Spies Can Eavesdrop on Phone Calls by...

 ... sensing vibrations with radar.

An off-the-shelf millimetre wave sensor can pick out the tiny vibrations made by a smartphone's speaker, enabling an AI model to transcribe the conversation, even at a distance in a noisy room.

Spies can eavesdrop on conversations by using radar to detect tiny vibrations in smartphones and employing artificial intelligence to accurately transcribe them. The trick even works in noisy rooms, as the radar homes in on the phone’s movement and is entirely unaffected by background hubbub.

Millimetre wave sensing is a form of radar that can measure movements of less than 1 mm by transmitting pulses of electromagnetic wave energy and detecting the reflected beams.

Suryoday Basak at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues used a commercially available sensor operating between 77 and 81 gigahertz to pick up the tiny vibrations in a Samsung Galaxy S20 earpiece speaker playing audio clips. They then converted the signal to audio and passed it through an AI speech recognition model, which transcribed the speech. more$

Is Russia Targeting CIA Spies with Secret Weapons?

Marc Polymeropoulos woke up in his hotel room with his head spinning and ears ringing. "I felt like I was going to vomit. I couldn't stand up. I was falling over," he recalls. "I have been shot at numerous times and this was the most terrifying experience in my life."

Polymeropoulos had spent years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan as a senior officer of the CIA fighting America's war on terrorism. But that night in Moscow he believes he was targeted by a secret, microwave weapon. more

Diplomats Reportedly Zapped with Microwaves

Mysterious neurological symptoms experienced by U.S. diplomats in China and Cuba appear to be caused by directed microwave energy, according to a new report by the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) obtained by The Hill...

A source familiar with the symptoms told NBC News, which was the first to report on the findings from NAS, that the CIA had determined Russian operatives who had worked on microwave weapons were in the same cities as CIA agents at the time they began experiencing the neurological symptoms.

U.S. diplomats in Cuba began experiencing the symptoms in late 2016, reporting they were hearing strange sounds and experiencing odd physical sensations before becoming sick. Some of those symptoms disappeared, while others lingered.

Cuba has denied any knowledge of the illnesses. more