Acoustic attack

[Lucysnow]

WASHINGTON -- The two-year-old U.S. diplomatic relationship with Cuba was roiled Wednesday by what U.S. officials say was a string of bizarre incidents that left a group of American diplomats in Havana with severe hearing loss attributed to a covert sonic device.
The Cuban government flatly rejected the allegations later in the day, saying in a lengthy statement that "Cuba has never permitted, nor will permit, that Cuban territory be used for any action against accredited diplomatic officials or their families, with no exception."
In the fall of 2016, a series of U.S. diplomats began suffering unexplained loss of hearing, constant painful headaches, sleeplessness, exhaustion and other symptoms, according to an official familiar with the incidents. Several of the diplomats were recent arrivals at the embassy, which reopened in 2015 as part of former President Barack Obama's reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba.
The source familiar with the incidents told CBS News that as many as eight or nine U.S. government employees had their assignments cut short due to the severity of the symptoms, but others affected remain on the island after being "encouraged not to leave." http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cuba-rejects...n-embassy/


Can anyone explain to me what is a 'sonic attack'? Is it a new kind of weapon or something and if not what's to gain from using such a device?

[Secular Sanity]

A Sonic Attack in Cuba? How an Acoustic Weapon Might Work

"There is a growing controversy about people who live near these windmills who start feeling bad," Liberman told Live Science.

"They get headaches, they get dizzy, they get nausea."

For instance, a 2014 study in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that low-frequency sounds below the audible range could disrupt little whistles made by the ear, called spontaneous optoacoustic emissions, in response to noise. (How that mapped to symptoms, however, wasn't clear.)

In this instance, one possibility is that the infrasound stimulated the part of the ear not dedicated to hearing — the vestibular system that controls balance, Liberman said. In that instance, the symptoms wouldn't appear immediately.

"You could imagine them being very slow onset and very persistent," Liberman said. "It might take days before you even notice any funny sensations."

That may explain why the State Department refused to describe the symptoms experienced by their employees as including hearing loss, Liberman said.

High-frequency ultrasound

The other type of sound humans can't hear is ultrasound, which is above 20 khz. That's a less likely possibility because high-frequency sound dissipates quickly with distance and in tissue such as the ear. However, high-intensity, focused ultrasound has been used for everything from breaking kidney stones to cauterizing tissues in the body.

But the fact that it doesn't work well across long distances means it's tough to imagine a device could get close enough to the people to work, without them suspecting, Liberman said.

What's more, if a covert acoustic device using ultrasound produced enough energy to permeate and damage the ear from far away, it would probably heat the head up, too, Liberman said.

However, it's theoretically possible that high-frequency ultrasound may have somehow damaged the blood vessels in the ear canal, thereby leading to damage, he said. That seems less likely, but "I've been in science long enough to not discount as impossible things that seem improbable," Liberman said. [1]

[stryder]

This isn't the first time that an Embassy has been attacked in this way. (I'll see if I can find a source, I can't suggest how reliable it is.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9814721
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/arti...069X-11-85

In this particular instance it's suggested that the Soviet power of the time utilised Microwave (Dielectric) radiation to "observe or effect" Embassy staff at the US Moscow Embassy.

This is why there is the quick leap to the conclusion that Russia must well be the source. The problem is however that it is a "cold war" technology, which could either be part of Cuba's old infrastructure or even other Communistic sympathiser countries from that era. In any case it requires an infrastructure (it's not "beamed from space", it utilises equipment that already exists. That equipment itself happens to be "Analogue", as digitised parallel processed modern day equivalents can be operated with both less observable effect and harder detection.)

The manipulation of a constant frequency to cause sickness or harm is not likely to be the desired effect, if anything it's more likely to be trying to probe to identify communications devices, networks, RFID's as well as the standard method of spying on volumetric changes caused by vocalisation. (In fact a counter to using infra-red to record reverberations on a glass window from discussion is to actually add more noise to the environment to counter, the problem with this however is if the people involved in the discussion aren't "air-gapped" between the RF rich environment by being in a Faraday Cage etc.)

Unfortunately it's just another one of those cloak and dagger operations that some country (or company) pulls on a country or target for whatever purpose. (The thing is nowadays, that can actually be tracked, so why still pretend like it's not happening?)

[Lucysnow]

This isn't the first time that an Embassy has been attacked in this way.  (I'll see if I can find a source, I can't suggest how reliable it is.)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9814721
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/arti...069X-11-85

The manipulation of a constant frequency to cause sickness or harm is not likely to be the desired effect, if anything it's more likely to be trying to probe to identify communications devices, networks, RFID's as well as the standard method of spying on volumetric changes caused by vocalisation.  (In fact a counter to using infra-red to record reverberations on a glass window from discussion is to actually add more noise to the environment to counter, the problem with this however is if the people involved in the discussion aren't "air-gapped" between the RF rich environment by being in a Faraday Cage etc.)

Unfortunately it's just another one of those cloak and dagger operations that some country (or company) pulls on a country or target for whatever purpose.  (The thing is nowadays, that can actually be tracked, so why still pretend like it's not happening?)

Oh. Ok. Thanks both of you for the explanation. I thought this thing was being used to cause physical symptoms, it didn't occur to me that this wasn't the goal and it was something else they were trying to achieve. Its interesting, I didn't realize they were using this type of technology.