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Comment by tgsovlerkhgsel | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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

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.

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.

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

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.

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