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Comment by Google234 | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t they install detectors inside all the embassies at risk to prove or disprove this? Why didn’t they do this earlier? I’m pretty sure there are many places that could be contracted to make a detector in a few weeks - this isn’t new technology. This seems really easy to test... so why are we still speculating.

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A small detector would be easy to build and carry around, with 80’s technology.

The connection between these events is tenuous at best.

Yeah, it actually looks like you can buy them on Amazon for about 30$. I don’t want to doubt but this seems so simple to test that the lack of any direct evidence makes me suspicious.

https://www.amazon.com/Electromagnetic-Radiation-5HZ-3500MHz...

The descriptions of the attacks seem to indicate a pretty narrow beamwidth, so you'd probably have to wear it on a helmet :)

At intensities that would injure, you light up the whole neighbourhood with scattered radiation. There's no hiding this attack from a sensor in the vicinity.

The math would be interesting to see. I haven't seen a directed energy antenna, but you can easily drop 9db with single digit degrees off target with a big dish.

9dB is really not a lot. If you're going to be sending 10kW+ of radiation 9dB of directionality still means you're gonna light up the whole neighborhood.

In the most literal sense of the word. 1 KW at 100 meters on a directional antenna like that will happily light up neon tubes. The field is going to be a few hundred V/meter.

This kind of device seems marketed towards people who think EM waves in general are bad for them. It says it can't detect RF radiation while it clearly says 3.5Ghz in the description, so I think it might be a scam.

Regardless of that, wideband EM receivers exist, and the US has some with incredibly high sensitivities.

So much this!

Any radio beam which was strong enough to affect human tissue would drive a basic EM detector crazy.

A suitable detector would be a simple wire dipole, a schottky diode and a meter. Any radio hobbyist could make you one in a few minutes.

Plus such a strong field would drive most domestic electronics equipment crazy due to our crappy RF immunity regulations..

If they did, there is no reason we would be told or the results would be made public.

Especially if and when they detected nothing and continued to claim they were being attacked by dastardly enemies.

I would put them on police cars. They are driving around anyway and their other duties are not that different. Also, the alternative is for them not to know they are getting zapped.

They could try that, but it seems like personnel are being attacked outside of embassies. They'd need to equip everyone's domicile with detectors as well.

That said, State Dept and the intelligence community should've been all over this. When this happened in Cuba, everyone should've been on high alert. When it happened again after, people should've snapped into action.

It's possible that the powers that be didn't take it seriously but now there's no excuse for Biden admin not to act. Clearly the perpetrator is emboldened and will persist until they experience serious consequences.

And at the very least, those affected by this should be getting workers comp and full support to deal with the effects.

Uh, the administration Biden belonged to more or less ignored worse stuff than this that enabled attacks like this. Take, for example, the OPM "hack." Read this:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/encry...

IF you're wondering how whoever was running attacks like this would get the data to follow people home with attacks like this, in places where there aren't any sensors, look at these hearings from 2014.

Noone was fired, noone even lost their pension over that.

I agree that more should have been done, but the director of the OPM did resign, which is basically being fired in that kind of position. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/10/421783403...

OPM Director is a political position with a defined end date. They serve for 1-4 years.

> Uh, the administration Biden belonged to more or less ignored worse stuff than this that enabled attacks like this. Take, for example, the OPM "hack."

I worked at State Department during the Obama era and into the Trump era. I am well aware that the Obama administration did not impose adequate consequences for prior acts of espionage and aggression such as the Cozy Bear hack on State Dept or Mikhail Lesin getting bludgeoned to death in DC. There also wasn't adequate pushback against propaganda efforts.

The OPM hack is widely attributed to China and is probably the most devastating breach in recent memory. Who knows what the real world consequences of that have been thus far.

Either way ny point is that right now, today, there is no excuse not to act. Unless maybe they still haven't figured out what is happening and who is responsible.

IF my Dad were alive and here and lucid (he had dementia the last five years of his life) he could give details of similar actions by the Russians and the US from basically the late 50's to the late 70's, which was the span of time of his having worked for obscure three-letter agencies.

Oh, and willing to talk. He only talked to me, his son, about a friend of his who he thought was killed by the Russians twice over a forty-year period.

But anyway, I suspect based on that that it's happened plenty of times before without retaliation.

>Either way ny point is that right now, today, there is no excuse not to act. Unless maybe they still haven't figured out what is happening and who is responsible.

I doubt we can; I think the OPM hack has lead on to further intelligence failures, to the point where we can't tell what's going on, can't count on the three letter agencies to tell us the truth about stuff, and can't effectively defend ourselves as a result.

I think that's part of why the allegedly natural virus hit us so hard. One failure leads to the next.

I've honestly thought about keeping one of these in my apartment, I worry a bit about people doing stupid things with microwave ovens.

Something like that? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUNFc1dfU7k

As far as I know the creator of this site was later hospitalized in to locked-ward psychiatry.

http://mikrowellenterror.de/english/index.htm

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