked. This was 1980. Such gadgets should be very cheap today.

Given the history, with the Great Seal Bug

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

I would expect plenty of monitoring; it is cheap and easy.

We appear to be right back to the original explanation, an exposure to high-energy microwaves. I'd be curious to know if this is clearly an attack, or if this 'Frey effect' could happen accidentally because of nearby microwave transmission or similar?

What about misused or defective radio equipment ? I guess that they have powerful microwave sat equipment, in there. This is a more reasonable explanation then mysterious "death ray" that, anyway, should be detectable and traceable with the right equipment, in case someone want to prove its existence. Moreover, what's the logic in creating a gratuitous diplomatic incident and possibly cause reprisals against the responsible ? IMHO , this story is the perfect click bait so nobody want to consider more logic and simple explanations.

What I don't get about this explanation is that I'd expect high-profile embassies to be at least monitored for radio activity or even shielded against it.

But maybe I'm just expecting too much vigilance here.

The couple of stories I read in detail happened at/near employee houses, not at the embassy.

Ah, that explains it. Obviously it's hard to protect against this outside.

IIUC, the microwave bursts are extremely directional, so you can’t really monitor for this effectively. Similarly, it’s bit unrealistic to cover the entire embassy in thick steel (and have no windows).

Such an attack cannot be hidden from detectors in the vincinity. There is far too much energy in the air for an antenna not to pick up on diffused and reflected emissions.

On the other hand a fine, grounded mesh will protect just fine against such attacks. Even in windows. Look up IEMI shielding.

Now taking these two together I think that it is possible that the embassy had both shielding and detectors. Because the attacks may have happened outside the shielding, and the detectors were inside to detect bugs.

I accept that the detection is probably possible because of the reflection, but I’m doubting the effectiveness. (The blasts would be incredibly short, and it seems like it would be hard to distinguish between severely attenuated reflections vs noise from other sources.)

Re: a mesh in the windows, given that we can’t even shield microwaves, I’m seriously doubting such a weak faraday mesh would be effective. But I don’t really know what the attenuation model would be.

Perhaps my assessment is overly pessimistic, but I think your assessment is overly optimistic.

I don't know what type of filtering is applied to detect radio-transmissions. If the detection equipment is not looking for microwave-attacks, they could indeed get filtered out as noise. But again, at intensities that induce the Frey effect you illuminate a neighborhood well above the normal noise-level. You can't hide this.

I disagree about the shielding of microwaves because the shielding is obviously very effective. If it weren't so, we'd feel physical discomfort with our face less than a meter from the magnetron.

For the properites of shielded windows, I refer to "Shielding Effectiveness and HPM Vulnerability of Energy-saving Windows and Window Panes"[0]. The three panes they measured range from 15 dB to 35 dB attenuation. Now scaling an attack by 15 dB is not generally easy. It may mean you have to reduce the distance and operate from a van instead of a flat for example. By 35 dB we're talking about three orders of magnitude which makes scaling impossible because it'd cook the whole neighborhood.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324950137_Shielding...

Your microwave oven has a mesh in the door that you look through all the time, it keeps the microwaves inside, and keeps you safe. This is a well known technology.

1. The article is a copy of the original: https://theconversation.com/scientists-suggest-us-embassies-... . I wonder if scitechdaily is just a content farm or if they had a license to copy that content.

2. This Vanity Fair article believes it's mass hysteria: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/01/the-real-story-behin...

Isn't vanity fair a fashion magazine?

It's a culture magazine. It started life as a fashion magazine and includes a fair bit of fashion in its content, but it has always been broader than that. It looks more like The New Yorker than Vogue or Cosmo. Or perhaps a cross between The New Yorker and GQ.

Yes but they’ve had people like Hitchens as contributors.

I’ve heard the Great Seal Bug described as being activated by microwaves, and wonder if all these embassies and offices were riddled with similar bugs.

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

It is plausible, but the Great Seal (aka “the Thing”) only operated at 800Mhz. The microwave range is from 1 gigahertz (GHz), up to about 300 gigahertz.

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