alt Hacker NewsDebunking the CIA's “magic” heartbeat sensor [video]
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I watched this video earlier today and came away unconvinced. Labeling this HN post as debunking feels a bit leading as that is not the title of the video. They did not follow all of the necessary logic to debunk it.
They boiled it down to: might be technically possible, but it's improbable, if you make assumptions we're making that are unreasonable.
Whether the video was just sloppy and weak by chance, or they're trying to bury this, or it legitimately doesn't work, I don't know. This video doesn't answer that.
We know it's simple to detect someone's heartbeat from just colour changes of ones skin in a regular video taken with a phone camera. Wouldn't this be trivial with military level IR tech? Sounds way more likely than some amazing new top secret technology that is somehow filtering out every other magnetic field and can detect a heartbeat through mountains.
There are so many easier ways to detect a person that I don't understand why they chose going with this charade
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic -- Clarke's three laws
HOWEVER, sometimes, if a technology is sounded like a magic too much, then maybe it just is, without any technology in it.
Back many years ago I worked on a research project which used UWB radar to detect breathing through walls / rubble / etc. But the distance was in the range of 1-10 meters. The application was to use such sensors for finding survivors after earthquakes etc.
If they can detect the faint signal of a heartbeat from so far away, why not instead deliberately transmit a weak, wider-bandwidth pseudorandom magnetic signal? Such a signal would be even harder to detect than a heartbeat without prior knowledge, yet easier to identify and track using a matched filter.
As always with these kinds of outlandish claims, the best explanation is almost always that the journalist with the arts major degree misunderstood a key phrase in long-winded technobabble, and ran with it.
I mean... come on, we of all people have all surely been involved in one of these. We explain some deeply technical thing to some salesperson, they hear one word they understand, and the gleefully run off like a dog with a bone telling everyone that we can compress any movie into a single kilobyte.
"No, no, that's just the torrent root hash!"
"So you are saying it can be compressed into a kilobyte!"
Etc...
Quantum magnetometers are real, they are crazy sensitive, and apparently there are some research programs into making a "tricorder"-like device that can detect a human heartbeat ten centimeters away. I.e.: you've got an unconscious pilot in full flight kit, exposed to the elements overnight, no detectable pulse but... wait! Hey! Perfect time to test that new doohicky the boys in the lab cooked up!
That gets turned into a press release by someone who doesn't know what a centimeter even is because they're a Yank that grew up knowing only Freedom Units, got 10 clicks confused with 10 cm and... wow! What a press release! The best ever!
Now the whole world is talking about how we can detect a pilot miles away with a signal that normally takes special conductive lube and low-resistance wires coupled to a highly sensitive amplifier to detect reliably.
Not to mention the obvious problem of having to filter out, oh, I don't know, the heartbeat of the person holding it. And everyone else nearby. Every desert animal. The electronics of the helicopter used to get there. The radio on their belt. Satellites. Every mobile phone in the vicinity. On and on.
None of that matters, because someone got an exclusive story.
this is such a classic, well trodden propaganda tool i'm surprised anyone here falls for it.
tell the public about an incredibly advanced piece of tech that simultaneously justifies the $1 trillion+ military budget, makes people fear the sophistication of our government (prevent dissidence internally) and distract from otherwise embarrassing flaws in the war so far.
it's like how trump releases "proof" of aliens ever time he wants to distract from a new epstein files bombshell.
if you believe this i've got a bridge to sell you.
I think the link must be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVTPv4sI_Jc
More likely, the story is designed to make the public believe that US propaganda is actually aimed at the "foreign adversary" rather than at the US population. The emotionally appealing bit is the idea that even if the story is fake, Iran is now thinking it is dealing with an adversary that has and is using tech that is right out of science fiction.
In reality, it's all aimed at us, the people. All of the "tough talk", the comments that appear intended for dissident groups within Iran, etc., is all meant to mislead the people (us) who can stop the war so we don't do so.