I am mildly amused that this is illustrated with a video of a laser, because… why?
(No one in the NYT article is suggesting that this was done with masers, which are the actual microwave equivalent of lasers. A flashlight would be slightly more appropriate…)
I think it would be difficult to make an entire building be a Faraday cage
And in fact most of the reports of mysterious sounds in Cuba have been for American diplomats in their homes or in hotel rooms.
No doubt we’re busy crafting tin foil hats, but lots of interesting reading here: https://fas.org/irp/agency/dod/jason/
“Don’t try this at home.” … as he sits on a bed, in a bedroom, at home.
Who said it was our enemies?
Bang on. Much more likely to be botched microwave eavesdropping than an attack on personnel. The technique is not new. Here’s a link to Bruce Schneier on it from 1995.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/10/eavesdropping_t.html
If there were even a slight possibility that the symptoms were the product of microwave radiation, why weren’t detectors procured to shed light on the question right away? They’re cheap and readily available.
Poutine does NOT require an apology. Unless the cheese is anything other than fresh white curds. In which case, it’s not poutine.
Well then, I’ll take two!
imagine something hidden in the walls or on the roof of the building where you work, operating on the same basic principle, beaming energy into your brain to harm or kill you.
The key word here is “imagine”.
Is it a kind of sound system playing bad pop music? I think I saw something like this in a department strore once.
i have heard meteors - went out in the countryside to watch the perseids and was very surprised to hear ‘zipping’ sounds that correlated with the meteors appearing in the sky. since the sounds were concurrent with seeing them, the phenomenon had to have been electromagnetic in nature. i read later that people believe that grasses can act as natural transducers for low-frequency RF emitted by the ionizing atmosphere in the vicinity of the meteor. but maybe it was my head though 
. at any rate RF wavelengths at audio frequencies are waaaaay to long to be called microwaves.
That’s interesting. I looked up just enough about the topic to find a reasonable article (and to get the hunch it wasn’t super related to a microwave weapon) but didn’t realize that the meteor’s RF was directly inducing the sound in that manner (i.e., so that the sound you hear is the actual radio frequency). Neat!
Yeah, I think there has always been a stupid smell around this story.
The issue has apparently been encountered in Cuba and China. Cuba and China have very close links. Who could it be? It must be the Russians, or Cubans friendly with them!
I must confess I did have a bit of a google to see if I could find out where the Chinese embassy in Havana is, relative to the US building, but naturally Google doesn’t know yet. I have paper maps at home but they’re all packed away.
I refer you to my previous comment.
They do, although Im not sure all the old ones have this built into them. The new London embassy will have this in the specs, but Im not sure about the old US embassy in London. Not that its so old.
My theory is it may not even be the host countries doing it. If the weapon can be set up in a nearby building surreptitiously then any nation could do it just to make relations strained between the two other nations. The State Dept should be looking at who is renting nearby buildings with line-of-sight to where the attacks occur.
I’m looking at you, Vladimir Vladimirovich.
it depends, I guess:
The Headquarters Building for the National Security Agency…It was completed in 1963; the lower, mall-shaped building, Operations Building 1, predates it by a decade. The more prominent towers—a pair of blue-black boxes, Operations 2A and 2B, clad in copper to block electromagnetic signals, like a Faraday cage—were finished in 1986.
https://www.citylab.com/design/2017/06/the-dark-architecture-of-national-security/529302/
others say its the glass itself:
On forums and chat threads it is rumoured that the sleek facade of highly reflective blue-black glass is designed as a massive Faraday cage
I suppose what is “practical” depends on the context, and the amount of money one is willing to spend…
Glad to see the New York Times report on microwave hearing and weapons. Since 2010 EHT has provided scientific details about this and other related matters featuring the brilliant work of Allan Frey http://bit.ly/2PyOYzZ and Beatrice Golomb http://bit.ly/2wJrAc5 – both innovative and distinguished researchers that have served as senior advisors to US Government and other sources.
This raises another important ground for concerns about the planned proliferation of 5G.
