The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This is the problem with "anonymizing" a person by just changing their name, or exchanging a name in a database with a number.
There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is precisely one. We already know she works in the embassy in Havana, which means she's one of a couple hundred people, she's female, which cuts that number in half, she has twins, which cuts that number by about 100.
There's unlikely to be the information you think in that article otherwise the CIA is going to be having a hard time. In all likelihood the CIA worked with the reporter to ensure the right disinformation came out. Note that the FBI refused to comment but there seems to be a lot of inside info about the CIA...
We start with approximately 33 bits needed to uniquely identify her. She lives in Havana, which immediately slices 11 bits from our search space (the population of Havana is around 2.13 million, or ~2^21). She's female, so we can roughly cut our population in half again; now we're only at 20 bits.
She worked in the Havana embassy in 2017 and was one of the people impacted by the strange health issues. There were about 24 people impacted (insofar as I can quickly find online), which means she must be one of these 24 people. Assuming all of the other 23 are also female, now there are only 4 bits remaining (24 = 2^4.58).
Finally, she has twin 12 year old children. We'll have to make a few fuzzy assumptions here, but given 1) a birth rate of ~1.5 per female per year, 2) a world female population of ~3,232,000,000 in 2005, and 3) a chance of having twins at about 3.33%, she is most likely in a set of about 159,984,000. This is only about 27 bits, which means we get a little over a 5 bit reduction by placing her in this set. That gives us the last 4 bits we need.
This is all assuming that the information given in this article is correct and the foregoing estimates are comparable to the real world statistics. This is a little fuzzy because I'm not sure if she's actually Cuban or American (and therefore where she was in 2005, or which estimates to use for calculating twin and birth rate statistics).
And strangely enough I am pretty sure I know who this person is. Just based on those facts and other things from the article.
Also, one thing you pay for through the nose when buying a spectrum analyzer is scan time. If you want narrow buckets and a broad frequency, a cheap SDR is going to take on the order of one second to scan from 1 MHz to 6 GHz. If your radio pulse lasts for a few milliseconds and has a bandwidth of a few kHz, you're unlikely to see it unless you have a big FPGA, big RAM buffer, and high-end filters on a $XXXXX scope.
Psychosomatic symptoms are still symptoms and stress and anxiety can cause physical changes to the body and brain and long lasting effects.
>But their skepticism vanished when they saw the patients. “There was not one individual on the team who was not convinced that this was a real thing,” Smith said.
and from another article: (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180829115456.h...)
>"We have seen this before when the Soviets irradiated the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the days of the Cold War," he said.
So the Soviets / Russians have form and the symptoms fit. There was also a van seen which could have had the gear:
>...looked outside her home after hearing the disturbing sounds and seen a van speeding away. (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/science/sonic-attack-cuba...)
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
The article only reported cases of diplomatic personnel being affected, but I found some other sources stating that tourists were also affected, but those sources are not as reliable as this one.
Anyway, with the number of tourists traveling there, it is very unlikely that you might get affected.
No evidence exists to suggest anything actually happened to the victims, and what limited scientific evidence does exist is being criticized.
And all of this just happened to directly support the official hard line position taken by the new US government.
What a remarkable set of coincidences!
>> In fact, aside from the victims’ accounts, there was no conclusive evidence that anyone in Cuba was attacked at all.
>> an investigation carried out by Canada and Cuba has thus far found no evidence of attacks.
>> After the study was published, JAMA received letters from other specialists, arguing that the study was flawed, especially in neglecting psychological explanations.
>> "After a year and a half, the most powerful nation on earth hasn’t been able to present one single piece of evidence"
>> But he acknowledged that more data were needed to convince skeptics that the syndrome was real. He said his team was awaiting “potential tangible evidence” from a new neuroimaging study involving the victims.
> You insinuate that the new administration is the only group of people in the world interested in scuttling normalization
Sure, plenty of other parties interested in stopping the normalization of relationships exist. But their state intelligence agents aren't the ones claiming injury from a mysterious attack that no one seems to be able to prove happened.
> The article was about the many non-CIA officers affected.
Psychosomatic illnesses are a real thing. They can cause real and serious impact to people's health.
A psychosomatic illness arising after the stress of living and working in a country that has been "the enemy" for six decades, after being told that you will be under "constant surveillance by Cuban intelligence", after their intelligence agents make it clear to you that you're under surveillance? After three agents of your state intelligence suddenly come down with a mysterious, unexplainable illness? Seems entirely plausible to me.