CIA used "long-range quantum magnetometry" called "Ghost Murmur" in Iran(nypost.com)

16 pointsby bhouston2 hours ago4 comments

pants24 minutes ago
Murmur BS aside - holy shit, they had to abandon two C-130 class planes because they got stuck in the mud? And lost an A-10 Warthog on top of the original F-15?
This looks like a massive fuckup!
bigyabai2 hours ago
> The secret nature of Ghost Murmur was “basically why everyone’s been so cagey about how [the airman] was actually found,” the first source said.
Or an excellent fictional coverup for a failed Isfahan raid, not that such a thing would ever be considered by rational officers.
- bhouston2 hours ago
  Yeah, this Ghost Murmur thing doesn't seem to hold water. But I figured I'd post it anyways, maybe someone know more than me about this field.
  Also, I agreed that there was a failed raid, I tried to post on it yesterday but got no traction:
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47665350
  - kuhsaftan hour ago
    Magnetocardiography is a thing. The NRO has some insane capabilities, so I wouldn’t immediately discredit the idea that a magnetocardiographic scan of a large area is possible.
    It’s important to note that the individual was isolated by miles. And that they knew the time and location of the crash to determine the search radius.
    It’s also one of the many tools they can use. So they may have used some combination of methods to reduce the search area and to pinpoint the target’s location. To say that they only used magnetocardiography is probably false.
    leephillips10 minutes ago
    It is. One of the first magnetocardiographs was of my heart, because I happened to be in the basement when my fellow graduate students were looking for a subject (I’m a theorist and wouldn’t be allowed to actually touch anything). They used a SQUID that cancelled out the Earth’s field and its gradient; the sensor was close to my skin but not touching it.
    quietsegfault33 minutes ago
    Earth’s geomagnetic noise fluctuations are on the order of nanoteslas (10^-9 T), which is 18 orders of magnitude above the signal they claim to have pulled out.
    It’s below the thermal noise floor of any physical measurement system that obeys thermodynamics. You can’t engineer around it because it’s not an instrumentation problem. The signal is smaller than quantum noise limits at that scale. “AI” filtering doesn’t help when there’s no signal to filter. You can’t computationally recover energy that isn’t there.
    This is certainly bullshit of the finest, most grassy and odorous caliber.
- __patchbit__2 hours ago
  Those loot boxes with identity and payment cards recovered from the broken airstrip may phone home.
nslsman hour ago
Heh, they even reused the name from “the ghost of Kiev”
aggakake2 hours ago
Smells like absolute BS to me.
- alsaaroan hour ago
  Same.
  But perhaps the underlying technology is a superconducting SQUID.
  The ability to detect a heartbeat from distance is far fetched though.
  - kuhsaftan hour ago
    So is cm resolution with satellite imagery, but the NRO does have those capabilities.
    quietsegfault31 minutes ago
    The photons arriving at the satellite from a ground target aren’t getting weaker due to distance in any way that defeats you, because the sun is illuminating the target and the NRO just needs to collect enough of the reflected photons.
    SQUID sensors (the most sensitive magnetometers that exist) require magnetically shielded rooms to record cardiac signals at centimeter range.
    kuhsaft17 minutes ago
    They require a shielded room to increase the SNR. SQUID sensors are sensitive enough to record cardiac signals at distance. The issue is SNR.
    What they are saying is that they produced sensors with a high enough inherent SNR. And they managed to increase the SNR through computation. They also stated that it was an ideal environment with no other electrical/magnetic interference.