Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by phobosanomaly 2074 days ago
Thinking my way through this thing:

A. If there's a directed-energy weapon, we would know about it because we probably have one too.

B. If we have one and we know they're using it, we have two choices:

     B.1 We call them out on it, but then we have to 
     admit we have the thing too, and we've tested it on 
     people so we know it does that.
      

     B.2 We don't call them out on it directly, and we 
     just encourage affected federal employees to go 
     public and shame our friends in Moscow, Havana, 
     Beijing, country X we have some political problem 
     with.
C. If there's not a directed-energy weapon, it's either the pesticide thing or mass hysteria.

D. Normal people won't know what the real answer is until it's FOIA declassified in 60 years.

E. Working for the CIA in unfriendly countries can come with side-effects.

3 comments

The article says the team at the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania didn't think it was mass hysteria:

The neurologists at the University of Pennsylvania found that some explanations for the Havana Syndrome, including mass hysteria and group psychosis, were highly unlikely. Many of the patients didn’t know each other, their performance on these tests could not have been faked, and they did not wallow in their pain. In fact, according to the study, they were desperately trying to get better and “were largely determined to continue to work or return to full duty, even when encouraged by health care professionals to take sick leave.” The study also concluded that these injuries were likely not caused by exposure to chemicals, since no organs other than the brain were involved. Nor were they likely to have been the product of a viral infection, the doctors said, because these patients did not display associated symptoms, like a spiking fever.

Ok, cool. So then:

1. Directed Energy Weapon - 40% Chance

2. In-house Embassy Comms Equipment - 30% Chance

2. Pesticide Spraying - 25% Chance

3. Psychosomatic - 5% Chance

You wanna tweak the values? Add another category? Remove a category? Weigh them different?

Not sure if I'd rely on the theory that one entity can always discover what another did. ( #1 above)
In this case, I'm not sure I'd agree with you, and I'll say why and I'm curious if you have another take that I haven't thought of.

This has to be a top priority in the intelligence community, I mean like the CIA has had teams of in-house Engineers and Scientists reviewing classified information on available etiologies, plus they've probably pulled reams of SIGINT data to see if they can find any clues.

If it's being deployed in the field, the underlying tech has probably been around for a while.

It's happened in multiple major cities, so if it is an intelligence op being run by a foreign government, there's a big team running the thing working with different communications channels and crossing multiple national borders, which means there's a high risk of some information leak from the program.

Anyone in the U.S. defense industrial complex working on a similar weapon would have let the IC know, because it's great advertising for their weapon and could lead to some very lucrative contracts in both the offensive and defensive space.

So, just to pull a number off the top of my head, I'd say there's like an 85% chance someone knows what's going on.

So, then that might help us narrow-down which nation the attacks would be originating from. If we know what is doing it, and who is doing it, the President has probably been briefed on it. If China was orchestrating it, Trump probably would have just said something by now. Same for Cuba or Iran. It would play strongly in his favor politically considering the ongoing diplomatic hostilities with those nations.

Russia perhaps?

Trump probably wouldn't call out Russia based on his response to the bounty thing:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/29/trump-russian-bount...

The attacks started in Havana, and if you've ever seen the Russian embassy in Havana, it's RIGHT out of a 70's Bond movie. Seriously, look it up. The building is awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassy_of_Russia_in_Havana

If there's anything going on in Havana, the Russians either know about it, or are involved in it. It's their diplomatic backyard, they've been there since forever, and it's a pretty small city.

Idle speculation (just for fun). My money is on:

A. Russia has something to do with it.

B. President won't publicly call them out on it.

C. Intelligence community is frustrated, so they're encouraging affected employees to go public in hopes that someone outside of the security-clearance bubble will figure out what's going on.

/Pretending I'm a super-secret squirrel.

60 years seems like a stretch to ease my curiosity. I better start working out extra and eating more salads.
I suppose it's still 2020.

There could still something that would reveal the truth, like a coup, revolution, second pandemic, financial-crash, war with China, singularity, mass-extinction event, nuclear holocaust, collapse of some ice shelf. There's always the chance something weird could happen and the government could use them on us, thus we would know about it.

If there's one thing I have genuine faith in, it's that 2020 is the QVC channel on interdimensional cable, and man maybe we'll find out early.