US investigates second suspected case of mystery 'syndrome' near White House

And, again, I'm more skeptical of the DC cases than the overseas one, and I think it's likely that a decent percentage of the cases are psychogenic.

Here are the dog references, for anyone else curious:

(Alleged Virginia attack)

>Then, shortly after Thanksgiving 2019, according to three sources familiar with the incident, a White House staffer was hit while walking her dog in Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. According to a government source familiar with the incident, the staffer passed a parked van. A man got out and walked past her. Her dog started seizing up. Then she felt it too: a high-pitched ringing in her ears, an intense headache, and a tingling on the side of her face.

(Alleged China attack)

>Meanwhile, the roster of victims was growing ever longer. In June 2018, the U.S. State Department evacuated nearly a dozen people from Guangzhou, China, where American diplomats and trade representatives reported feeling symptoms eerily similar to those their colleagues had experienced in Cuba. One victim, Catherine Werner, said that her symptoms began in late 2017, just as Polymeropoulos’s had: a splitting headache, nausea, loss of balance. When her mother went to Guangzhou to help her, she, too, fell ill. Even Werner’s dogs were affected, her mother told NBC News. They began vomiting blood and avoiding the room where Werner and her mother heard the sounds and felt the symptoms start.

These two scenarios definitely did not adjust my confidence about any of this. The reported symptoms are indeed different. I just think it's interesting. It absolutely could be a red herring.

>Much of the information we used for our investigations could never be found in most Western countries, but in Russia, is readily available either for free or a fairly modest fee.

They tracked FSB agents' geolocation positions using this data. Note these are just random private citizens with no special access to anything or anyone.

From the GQ article:

>The most compelling evidence, however, came from publicly available data. As has been widely reported, mobile phones track people’s movements, and location-data companies accumulate this information and sell it. Using this sort of data, CIA investigators were able to deduce the whereabouts of Russian agents, and place them in close physical proximity to the CIA officers at the time they had been attacked when they were in Poland, Georgia, Australia, and Taiwan. In each case, individuals believed to be FSB agents were within range of the CIA officers who had been hit in 2019. In two of the incidents, location data apparently showed FSB agents in the same hotel at the same time their targets experienced the onset of symptoms.

>When I asked Polymeropoulos about the CIA investigation, he said that it was conducted after he retired and that, because he did not have direct knowledge of it, he could not comment on it. He did say, however, that it would not be difficult to use the same techniques, analyzing publicly available data, that had been used by organizations like Bellingcat, which have employed similar methods to expose Russian operations in Europe. “Anyone can buy the cell-phone data on the open market, and you can see where people went,” Polymeropoulos explained. “And perhaps the reason why it seems to have worked is because, just like you saw with all of the GRU activities, they’re sloppy.” GRU machinations were discovered because officers had made several embarrassing missteps, like leaving behind taxi receipts that showed their starting address as GRU headquarters. In the case of the microwave attacks, it seemed FSB operatives had brought their phones with them while carrying out their missions—typically a no-no in the world of covert operations. “There’s ways intelligence officers cover their tracks,” Polymeropoulos marveled. “If I’m going off to do something like that, I’m not taking my phone. It’s insane. It’s so sloppy.”

Definitely could be CIA propaganda. But as Polymeropoulos explains, if Bellingcat could do it, the CIA definitely could, too. Maybe Bellingcat could even retroactively try to confirm this, perhaps.