> [...] urban terrorism. If it doesn't leave any trace and it can penetrate walls, [...]

That's obviously bad, but it's not really terrorism. There's no one universally agreed on definition of terrorism, but instilling terror is commonly a big part, and for that you want people to notice.

It's not terrifying to take EM brain-damage, have no way of proving it even in principle, and alienate your loved ones, employer, polity etc.?

It's the distinction between the terror of the victim, and the terror of the witnesses.

Perhaps you want people to notice for overt action, but deniability is useful for covert action. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be considered a hostile act, and if it results in what would otherwise appear to be a psychosomatic illness that causes distress in order to muddy the waters to conceal the affiliation of the actors involved, I think it’s fair to call it a terror attack.

Yes, it would be a hostile act. But it wouldn't be terrorism.

Not everything bad is terrorism.

I think many people would go along with dragging anyone responsible for funding or terrorizing people with this stuff out into the streets by their hair.

Not sure I’m expecting an “oh yeah haha, about that-“ anytime soon.

At least not until everyone’s welded inside their homes like China.

Speaking from the point of view of other idiopathic chronic conditions....if it doesn't show up in a blood test or a scan, many doctors will just call it psychological.

Mass hysteria should not be ruled out.

If they expected such a weapon after the reports, they'd have sensors for all kinds of emissions up the wazoo in those buildings. And yet, they still haven't recorded anything.

Maybe you've answered your own question. Directed-energy weapson exist - but the agencies that would have developed this particular capability have said that it isn't possible or doesn't match the reported symptoms. It would be fairly surprising if, between them, they didn't already have a wealth of research on the topic.

It's hard to say what the reality is though - e.g. maybe they didn't want to reveal an existing capabilty.

Intelligence agencies minimizing effects of deployed secret technology, that would be a first

> Sci-fi electro weapons don't make practical sense.

We all have fairly compact devices in our kitchens which, if you were to put your head in them and press the start button, would literally cook your brain.

Why wouldn’t a directed version of that make practical sense? Just because it’d be bulky compared to a gun? But that would depend on what you were trying to achieve. Killing people with polonium or ricin isn’t the most efficient approach either, but it’s been done.

Note that I’m not saying that’s what happened in the Havana case. Just questioning the statement I quoted.

It's weird to me to think that you could beam hundreds to thousands of watts of some sort of energy at an American embassy and not be detected. That's what has always made it seem rather outlandish. My suspicion has always been some sort of burnout/anxiety as the actual explanation, but certainly there could be another possibility.

Again, I wasn’t proposing this is what happened in the Havana case. It’s not clear to me that what happened in Havana wasn’t just a panic of some sort, much like the recent drone panic. If it were some sort of attack, it raises a lot of questions about what the purpose was, why Cuba, why we haven’t seen anything like it since, why all the victims of the attack are still walking around attending meetings in Washington DC, etc.

That all said, I still don’t see why a microwave beam weapon is implausible in principle. It might not be the most practical thing ever - that’s why I compared it to polonium and ricin. But for example, using a parabolic reflector you can focus microwaves over the kind of distance between two buildings perhaps across the street from each other. If the beam only has a diameter of a few feet at the target, and only used for a short period, how is that going to be detected? You’d aim it at someone’s head visible through a window, for example, and the source of the beam could be behind a closed window with a curtain.

Btw this subthread seems to have been removed from the OP page at this point, apparently because the comment I replied to was flagged.

It would you seem you can't distinguish directed energy from directed matter. Perhaps you worked too close to both.

Direct matter is directed energy.

You are drawing a false equivalence and being willfully obtuse. It's clear and obvious that the conventional sense of the term refers to technology like lasers and microwave. Please don't try to split hairs over semantics. Unless you are one of the spiritual nuts who claim "we are all creatures of energy" just because of the mass energy equivalence. Unless you are building a nuke in your kitchen, there's a clear difference in meaning in the conventional usage of the term "kinetic" weapon and "direct energy" weapon.

The point is that matter is by far the most concentrated form of energy we’re able to manipulate. The original comment seemed to be saying something along those lines, although it seems to have been flagged and I can’t check it now.

I don't like the false dilemma of "either a directed-energy weapon, or mass hysteria".

I think we should at least consider hydrogen cyanide, especially given that a known adversary (Iran / IRGC) has claimed that Mahsa Amini killed herself with cyanide, whereas the video imagery show 2 government employees simultaneously turning their back before she faints and starts collapsing, indicating prior knowledge of what would happen. They also like to take a step or 2 away of any diluting plume they seem to know to be poisonous (presumably hydrogen cyanide).

It looks like either dosage testing, or training for possibly foreign operations.

See my analysis at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42690702

I guess one challenge is you'd have to test these weapons on people to see if it causes the reported symptoms

I think having a long range explosives laden drone hit that sports stadium is way more scary. And more likely to come to an urban center as urban terrorism. Unfortunately. My 2c.

This is one of my biggest concerns for our future. What happens when the costs of drones or 3D printing become so cheap, and the learning curve shrinks to the extent that a terrorist, crazy person or school shooter can semi easily deploy their own deadly drone swarms.

Cars are really deadly and readily available without raising any suspicion.

(And only fairly recently have we really seen anyone use cars for terror attacks. And they are still fairly rare, considering how ubiquitous cars are.)

See also https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-about-terror and https://gwern.net/terrorism-is-not-effective

Cars are traceable. Poison would be the alternative for those that dont want to be apprehended.

I think many people misunderstand the degree to which society is contingent on the good faith participation of most people.

It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont.

Drone licence. Drone pilots licence.

How does that solve anything at all?

already exist. Drones are required to have transponders registered to their owner. Doesnt do anything and is trivial to disable or circumnavigate.

>It is like a prisoners dilemma where we have managed to convince 99.9% of people to cooperate and the whole thing can easily fall apart if they dont.

That should give people who want to impose their will on others more pause than it does.

Indeed. As Such, I think liberal democracies need to be based on voluntary positive sum cooperation to be stable.

> Cars are traceable. Poison would be the alternative for those that dont want to be apprehended.

Sure, but if you are willing to give your life 'to the cause', cars work.

I think we need to adjust society so fewer people feel they have nothing to lose than in the status quo.

Car bombs, and moving car bombs have been around since the 1960s and before.

I'm talking about just using an unmodified car to run over people. No need to learn anything about bomb making.

The curious thing about the two recent attack events in New Orleans is that most reported the trump tower one as an “exploding cybertruck” but very few even mentioned that the other incident involved an electric ford truck. It should have been absolutely newsworthy and raise questions: evs are actually more dangerous to a crowd. They don’t require space to accelerate. And they don’t make a lot of noise (and one could probably even disable the artificial movement sound). This is kind of a new danger.

Yes, it would be, if homicidal people were actually held back by the limitations of ICE cars. But they aren't even really brushing against them. They seem to be mostly limited by their own incompetence. Fortunately.

I believe we’ve passed this point many years ago. These are already extremely cheap and accessible to anyone, you can buy 20-30 small drones for less than the price of one firearm.

In reality there are hundreds of other ways someone could devise attacks like these, technology doesn’t really matter that much.

well, we did just see a 3D printed weapon used, but the stories about the perp's looks shouted over the other details. I'm sure the gun lobby was pleased with that. so to the idea of school shootings, drone swarms would probably be too much for that, but a kid printing up their own guns to use is definitely something I could see happening. drone swarms would to me still be limited to a more well funded group to achieve instead of a lone wolf scenario.

Then they’ll match the deadly output of states that have killed tens of thousands of people I guess.

That time is here. I'm not all that smart and have made several quadcopters from parts. These do not have the geo restrictions that the commercial ones like DJI come with. There are thousands of people across the country doing the same with FPV drones. I live very close to a base that it's not uncommon to see Air Force One lands. I've often wondered if they have some sort of jamming software. It would be very easy to cause problems in a crowd and it's just a matter of time.

The (turrible) Black Sunday novel [1975] made quite an impression on young me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(novel)

How do you falsify mass hysteria with that strategy?

Maybe you don't, and maybe that's part of the terrorism, even a placebo effect could frighten many.

Maybe by design

Can’t you make these weapons with the magnetron out of any old microwave? I’ve always wondered why these devices aren’t more prolific than they are…

No.

My guess is there would be a strong selection against impulsive non-experts. That’s on my “No-MacGyver” list with garage door springs and AC unit capacitors .

Yes, I could, but I'd have a 90% chance of hurting myself. Ditto for giving some cancer with radiation, many covert poisons, and similar. I can name a dozen ways I could kill or harm you, but:

1. I'd need to be wacko enough to want to harm you

2. I'd need to be sane enough for a major engineering project

3. I'd need to be competent enough to succeed without hurting myself

The set of individuals with all the traits required is small. It's not zero -- we had Ted Kazinsky -- but very small. Most major crimes are also never solved, and many more people can just take a gun and shoot someone. That's probably even harder to track down since a lot more people have guns than labs and PhDs. Esoteric technologies make for easy investigations.

So in the end, I think state actors have these. They also make good plot lines for a novel or video game (I have about a dozen I came up with in the context of a half-baked creative project).

But for real life individuals, I don't see how they'd become prolific. We'll probably see a crazy someday, but nowhere close to gun homicides. They just don't make much practical sense for an individual.

The top of my “I’m surprised it’s allowed” list is large lithium batteries in airplanes. If phones weren’t already so ubiquitous, they would have been mostly banned.

Yes, and you don't even need to dig into the dangerous bits (microwave transformers are some of the biggest killers of electrical hobbyists), just remove the door and defeat the interlock.

> The most scary thing about these kinds of systems seems to me to be the potential for urban terrorism.

A mortar or backpack has a thousand times the potential for urban terrorism.

Depends. A mortar going off once will be an incident, but have a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic, and it’ll gum up the works. Anytime someone gets a headache they’ll head to an ER.

A mortar is a somewhat known danger, and doesn’t trigger imagination and fear as much as a danger you can’t identify.

There are people already imagining this - look up “targeted individuals”

> a hidden mind ray targeting random 10 people a day in a big city and you’ll get a lot of panic,

You'll get just as much panic by having friendly press start pretending that this is happening.

A significant portion of the population does not have a working bullshit filter, and will believe all sorts of stupid garbage.

You don't actually need to build a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza shop, you just need to tell people that one exists and tens of millions of people will believe you.

And in this case, your side business of selling ubermensch supplements and tinfoil helmets will be cracking.

Look up “Targeted Individuals” - the human mind is an amazing thing

There's no chance this is disinformation muddying the online argument to prevent people from intelligently concluding that this is a directed energy weapon, of course.

You don't have to use it just for winning - consider sports betting, you can definitely place multi-million dollar bets, on the team that isn't a favorite, then use your Havana Ray to disturb a couple key players - make millions, repeat.

Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite. When the news comes out, you'll make millions.

>Short a company's stock - melt the brains of their c-suite

For many companies that would be an improvement

The technology could also be used by oppressive governments to harass dissenters (and anyone else they might target). Essentially modern, high-tech COINTELPRO.