Debunking the CIA's “magic” heartbeat sensor [video] | Hacker News Reader

Debunking the CIA's “magic” heartbeat sensor [video]

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50 pointsareoform66 comments

More likely, the story is designed to make the public believe that US propaganda is actually aimed at the "foreign adversary" rather than at the US population. The emotionally appealing bit is the idea that even if the story is fake, Iran is now thinking it is dealing with an adversary that has and is using tech that is right out of science fiction.

In reality, it's all aimed at us, the people. All of the "tough talk", the comments that appear intended for dissident groups within Iran, etc., is all meant to mislead the people (us) who can stop the war so we don't do so.

The us did recently announce that it has technology that can manipulate space and time or something.

It's very likely a psyop like you said. "You don't know how advanced we really are! When we come for you you better just give up!"

I bet the us does have some secret weapons technologies. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are sci fi adjacent. But I think their biggest asset is likely intelligence, and channels to mass manipulate people via the Internet and boots/agents on the ground. Fortunately for other countries that power is more effective domestically. Unfortunately for us citizens there are trillions of dollars developing technologies to destroy us and not enemies.

The shift in us politics is directly related to feeding this. Defense/offense companies need to make more money. So they need to use these tools. Us citizens are the likely next targets beyond things like software exploits and taking over a few countries seemingly randomly.

> The us did recently announce that is has technology that can manipulate space and time or something.

Do you have more on this?

Google "us announces it can manipulate space and time"

That was spoken as a metaphor and not a reference to actual tech. They have surveillance capabilities to review massive timelines of events and people movement (time), and capabilities to see through things or generate models of places (space).

The point is, it sounds really powerful. Like some space age technology but I manipulate space and time by farting or eating a pizza.

I think the implication was the US can insert itself anywhere at any time and no one can stop it.

I can manipulate space-time. Enter the on ramp to the highway and accelerate. I am now aging slightly slower than you are.

I can also manipulate gravity by charging my phone. Since E=mc^2 my phone weighs slightly more when charged.

I've got a time machine! It only goes forwards right now, reverse is currently broken, and it only goes at one second per second right now.

Mine's under the seat.

(Futurama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0Ns8EtR7RA)

Hey, I saw your comment on my suggestion of switching to drama instead of switching animals on the cocaine bear thread and just wanted to correct an apparent misunderstanding of meth. I can't comment over there any more because I missed it for too long so I'm doing it here, which I hope isn't so against the rules as to annoy anyone. Meth is both excreted and metabolized and then the metabolites excreted in urine but the metabolites are pretty psycho active as well.This is done primarily with the liver enzyme CYP2D6 which primarily metabolized it to amphetamine and 4-hydroxymethamphetamine, which are both psycho active. The end result is 30-50% methamphetamine excreted unchanged and the rest the metabolites of which most are the two mentioned and psychoactive themselves. The ratio is primarily determined by the urine PH.The more you know (tm)

Uhm... Hm...

This person is a meth scientist? What . Okay. Don't want to know.

comedian making a joke about cocaine bear movie sequel addressing factual inaccuracies in a reply to the joke. Not a meth scientist, just fascinated by biology and chemistry.

Hey I am not shaming you. You do you okay. If the apocalypse ever happens we will need people like you.

The US very much would like the public to believe space data centers are economical and viable so they can just throw the taxpayer money to their favorite techbros, aka owners.

China will win purely because idiocracy

> China will win purely because idiocracy

China will win because its leaders didn't drink the capitalist kool-aid, which mean they can use capitalism as a tool instead of being controlled by its dysfunction.

Why would disinformation about a technology used to recover a pilot have any bearing on public socio-political views about the war? Eternal September is becoming increasing real on HN.

> More likely, the story is designed to make the public believe that US propaganda is actually aimed at the "foreign adversary" rather than at the US population.

Or some kind of cover story to distract from the real technology. If they really used some kind of advanced beacon, but they can convince people it's actually some kind of crazy-advanced heartbeat-detector, they can discourage their adversaries from looking for the beacon signal.

> discourage their adversaries from looking for the beacon signal

I thought the exact same thing the moment I saw it. LPI (low probability of intercept) beacon just makes so much more sense (in the kit the pilot ejects with... has existed for decades). Why would they bother detecting heartbeats? They might not even detect the right one or trigger on an animal or whatever.

That’s giving a lot of credit to the New York Post.

There’s a non-zero chance they’ll run an article this week about Bigfoot being an agent of the deep state.

I watched this video earlier today and came away unconvinced. Labeling this HN post as debunking feels a bit leading as that is not the title of the video. They did not follow all of the necessary logic to debunk it.

They boiled it down to: might be technically possible, but it's improbable, if you make assumptions we're making that are unreasonable.

Whether the video was just sloppy and weak by chance, or they're trying to bury this, or it legitimately doesn't work, I don't know. This video doesn't answer that.

By Veritasium, for anyone else wondering whether to click

Thanks, saved me a click.

What’s wrong with veritasium?

It's been bought up by venture capital and it's rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way with the changes by the new management.

I was also afraid of that, but I actually really liked the recent videos.

Yeah actually I haven't been dissapointed with the quality of the new videos so far, I will hold my breath though as venture capitals priorities aren't always aligned long-term.

What are the changes that are rubbing fans the wrong way? I feel like the latest videos have been interesting.

I still find them engaging and well made. It’s a bit more “corporate” but honestly the content remains as good

The problem I have encountered is that some of the physics explanations are of dubious quality. A good example is the debate between Veratasium, Steve Mould, and ElectroBOOM about “whether electricity travels at the speed of light.” The Veratasium video comes across as pretty clickbait-y. That said, the combined narrative across these three channels was pretty interesting.

Veritasium sold out to some rich fuck investors who're turning the channel into a slop factory (slowly phasing out Derrick's presence in the process, transitioning to hired actors and lame scripts.)

Thanks. I don't watch private equity sell out slop.

We know it's simple to detect someone's heartbeat from just colour changes of ones skin in a regular video taken with a phone camera. Wouldn't this be trivial with military level IR tech? Sounds way more likely than some amazing new top secret technology that is somehow filtering out every other magnetic field and can detect a heartbeat through mountains.

Why is everyone debating some theoretical advanced heartbeat or otherwise people detection tech rather than the absolutely obvious answer - some kind of advanced, specialized transmitter that's designed to be hard to detect and simply transmits the encrypted GPS coordinates of the pilot?

Or just rocking up to the nearest village with a thousand dollars in cash and asking where the pilot is.

Because the NY Post ran an article that said

"The CIA used a futuristic new tool called “Ghost Murmur” to find and rescue the second American airman who was shot down in southern Iran, The Post has learned. The secret technology uses long-range quantum magnetometry to find the electromagnetic signal of a human heartbeat"

Note, I agree that it was probably some novel beacon technology. Just answering your question about why people are debating whether it was a device that could detect a human heartbeat from long range.

We literally know what beacon device was used: Boeing CSEL

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/nation-politics/in...

Almost all of those words could be true if the beacon is disguised as an implanted medical device that creates some EM "interference" on each heartbeat, or every X heartbeats. From the outside it would look like sloppy design or a minor malfunction, in reality the signal is designed to be highly trackable

Not that I believe any of those words are true beyond the code name. The incident is exactly the kind of thing you'd want to create false rumors about

it just sounds like the submarine communication technology, very low baud rate, used to transmit the pilot's location and liveness, using quantum magnetometry to measure a magnetic field without huge coil areas.

I get the NY Post article, I'm just surprised that even people who assume the Post is full of shit still run after the "heatbeat" claim rather than ignoring it completely.

I think the fear of being located isn't based on the fact that someone can decrypt an encrypted transmission, its simply because someone can trace that a particular location is transmitting some radio waves.

You encrypt it because encryption is cheap and gives you confidence that the message content won't be intercepted.

The transmission itself would need to be stealthy or separated (by distance and/or time) from the pilot. For example, the pilot might leave a transmitter to send a message "moving south, will hide on X hill" hours after the pilot leaves, or even toss a transmitter into a river. But most likely just very spread-spectrum/CDMA to make it indistinguishable from noise.

That's a complicated way of describing Professor Xavier's Cerebro, but that's basically how it works.

There were commercially available lidar/ladar sensors that can do basic spectroscopy at a great distance. Specifically, the public specification showed it was able to pinpoint C02 or nitrate levels over 14km away.

Keep in mind this was published over a decade ago, and I'm sure they have systems with better specs these days. Too bad these were too cost prohibitive for FSD automotive platforms.

There are magnetic sensors that could detect rusting-container currents over 3 meters away, but still unlikely possible outdoors. There is a point where the thermal noise floor means any signal is lost at a minimal threshold.

I am sure folks are extra cautious about detailing key technology these days. =3

There are also dirt cheap human presence sensors that use millimetre wave radar that can detect if a person is in the room even if they’re sitting still. If I can buy these for a couple dollars then what could the military do with a few billion dollars and reaper drone platforms? With a big enough array you might be able to pinpoint everything alive within the area under surveillance.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007989577185.html

After watching the video I was a bit surprised to not see them explore the possibility that the word "heartbeat" may not refer to an actually human heart, but rather the concept in similar way that computers and servers uses the term heartbeat. The US military can have a low energy transmitter that sends a heartbeat signal, but which methods of sending/receiving isn't disclosed to the public.

I would look if there is anything close to the idea of an "magnetometry" that could be used for communication with an sender and a receiver. Something like say the idea expressed here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.4218/etrij.2023-...

Video have some inaccuracies. As example, said "to detect heartbeat from 100m, 10-20 T", but then talking about "from 100km".

So, if carefully looking, SQUID could detect with 10-15T, so need just additional 5 magnitudes. And as I know from practice amateur astronomy, with regular signal, 5 additional magnitudes could be achieved with numerical methods.

So we have two questions remain - how CIA managed to have SQUID small enough to fit on something like helicopter (or weapons bay on fighter), and how they managed to fly nearer than 100m to pilot, each could be answered - "possible, if have highly motivated people, with big money".

There are so many easier ways to detect a person that I don't understand why they chose going with this charade

It is more plausible than most of the stuff said publicly by the administration and makes Americans feel like the trillions are worth it.

As always with these kinds of outlandish claims, the best explanation is almost always that the journalist with the arts major degree misunderstood a key phrase in long-winded technobabble, and ran with it.

I mean... come on, we of all people have all surely been involved in one of these. We explain some deeply technical thing to some salesperson, they hear one word they understand, and the gleefully run off like a dog with a bone telling everyone that we can compress any movie into a single kilobyte.

"No, no, that's just the torrent root hash!"

"So you are saying it can be compressed into a kilobyte!"

Etc...

Quantum magnetometers are real, they are crazy sensitive, and apparently there are some research programs into making a "tricorder"-like device that can detect a human heartbeat ten centimeters away. I.e.: you've got an unconscious pilot in full flight kit, exposed to the elements overnight, no detectable pulse but... wait! Hey! Perfect time to test that new doohicky the boys in the lab cooked up!

That gets turned into a press release by someone who doesn't know what a centimeter even is because they're a Yank that grew up knowing only Freedom Units, got 10 clicks confused with 10 cm and... wow! What a press release! The best ever!

Now the whole world is talking about how we can detect a pilot miles away with a signal that normally takes special conductive lube and low-resistance wires coupled to a highly sensitive amplifier to detect reliably.

Not to mention the obvious problem of having to filter out, oh, I don't know, the heartbeat of the person holding it. And everyone else nearby. Every desert animal. The electronics of the helicopter used to get there. The radio on their belt. Satellites. Every mobile phone in the vicinity. On and on.

None of that matters, because someone got an exclusive story.

Back many years ago I worked on a research project which used UWB radar to detect breathing through walls / rubble / etc. But the distance was in the range of 1-10 meters. The application was to use such sensors for finding survivors after earthquakes etc.

or bombings

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -- Clarke's three laws

HOWEVER, sometimes, if a technology is sounded like a magic too much, then maybe it just is, without any technology in it.

If they can detect the faint signal of a heartbeat from so far away, why not instead deliberately transmit a weak, wider-bandwidth pseudorandom magnetic signal? Such a signal would be even harder to detect than a heartbeat without prior knowledge, yet easier to identify and track using a matched filter.

They want to lie about how they found the soldier, and potentially have China spend a few billion trying to copy technology that can never work.

Why are we assuming China is too gullible to know this technology can never work, when it's so obvious to the lay HN commentariat?

Presumably we're cunningly exploiting specifics of their world view.

Despite the authoritarian rule, PRC still values education highly in quite a few contexts where it doesn't interfere too much with the authoritarianism, and the country not only has plenty of physics graduates who will have learned about the Josephson effect, but might well listen to them and give them adequate grants for R&D.

It's hard for people to imagine someone can be smarter than they are.

Militaries and their disinformation units are like this.

There are at least 5 different narratives about how the US found Osama bin Laden, which contradict each other:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Osama_bin_Laden#Alt...

When a military achieves something and there's intense speculation on how they did it, they will want to obfuscate how they did it. One of the best ways to do that is to give a range of different explanations, some fanciful, some plausible, none of which are completely accurate, leaked to a range of credible and non-credible people. A disinformation campaign.

  In wartime, the Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of Lies

Winston Churchill

Was there even a soldier to find? Why wasn't his name released? Iran says it was actually a failed operation to capture their uranium.

Because not everyone has a transmitter, but everyone has a heartbeat?

Though in this case the pilot likely had a transmitter and that's exactly how they found him.

this is such a classic, well trodden propaganda tool i'm surprised anyone here falls for it.

tell the public about an incredibly advanced piece of tech that simultaneously justifies the $1 trillion+ military budget, makes people fear the sophistication of our government (prevent dissidence internally) and distract from otherwise embarrassing flaws in the war so far.

it's like how trump releases "proof" of aliens ever time he wants to distract from a new epstein files bombshell.

if you believe this i've got a bridge to sell you.

Propaganda.

I think the link must be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVTPv4sI_Jc

That's my fault, I was writing an email about COPPA at the same time and pasted in the wrong link. Oops!

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