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Recordings of the Sounds Heard In the Cuban US Embassy Attacks Released (apnews.com)
New submitter chrissfoot shares a report from The Associated Press: The Associated Press has obtained a recording of what some U.S. Embassy workers heard in Havana in a series of unnerving incidents later deemed to be deliberate attacks. The recording, released Thursday by the AP, is the first disseminated publicly of the many taken in Cuba of mysterious sounds that led investigators initially to suspect a sonic weapon. The recordings themselves are not believed to be dangerous to those who listen. Sound experts and physicians say they know of no sound that can cause physical damage when played for short durations at normal levels through standard equipment like a cellphone or computer. What device produced the original sound remains unknown. Americans affected in Havana reported the sounds hit them at extreme volumes. You can listen to the "Dangerous Sound" here via YouTube.
>The recordings themselves are not believed to be dangerous
So we can rule out Kanye West...?
Sound experts and physicians say they know of no sound that can cause physical damage when played for short durations at normal levels through standard equipment like a cellphone or computer.
Obviously these people have never heard Trump speak. I actually envy them
The youtube sounds to see if they're legit?
I've got the order for 20 or so outdoor speakers pointed at my neighbors house waiting on amazon...
The score (from http://www.politifact.com/trut...) as of 2015...counts deaths of Americans in America:
24: number of Americans killed by terrorism in the last decade
208,024: number of Americans killed by guns in the last decade
Was it the "brown note"?
This is egg on their face. It means that they cannot guarantee diplomatic safety in their own capitol, and if it's their own people doing it behind their back it means they cannot control their own intelligence services. Those are the sort of things that make a dictator get cold sweats at 2AM. It's a major crack in the facade of their power.
Let's say that it turns out to be "The Russians" and we catch them in the act. The obvious solution for the Cubans is to let us take the foreign operatives back to the US. It would even be justifiable for the Cubans to arrest the diplomatic mission of the foreign power and turn them over to US. Diplomatic immunity my ass. Doing this to a foreign embassy is an act of war because it is extremely serious non-lethal violence against a diplomatic mission. All bets are off at that point.
Obviously we need to loosen the definition of terrorism.
Pretty sure it's already looser than a 60-year-old whore.
*grin* subtle, at least initially.
I'm more inclined to believe that it's another state-actor or else a very, very large criminal enterprise, something on the international scale.
If a state-actor they want to limit the US and the West generally from bringing Cuba into the fold.
If it's a large criminal enterprise, it would be because they are using Cuba for some part of their operation that would be identified and shut down if the US were more heavily involved in Cuba.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Marines never left. We still are using a large bay there.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I played all 5 seconds of the YouTube link at very low volume and my dog jumped up from where he was lying down and began looking around the room with a "what the fuck was that" attitude.
There could never be any plausible malicious intent by people in Cuba against U.S. Embassy personnel. There's just no precedent and no motive.
The Cuban people were NOT indoctrinated for years to view U.S. Government entities as their enemy. There is NO possibility that rogue elements within Cuban society might be doing this 'For Fidel' out of ideological zeal.
Nope. None of that should even be considered.
I'm pretty sure they US public has been more thoroughly indoctrinated to view Cuba as the spawn of Satan by the US media than the Cuban government could ever hope to indoctrinate the Cuban people to view the US as a mere 'enemy'. I attribute this largely to the fact that the average Cuban is better educated and generally better informed than the average American.
The actual sound is very creepy, but its slightly under volume. You may need to adjust your speaker volume. At 3min the tones begin to oscillate a little causing a slightly dizziness. Be careful. https://youtu.be/cyMHZVT91Dw?t=3m5s
Worked in broadcasting for a lot of years. I knew an engineer who had troubles with his next door neighbors in an apartment building. So, brought home an amplifier, tone generator and a couple of JBL's and set them against the wall, adjoining the neighbors bedroom. Not sure of the freq, 10hz or lower, and cranked it up when he wasn't home. If you put your hands on the wall, you could feel it, but not hear it. I think the neighbors moved out within a few months.
*grin* subtle, at least initially.
I'm more inclined to believe that it's another state-actor or else a very, very large criminal enterprise, something on the international scale.
If a state-actor they want to limit the US and the West generally from bringing Cuba into the fold.
I agree with you. And a smarter administration would be asking the following questions instead of just assuming "evil Cubans did this 'cause they're commies!"
Is there a nation that thrives on chaos and disorder in the world, particularly when it is the cause of such chaos and disorder?
Is there a nation that regards human life so little that it sent agents on a public airline with a radioactive element to kill a dissident and gave no concern to the impact the radioactivity would have on its own agents or the unknowing passengers?
Is there a nation that would benefit from Cuban-USA relations deteriorating?
The answer to all of the above is Russia.
An attack carried out by a white guy with no ties to Islam or ISIS who spent years gambling and drinking and doing all sorts of not-even-remotely-muslim shit before snapping and murdering a bunch of people.
You Trump-sucking retards need to give up trying to tie Las Vegas to ISIS and accept that white men commit mass murder in the US far more often than any terrorist organization ever will.
A significant portion of the other half are police shootings, which leaves very few "innocent" gun related deaths.
... If you believe that the police only shoot guilty people. I'm not at all convinced of that, or even that most cases of a police officer drawing and using a firearm are justified given the circumstances. IIRC, police officers don't even make the top 10 of most dangerous professions in the USA, so their trigger happy attitude isn't really justified. Unless of course their job is relatively safe because they tend to shoot first.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
There is one question you are missing, before you can reasonably blame Russia, or anyone else for that matter:
Does any known technology exist that could have actually caused this to occur?
Hey, I'll admit that it's certainly *possible* that it could some unknown technology, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody has been able come up with any kind of theories about how that a weapon with that kind of technology would even work in the real world.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Yep. For starters, we need to make it apply to white people too. Then that number would jump dramatically. Still be dwarfed by other gun deaths, but as I recall most of those are suicides, followed by accidents, followed by intentional murders over personal causes, none of which should qualify,
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think the GGP's numbers are way off in terms of shooting deaths; GP's link indicates 11,000-11,100 firearm related homicides per year, 19,300-19,800 firearm related suicides per year. (Interestingly, or not, roughly 5,000 "other" homicides per year.) Police shootings account for less than 500 deaths per year based on the best available information-- CDC data shows 258 in 2011 and 412 in 2010; Washington Post tracks 400 per year in the last few years.
Another interesting tidbit-- if you look at total death rate by state, the highest rates are by far the rural states.
You're talking about diplomats/spies - arguably the most politically-driven profession on Earth. Foul play is the norm there, not the outlier.
Yeah the whole "Accoustic weapon" thing seems a bit too sci-fi for my liking. Like, what would be the point? The Cubans are *super keen* to not piss off the Americans right now, other than a few nationalistic grumbles, because post-fidel cuba knows thats how it gets out of its rut, but normalizing trade with its wealthy neighbor.
So I dont see a motive. And the weapon, excuse my skepticism but if its *high* pitches we're talking about thats even fishier,due to the higher difficulties of propagating high pitches along with the easier task of locating the source. Super low frequencies, maybe , but high frequencies? I highly doubt it. But a busted old tube television set, or whistling from a damaged HF transformer, theres are some noises that can get on your nerves very quickly, and both *entirely reasonable* things to occur natively on an island thats been subsiding on leftovers from the old USSR for half a lifetime.
So no motive, no weapon, a bunch of sick diplomats with symptoms may well just be an odd-ball bug going around (embassies see a lot of back packers, aka "virus vectors").
We sure theres a crime scene here?
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
All we really know is there have been sonic attacks against both US and Canadian government employees.
That's jumping to conclusions.
My SWAG is that it's a CIA product that's to blame, like a high frequency vibrator attached to windows to thwart laser listening, and that with the panes used in Cuba, the unfortunate side effect is that it acts as a speaker element and causes the sound "attacks".
I.e. Hanlon's razor.
Speaking of which, we're seeing exactly that same type of problem with gun violence in black neighborhoods here in Canada. But we don't see the same level of problem in say poor chinese, indian, or vietmanese neighborhoods.
Given that Canada doesn't track racial statistics as they relate to crime very well (or at all in many cases), I'm going to have to see a citation for that.
They could figure that out relatively easily. Also, the effect would be limited to personnel in/near the embassy. Apparently, some attacks have occurred outside the embassy grounds.
From what I can tell, only in places where the spooks might see reasons to install anti-surveillance equipment, like the domiciles of operatives.
And, again, it's alleged attacks. Without us having seen any actual evidence for it being attacks, you're begging the question.
There could never be any plausible malicious intent by people in Cuba against U.S. Embassy personnel. There's just no precedent and no motive.
The Cuban people were NOT indoctrinated for years to view U.S. Government entities as their enemy. There is NO possibility that rogue elements within Cuban society might be doing this 'For Fidel' out of ideological zeal.
Nope. None of that should even be considered.
I'm pretty sure they US public has been more thoroughly indoctrinated to view Cuba as the spawn of Satan by the US media than the Cuban government could ever hope to indoctrinate the Cuban people to view the US as a mere 'enemy'. I attribute this largely to the fact that the average Cuban is better educated and generally better informed than the average American.
I really just wish that Americans would figure out how to associate government actions with the government, and not condemn the country or people in it for the actions of their government. Your statement that the American public views Cuba as evil is surprising to me, because I don't think that at all. That may happen for some countries, like North Korea where things are a bit more extreme. But Cuba? I don't see it.
And I sure as hell hope that people in the rest of the world don't judge all Americans based on what our government does and says.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Canada does, it's just suppressed by organizations because of political correctness.
So if the data is suppressed (and your article confirms it is not collected at all in some jurisdictions), how do you know there is a trend of gun violence specifically in poor black neighbourhoods, but not in other racial categories? Personally I think Canada likely has similar, if less inflamed, issues as the US in terms of racial disparity and over-representation in criminal statistics simply because CA/US cultures aren't that far apart. However I find claims of specific trends lack credibility without actual data to back it up. I would love if we had actual public data on this so we could try to address issues that might exist.
Or you can simply pay attention to the media, which paint a picture of what's happening too.
No, there is too much bias in media. I take trends in media as trends in what people are interested in at the time. When I see an uptick in articles about police killing unarmed black civilians, I don't assume this is suddenly happening more often, only that people are suddenly more interested in those stories.
Yeah, but it's not really Cuba's fault that the USA keeps all their political prisoners there.
It would be like blaming gravity for people who jump off a bridge/building.
More like blaming a lack of guard rails. The point is not that having easy access to guns makes suicide possible, yes of course if someone is really determined they can always find a way to kill themselves, the point is that having lots of guns lying around makes suicide quick and easy.
The difference between someone who is dead and someone who had a brief but intense episode of depression is sometimes a matter of convenience - how easy is it for them to kill themselves in that moment?
I wasn't trying to troll at all... only refusing to blindly believe in a baseless claim that is driven more by paranoia than by any facts.
It's obvious that we don't really have any facts to come to a reasoned conclusion, but that's still no reason to come to the conclusion that somebody was attacking them
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You couldn't use a similar setup because it's highly unlikely the sound was omnidirectional like a gunshot. All your sound sensors would pick up near silence. Plus if it was a constant and consistent sound that wouldn't work from a timed location perspective either. You could probably determine a direction, if you had actual gear at the location where it was focused.
I suppose a natural source could produce a noise like this
No, if a noise like this were observed by SETI, they'd suspect a reflected Earth signal, or go running to the newspapers.
Not much in nature generates regularly spaced frequency peaks, which is why we use them in communication... they are easy to pick apart from the background noise.
Someone had to do it.
The recording might not be authentic.
Sonic weaponry is not new and far from unknown... causing damage isn't even that hard. The question is whether they've perfected making specific targeted changes to a person with this tech.
For example: I could turn anyone into a mindless pile right now using little more than the pencil on my desk, BUT if I wanted to, instead, slightly change your behavior I'd need a *really fancy pencil ;)
The sound in the video is fairly similar to a mixture of a tornado siren and some cicadas but the length of the sample is too short.. would be interesting to do some waveform analysis on how the fluctuations change over a much longer period of time. The brain has a way of filtering out a fairly constant "annoying" sound so the fluctuations you can hear in the short segment probably have a fairly calculated variation pattern to continually force the brain's pattern matcher out of sync (while maybe at the same time gaming the matcher to change behavior with parts of the signal that don't change..)
Hacking the brain is fun! :-D