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posted by janrinok on Wednesday May 23 2018, @11:25PM   Printer-friendly
from the can-you-hear-that? dept.

A U.S. government health alert has sparked comparisons to symptoms experienced by State Department employees in Cuba:

US officials have issued a health alert after a US government employee stationed in southern China reported "abnormal sensations of sound and pressure" that indicated a mild brain injury.

The official, assigned to the city of Guangzhou, reported a range of physical symptoms from late 2017 through to April 2018, and was sent back to the United States for assessment, the State Department said. The US Embassy in Beijing learned on May 18 that the clinical findings of the evaluation matched that of a "mild traumatic brain injury," an embassy spokeswoman told CNN.

The alert will raise comparisons with a series of unexplained incidents in Cuba that led to the withdrawal of most US personnel from the embassy in Havana. The cause of those incidents, reported in late 2016 and early 2017, still remains a mystery.

[...] The State Department said in its Wednesday statement that anyone who experienced "unusual acute auditory or sensory phenomena" while in China should move away from the source of the noise.

Also at BBC, CNBC, South China Morning Post, and MarketWatch.

Related: US Embassy Employees in Cuba Possibly Subjected to 'Acoustic Attack'
U.S. State Department Pulls Employees From Cuba, Issues Travel Warning Due to "Sonic Attacks"
A 'Sonic Attack' on Diplomats in Cuba? These Scientists Doubt It
Cuban Embassy Victims Experiencing Neurological Symptoms
Computer Scientists May Have Solved the Mystery Behind the 'Sonic Attacks' in Cuban Embassy


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by pTamok on Thursday May 24 2018, @10:14AM

    by pTamok (3042) on Thursday May 24 2018, @10:14AM (#683487)

    I still think it's unlikely to be anything to do with sounds transmitted through the air. The symptoms seem consistent with the Microwave Auditory Effect [wikipedia.org], and a foreign embassy is likely to be a place where Intelligence organisations are likely to be playing around with microwaves - there is a long history of this for example, 'The Thing' [wikipedia.org] from 1945. Given that people have complained of hearing noises when resting at night, I would not be surprised if hotel rooms likely to be used by diplomats are bugged, possibly by devices incorporated in the walls when the place was built, and microwaves could be used to energise them, or recharge batteries etc.
    Many people with a technical bent have heard of van Eck phreaking [wikipedia.org], which is simply one aspect of gaining insight into the workings of electronic apparatus by observing its emissions - something which the TEMPEST programme [wikipedia.org] aims to minimise. It is possible that using microwaves to energise otherwise quiescent circuits and thereby reveal a fingerprint was the intent: high-energy pulsed microwaves could certainly be used for this - anyone who has used a GSM phone near an audio amplifier can identify the characteristic noises that are emitted when the phone periodically contacts a base-station, and the bip-debip debip debip sound that just precedes the phone ringing, followed by the storm of noise while a conversation takes place. Looking at how pulsed microwaves are affected can reveal a lot about any equipment in the signal path, as can analysing echoes from equipment which reflect signals.

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