Here's a pair of twitter threads detailing why this seems like unsubstantiated nonsense, one posted after this was announced and one with access to the report.
I see three problems with your dismissal of the NAS finding:
* Whatever skepticism you have toward NAS, I have a thousand times more skepticism toward a tweet thread from Sharon Weinberger.
* Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications. The peer review process is not itself a form of research. The paper should be judged on its own merits and the credibility of its authors.
I agree with everything except that the I think the paper, and other papers in general, should be judged on their merits alone. The credibility of the authors should not influence how the paper is judged.
Definitely. Using credibility, or any other metric, to determine what to review is fine. Using credibility as part of the review itself is not something I agree with.
With respect to publishing, there is a significant volume of work, and we should be able to keep up with it long as people review as much as they publish.
You seem to be conflating the problem of weak or no pear review (i.e. the reason why paper-mill publications are shitty), with the problem of judging a paper by the author's name and not purely by its content (i.e. what the OP proposed).
>Contrary to what Weinberger said, a 64-page NAS document is available at
That tweet was made before the report was released, but there were a few press stories about it. The second thread opens with a link to the report.
>Peer review is a BS credibility threshold that validates tons of garbage research in a way that financially benefits publications.
And this paper is of such low quality they couldn't even manage that. It has no merits, and even the paper admits the data is shit and the conclusion is unfounded.
Peer review is the process by which that judgment is made.
Criticizing peer review is a little bit like criticizing democracy. It's the worst possible way to go about doing things, except for all of the others we've tried.
> Peer review is the process by which that judgment is made.
Not if you are yourself a scientist.
Peer review is a social method of establishing the validity of research, but it's not the only method. Another would be collaboration between well-credentialed investigators. Yet another is having the backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution.
Peer review is lauded by people who either (A) don't know anything about research, or (B) do research without stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution. Its chief proponents are the publications and conferences themselves, whose entire business model depends upon a perception of the elevated status of peer review.
It seems you have discovered the egg and the chicken problem.
What is a "well-credentialed" Investigator if it's not measured by peer review? It seems to me like an argument from authority, which is ten thousand times worse than "problematic peer review" you claim. Define well-credentialed without peer review without a cycle please.
What is "backing of a large-scale professional firm or institution"? They already exist, they are called journals, which perform, surprise, peer reviews. Other alternatives you mention are probably private organizations, you seriously believe it's less problematic than already less problematic journals? Much naivety in this argument.
Peer review has its problems, but as you've been told before, it's the best we have come up with. Your proposals are much worse than what we have.
Peer review basically confirms that there are no obvious, glaring problems with the methodology or conclusions. It's not like the peers actually reproduce the experiments.
If you are a "brand name" researcher (i.e. already well known and respected by your peers) peer review is even less meaningful as it's pretty much a rubber stamp.
My wife is a researcher and says she can often guess who the authors are when she performs reviews because it's her domain and their references and context tend to give it away. But it's still a guess because the review process is blind. I'm pretty sure it's just the journal's editorial staff that can see who's who. It's not perfect, but it's not as blatantly biased by 'brand name' stature the way you suggest.
Isn't it expected that as scientists understand their field in greater depth, they make less mistakes and their papers would be closer to the truth and be rejected less?
It's not like many of these fields are just starting up.
This year I've read a lot of epidemiology papers, and sometimes their peer reviews. There's something deeply wrong with peer reviewers in this field because they often write long, detailed reviews that completely ignore glaring problems in the papers, problems that jump out to 'lay' readers on the first glance through. My guess is that there are very complicated sets of unwritten rules about the sorts of problems that are and are not legitimate to criticise in peer reviews, and problems that are a little bit too fundamental, of the form "this entire paper should be rejected out of hand", don't get given when a paper has 25 authors at prestigious universities, even if the methodology or conclusions are absurd.
Ok, but I think your examples are specific to the social sciences where the method used is not sufficiently close to the scientific method to be reliable enough. Hence you're likely to see systemic biases in junior and senior authors alike as the field may not converge to "truth".
But in fields that the method is closer to science (e.g. physics, chemistry, neuroscience), I would expect that the overall field is converging to the truth and that senior authors will therefore be more tuned in to the best estimate of truth or how to get to it than junior authors.
Yeah, but do you have a formal list of academic fields labeled as scientific by media/government but which are not actually scientific? The term "social science" doesn't cover it, as epidemiology is proving. Not many would call it a social science but the problems there are identical or frankly even worse. And what of climatology, another field where people construct complex models on relatively small datasets and can't do even small scale experiments? Is that also a social science? Clearly not.
Even in microbiology there are a huge number of papers that don't replicate.
To me it looks like the problems are general. They aren't restricted to a small set of social sciences.
Attempting to review the research of the NAS makes it obvious that their findings are way under the standard of evidence for such a claim. They also fail to give any kind of parameters for what this kind of RF would look like, as well as fail to make specific, falsifiable, claims on what it is.
While plenty of bad claims have been validate by peer review, it doesn't mean that peer review doesn't massively reduce the number of outrageously incorrect claims.
In any case, as it stands, the NAS article wouldn't pass peer review, because it makes borderline unphysical claims without providing enough evidence, even though doing so is quite easy. As for stellar credentials or the imprimatur of a large institution, one of the authors is fairly kooky and the institute itself has a massive conflict of interest.
There's a reason even the State Department is distancing itself from this thesis.
It's really just all speculation, and doesn't fit the facts very well. If two people are in the same room and only one has symptoms, it is unlikely to be microwaves. Also, the brain imaging study just found differences in grey/white matter compared to controls, but that tends to vary quite a lot in the general population, and isn't evidence of brain damage.
Overall, FND seems to be the most plausible explanation at the moment.
Microwaves can be highly directional, beams can be transmitted in much narrower than the width of rooms. It fits some facts fairly well, modulated microwaves could induce audible frequencies at various points of the head involved in audio perception.
As mentioned elsewhere though, signals intelligence at diplomatic posts (see Stateroom and the SCS) would likely have detected at least lower frequency microwave energy. At higher frequencies it is less commonly used for communications and hence less likely to be monitored.
Don't know why everyone is expecting solid proof here. There's a reasonable chance this would have been detected, but we're unlikely to know even if it was. Microwaves are still a plausible explanation.
>Don't know why everyone is expecting solid proof here
Occam's razor. Doctors see these symptoms many times every day. For some reason, embassy staff are different from the rest of us humans, and we have to concoct some incredibly implausible reason for their symptoms.
So the occurrence rate of brain abnormalities, dizziness, loss of balance, early onset Parkinson's, hearing loss and anxiety in the US embassy in Havana are all in line with those of the general public? or those among diplomats in other posts? Is this a fact, because I am not aware.
"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day"
Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.
The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before. The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.
It's fair to invoke Occam's razor if you need an immediate hard conclusion but there's no reason for experts to not explore this and state what they're finding. The problem is when there are so many non-experts with limited information jumping to the conclusion that this must be nothing but a drum beat-up to war because of the conspiracy amongst warmongers for which there is also no proof.
If it is due to some weapon, the operation would be designed to be unattributable. And if it could be attributed no one is going to tip their hand as to their capability of finding out. So we're unlikely to get solid proof for any of this and need to follow up on plausible explanations. I said that microwaves are a one, not saying other explanations aren't also. And I'm not rushing to conclusions.
There are no brain abnormalities. They simply found different values for grey/white matter in certain areas of the brain from controls, but these values vary among the population, and it isn't evidence of brain damage.
>"Doctors see these symptoms many times every day" Thats why it's called a syndrome - no one positive indicator.
Indeed, and these symptoms can be very serious in many cases (having experienced them myself, to a much worse degree of impairment than described here).
>The possibilities of it being crickets or mass hysteria have been put forward before.The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.
It's not "nothing". FND (and variations thereof) is incredibly serious, and not "mass hysteria", and it is the most common complaint seen by neurologists. People who actually understand about FND are saying it is the most plausible explanation for these symptoms:
"It's not "nothing""
By nothing I mean there's no syndrome. Symptoms can be real.
From what I understand, you're saying the FND occurrence rate among these embassy workers is the same as that of the general population, but for some presumably conspiratorial reason, they're being treated specially.
Let's give credit to the many neurologists on this who know about FND, and many other disorders, and assume that they and the authors probably have considered it.
No, not conspiratorial. People just don't like functional disorders, as they think it means they are weak/crazy/lazy etc. Having recovered from CFS, I have seen this preducice first-hand.
>Let's give credit to the many neurologists on this who know about FND, and many other disorders, and assume that they and the authors probably have considered it.
Unfortunately FND (and functional disorders in general) are very misunderstood by almost everyone, including the authors of this report (they say that vestibular and balance symptoms would be "hallucinations" and are very uncommon, and liken them to schizophrenia).
According to the DanFunD study, the prevalence of functional disorders is about 16% in the general population (which includes all the symptoms being discussed).
> The authors obviously decided these explanations didn't fit the clinical observations, and I suspect they're thorough enough to consider that they're looking at nothing.
The report stated that they were lacking too much data to determine it was a mass psychogenic illness, and could not make a conclusion on the subject. It would still fit the available data though.
Mass hysteria strikes me as even more plausible if you consider that some of the people reporting symptoms are American intelligence agents who could be participating in a disinformation campaign to give a pretext to act against Cuba.
Then we blame the Russians while tut tutting the Cubans for allowing this to happen.
That’s the rather tidy thing about claiming to be attacked by a weapon no one can see and that leaves no evidence of use: you’re free to build theories that suit your geopolitical ambitions.
A tut tut isn't the same thing as an "act against Cuba."
If you believe that there are several diplomats with real injuries and persistent symptoms, then it stands to reason that something happened. No amount of FUD can controvert that.
Personally I have no geopolitical ambitions. What I do have is a great deal of faith in the American investigative apparatus, and none whatsoever in the honesty of Russia and China.
>The Russians definitely were working on this fifty years ago, and it produced symptoms consistent with many independent reports from US agents and people that suffered collateral damage
The twitter thread mentions this. It involved a bombardment of microwave rays that was detected. How would a similar attack evade detection now?
>The twitter thread’s main objection seems to be that the US is not publishing plans describing the secret Russian weapon.
Even without publishing the plans, if you think a microwave weapon caused this event you should be able to explain how it would function.
>Now that he’s on the way out, it’s not surprising they’re beginning to take action.
Taking action is a report that took months to complete with no strong conclusion?
> The twitter thread mentions this. It involved a bombardment of microwave rays that was detected. How would a similar attack evade detection now?
Sounds like something they could have worked on in the past half-century. Detection of a narrowly focused burst of radiation would be fairly challenging if you're outside of whatever volumetric detection zone is generated by the attack device.
How would you differentiate it from other RF interference?
> if you think a microwave weapon caused this event you should be able to explain how it would function.
I don't see what exists to be gained by explaining the function of a weapon that jeopardizes and frightens your diplomats. If the claims are true, then there is nobody to convince here; the US is going to act internally on its own information, and the alleged foreign actors involved are going to spread their own disinformation accordingly.
Radio receivers (and the LNA component of such) are incredibly sensitive... that's what allows all the radio systems we use daily to work at all.
If a signal is strong enough to have a physiological effect on the human body it is many many orders of magnitude stronger than can be measured with off-the-shelf instruments (i.e. an antenna and spectrum analyser).
Even if you make an effort to concentrate the effect in a specific spot (e.g. phased array antennas), you can only achieve a moderate reduction (e.g. 1-2 orders of magnitude) outside the central lobe. It will be easily detectable outside the effective area.
>I don't see what exists to be gained by explaining the function of a weapon that jeopardizes and frightens your diplomats.
Why would that be more frightening than releasing a report saying they were probably attacked by an unknown microwave weapon?
I think a radiation beam powerful enough to hurt people as described but able to avoid detection seems unlikely. Anything similar to interference is unlikely to cause damage.
Aren't the important guys living inside the embassy? if not you would still protect their homes if this weapon would exist and US knows about it. If it exists for 50 years and somehow US is incapable to protect against it or prove it was used then what does this mean?
Maybe ambassadors do, but it's not like they can run the show on their own. US embassies are pretty large operations with many different functions. IIRC, the people who think they were targeted by that weren't ambassadors, and at least some were involved in intelligence missions.
Still I expect US intelligence would know all the side effects of this weapon and not have to struggle identifying it, I expect they tested it 50 years ago already (same how they tested radiation effects, brain washing with drugs and all the other disturbing experiments they did)
> Still I expect US intelligence would know all the side effects of this weapon and not have to struggle identifying it, I expect they tested it 50 years ago already
You seem to be assuming US intelligence is as scarily competent as it is in the movies.
For instance even if they did test something similar 50 years ago, in the real world, all the people with that expertise would have retired long ago. To put it in perspective (with an imperfect analogy): 50 years ago, software engineers were writing code in COBOL and IBM 360 assembler, how quickly would a senior Java developer be able to parachute in and figure out and fix a subtle bug in an application written with those technologies?
Yes, it makes sense if such old stuff was experimented with in secret but then not used for decades.
But since we are entertaining conspiracies, what if US also is using this weapon, then they won't want to admit it and give clues on how to prove it was used.
My opinion(very uninformed) is that it is more probable that if a device is involved then it is some kind of spying/scanning tool and not a weapon.
I don't get the physics of how it could possibly be a microwave weapon.
Microwaves (mostly) just heat things up. Even the area denial "giant microwave generator" on a truck weapons simply make you feel like you're burning up. How could they possibly find a frequency or modulation that
A) Only affects the brain
B) Isn't stopped by exterior walls
C) Doesn't cause heating effects on the rest of the body (and everything else around you, or at least between you and the source of the radiation)
D) Isn't incredibly obvious when it's sitting around. Either this would have to be fairly high power, i.e. physically large, or it would have a high gain antenna (also large). If the power is low, it'd have to be close to the victim, like in the same room. The other problem is how do you hide the antenna? It can't sit in a van because the metal exterior would attenuate it.
It depends on the frequency. The brain is mostly water, but there are clear differences in the dielectric constant of air, the skull (bone) and the sweet delicious gray matter inside the cavity. By tuning the frequency of the waves, you can set up resonances in the cavity.
"Frey reported these symptoms with an RF source transmitting at 1.3GHz(which provides the greatest absorption depth into cortical tissue)..."
So they are implying that not all RF is stopped by the skin and some does penetrate deep enough to reach the brain. I don't suppose it will be long until some shortsighted YouTuber tries this as the experiment would not be hard to replicate at all.
Due to skin effect, most of the power is absorbed in the outer layers (skin mostly), and that causes 'warm/hot/burning' feeling, before doing anything else to your body.
Yes, and that's precisely because they are so lossy. It's not a resonant effect. You're just taking advantage of the grape's cross section being roughly a quarter-wavelength at 2.4 GHz, which allows the magnetron to dump a ton of power into it.
It's analogous to using a couple of forks to operate a pickle from 120V.
Should be fine as long as you put a cup of water in the microwave alongside the grape. They aren't really meant to run empty, and microwaving a single grape would be basically running it empty.
All 4 of your points could be easily explained if the device was designed similar to a "gamma knife" [0].
With a gamma knife, a number of lower power beams converge on the target from different locations to create a higher intensity at a calculated location, and everywhere else the intensity is low enough to write off.
A gamma knife-type thing would require much higher frequencies than are compatible with the theory because otherwise you get diffraction since the wavelengths are so large. It's very unlikely you'd be able to do such a thing with 20-12 cm wavelength radiation, the calculated location would be meters big and it would be detectable everywhere.
I don't know how building walls would affect coherent radiation at various frequencies, but if 80% of the energy made it to the destination, the other 20% could explain the variety of symptoms experienced in the room.
The only maser that would fit the bill is a hydrogen maser with a frequency of around 1.4Ghz.
That's a wavelength of 21cm.
That means that your beam waist is never going to be less than 21cm, which means that your beam divergence is going to be of at the very minimum 0.21/pi radians = 3.8 degrees, likely twice that.
That's just not targeted enough to be able to hide the massive EM interference it would cause (like, instantly destroying electronics). And also, if the transmitter was 200 meters away, it would have to be dozens of meters big, assuming you got some lending system. Otherwise, it would still be huge, but it would also spew radiation at a truncated cone with a radius in the meters.
Also, building walls would certainly deflect a lot of the radiation and cause decoherence but also heating and destruction of electronics.
In any case, if it was any kind of EM weapon at a suitable frequency, it would be incredibly detectable and we wouldn't have this discussion.
But for neurosurgery the head is held in place and the gamma knife does not need to be hidden. Presumably, the microwave transmitters of a conjectured gamma knife would need to be portable and able to operate without even being in the same room as the target's head.
We're still taking about imagined devices pinpointing targets' brains from large distances and through walls. I find it hard to believe that these devices would be that accurate and never miss and, say, accidentally hit someone's eyes or neck and cause obvious tissue damage.
But now the problem is convincing large numbers of people to stick their head into a machine where 200 individual beams can be focused on their skull, and then forget they ever did so.
I can’t address many of your objections but I don’t think putting it in a van would be a problem. Organizations sometimes use fiberglass body panels that look like normal metal ones but are transparent to RF in these kinds of situations.
I sort of assumed that if this is an RF weapon the attackers would just have a hotel room directly above or below the intended target, maybe even some structural modifications to the floor/ceiling.
Not that it's proof or anything, but supposedly ICE or a similar org has undercover backscatter XRay vans. Don't remember where I read that, but it was years ago.
> ABC News reporters Richard Esposito and Ted Gerstein provide one of the few accounts of the backscatter van in a book they wrote chronicling a year inside NYPD's bomb squad. Describing the security ahead of President Bush's motorcade to the 2004 Republican convention, they wrote that every vehicle entering the street in front of the hotel was ordered to drive between two unmarked white vans, which X-rayed each vehicle for bombs.
Collimated microwaves (i.e. a maser) pointed directly at the skull, from a distance, through a window, I'd assume.
What are the reported symptoms from military radio engineers standing in the transmission path of high-power/long-distance ship-to-ship microwave links?
To directly point radiwaves, you need very very high frequencies, and with skin effect, those don't go very deep into a humans head (we're talking millimeters or less here).
It's complete bullshit. If there actually were RF attacks of such huge intensities, the US would have trivially recorded them.
Yet that didn't happen. I don't see any reason why no measurements and proof would be measured given the extreme ease of doing so, except that it just didn't happen.
Depends on the frequency range being continuously monitored. If it's above the usual signals intelligence range there's a good chance it wouldn't have been recorded.
"Yet that didn't happen."
And we wouldn't know if it had. Holding on to what you can detect and attribute carries advantages too.
We're talking about repeated attacks at around 1.4Ghz, so not only within the range of SIGINT, but it would literally fry your phone, and they were supposedly repeated.
As for the last one, if there was proof, then the State Department wouldn't abandon the theory, and such wildly speculative and substance-less research wouldn't be commissioned.
Exactly what is the evidence of this directed microwave weapon?
As far as I can see there is absolutely none. A list of symptoms, based on interviews and self-reporting, no clinical measurement of any kind. And report that speculates on a cause in east and west.
Nothing beyond that.
The professionals signing off on this really should think carefully whether they are being used for political purposes.
The media replicating the study will not emphasise these weaknesses; they will instead go with the sensational speculation: A secret microwave weapon.
The purpose of the release of this sensational and unsubstantiated report is for the outgoing administration to box in the incoming Biden administration on foreign policy.
This will make it harder for Biden to normalise relations with Cuba.
> Staff and some of their relatives complained of symptoms ranging from dizziness, loss of balance, hearing loss, anxiety and something they described as "cognitive fog". It became known as "Havana syndrome".
These symptoms are also present in everything from Lyme disease to minor/asymptomatic COVID. They are also associated with positional vertigo.
Unless US intelligence knows something they have not shared, I don't see the "sonic attack" angle. We don't know what happened, we don't know what caused it, but it's an embassy, so it must be the fault of spies?
Suppose someone left a fork in their container while reheating their lunch in a microwave with a failing magnetron. It is an embassy-- suppose a bug interfered with a jammer. Suppose any other freak occurrence occurred that would emit this sort of energy.
Literally anything that disrupts the inner ear calcium deposits could produce these symptoms. Sound vibration or changes in air pressure could do it too. It happens to people who don't work at the US embassy in Cuba too, but that results in a vertigo diagnosis instead of accusations of theoretical attacks by unknown adversaries for unclear purpose.
The Russians studied this sort of thing 50 years ago? Ok. But what is the connection to the current political relationship between the USSR and Cuba? Why apply 50-year-old research--now--in Cuba, specifically? Why not test this on a control group that would not put the attacker in-scope of US intelligence? We will look like idiots if this turns out to be an intern fooling around with a directional microphone they found while cleaning out a supply closet.
Sure, something happened in Cuba that produced these symptoms in a group of people. But fuck me, if anything the mass hysteria seems to be coming more from US intelligence than the actual victims.
Pesticides are mentioned in the paper, but it doesn't consider it a convincing explanation, except, maybe, as a contributing factor.
But the most important part is in the summary:
> Multiple hypotheses and mechanisms have been proposed to explain these clinical cases, but evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven, and the circumstances remain unclear.
Pulsed, directed microwaves just seem to be "the most plausible mechanism". So, nothing conclusive.
What would the purpose be? I can't imagine a motive or a rational end goal. Would it be in the hopes that sickened diplomats could cause an incident that the hosting country could exploit in some way? I'm not saying that countries always act rationally, I just don't see what could be gained by doing this. Petty sadism?
The motive is to make it harder for US personnel to carry out foreign policy objectives in these nations. if a hostile foreign state can cause these symptoms without being detected, hence deniability, that’s a win for them.
which is why EM radiation alone is hard to accept, since it would be trivial to set up ultra wideband detection equipment at these locations.
likely there is much more known that is not released for security reasons.
"The motive is to make it harder for US personnel to carry out foreign policy objectives in these nations."
If they were soldiers, sure, that makes sense. But I thought the the job of diplomats is essentially to be a messenger between governments. "Carry out foreign policy objectives" means to relay accurately the stance and desires of the home government. Hurting a diplomat in no wise hurts the home government, it just makes communication more difficult.
aside from old school spying, all sorts of soft power tactics: support or not a government measure with marginal support, connect people or not with resources in the home country, advocate or not for sales of defense products from home country.
Or, to widen the possibilities somewhat, by Cuban interests who would prefer to not have normalized relations with the US, and who could enlist technically-advanced outside help — perhaps from Russia, but not necessarily the Russian government, directly.
One reason a Cuban entity might not want normalization is that a lot of property was taken over during the Revolution, and US Cubans (and other former property owners) have been clear about wanting it back.
Hmm, even though that's a bit of a stretch that actually makes sense. Also Russia seems like the only geo-political adversary that could pull this off and have a vested interest in keeping Cuba in their sphere.
After the Trump administration reversed the previous administrations opening of Cuba, Russia has increased diplomatic relations with the island nation. The trade between the two has doubled
The important aspect is the rate of increase. Beyond that, Russia is still Cuba’s largest creditor. They may not have the same influence as the USSR but they still have considerable leverage
Speculation from actual victims suggests it was intimidation from Russian agents who knew there would be no response as long as Trump was in the White House.
Some victims were approached by the Russians and told to go back to the US immediately before (within a day or two) of the attacks.
Such warnings are apparently extremely unusual, and a violation of professional etiquette between the US and Russian intelligence agencies.
> "Some victims were approached by the Russians and told to go back to the US immediately before (within a day or two) of the attacks."
I'm skeptical, tbh. Every single time someone has proof that it's definitely the Russians, I follow that rabbit hole and the actual evidence is tenuous or non-existent
As for its being Russians in this case, it's still turtles all the way down: Just as it makes no sense that it's the hosting country, it makes no sense that it's the Russians, especially if they tip their hand in such a way. What advantage would Russia have for intimidating the US embassy staff by sending thugs to "get out or else"? The embassy are glorified messengers with limited negotiating skills. Even if the entire diplomatic corps quit en masse, the US would just send more.
If there were some advantage to sickening, crippling and otherwise poisoning diplomatic staff, why are there not more such incidents across the world?
I don't think you or I have any access to the real evidence that would allow us to make a meaningful determination. We have almost none of the raw intelligence, and we're facing off with foreign intelligence agencies who have strong enough operational security to ensure that we won't gain access to such evidence.
We have intelligence agencies that pour hundreds of billions of dollars per year into recruiting human sources at the highest levels of foreign governments, intercepting vast amounts of encrypted data, and doing all sorts of complex analysis. It's entirely possible that the CIA has a source within Russian intelligence that has already handed them a copy of the machine's blueprints and operational plans, but the CIA can't reveal that information because it would destroy sources and methods. So instead, they're taking secret internal actions while also pushing hard on public agencies like NAS to look carefully at the non-classified evidence.
I guess it's also possible that the CIA has no evidence and just wants to pick a fight with Russia for some private reason of its own. I can't rule that out, but it would rely on a lot of people -- including Trump appointees -- having seen the (lack of) evidence and basically agreeing to go forward anyway. That seems surprising to me.
I think at the end of the day the best thing you can do is weigh motivations. Does Russia have a reason to mess with embassy staff? Well, it doesn't make sense to me personally, but then again, neither does killing your opponents in public using Novichok or Polonium. Does the bureaucratic CIA have some incentive to promote a baseless intelligence war with Russian agents, one that is likely to get people on both sides hurt? It's possible, but also seems pretty unlikely.
I think it's part of a method for mapping foot traffic inside a building. It came out around the same time as the "see people through walls using wi-fi" demo.
There's a variety of covert surveillance devices that have been remotely powered, but most of those were very early before you could get good batteries. I don't see a lot of reason for one today.
Well, yes, if you mean Guantanamo. As for the embassy itself, it is there only at the pleasure of the hosting government and of the United States. If Cuba wants the embassy gone, it merely has to tell them to leave. Sickening or crippling the staff does nothing to, say, help the cause of recovering Guantanamo Bay.
I know I'm missing something, because I don't think this would happen if there weren't an advantage of some sort somewhere. I just don't see how it's to the advantage of the hosting country. In fact, I would think it works against the interests of the hosting country.
Wonder if the nefarious party used magnetrons or masers to carry out the attack. Guessing magnetrons given that this seems very similar to other documented cases [1] before the development of room-temperature solid-state masers.
Reminds me a while back on eBay I saw a magnetron by one of the big military industrial manufacturers with a potential output frequency matching what was used in some recently controversial microwave weapon.
I was probably searching for magnetrons in general at the time. I browse eBay occasionally to poach lab equipment or retro computing stuff related to whatever I’ve been reading about / working on.
Occhams razor: A magic weapon is causing brain damage for every diplomat in a country that, conveniently, happens to be on the presidents short list of evil places he does not like.
or
After taking office in 2016 the president sought to roll back the cuban thaw and needed a convenient pretext.
suspiciously this weapon was never deployed against a single person at Guantanamo bay.
Having briefly lived in the Caribbean, I can confirm this kind of fumigation for mosquitos is common. The time period matches the Zika virus outbreak when even more fumigation than usual might have been done . . . it certainly was in Grenada where I was living at the time.
> A 2019 US academic study found "brain abnormalities" in the diplomats who had fallen ill, but Cuba dismissed the report.
BBC writes that "Cuba dismissed the report" but failed to mention that many others did too:
> The latest brain scans may provide fresh evidence of some injury, but the study was not without critics and some researchers have questioned whether there was any kind of attack at all.
> “Finding evidence of brain change doesn’t provide evidence of brain injury or damage,” said Dr. Jon Stone, a professor of neurology at the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study.
> Dr. Sergio Della Sala, a professor of human cognitive neuroscience also at the University of Edinburgh, in an email called the study “half baked.”
> He noted that 12 of the affected workers who had a history of concussion prior to going to Cuba were included in the analyzes. “In comparison, none of the controls declared previous brain injury. This in itself could cause statistical group differences,” Della Sala said.
The microwave thingy is just so far-fetched. If such a weapon exists, wouldn't the US intelligence agencies already have developed it? Sounds implausible that China, Cuba, and presumably also former Soviet states, would have access to this super-sneaky microwave weapon but not the US.
I find it interesting that that Havana Syndrome has been experienced by American and Canadian embassy officials in multiple outposts, but apparently no other NATO allies.
One thing Americans and Canadians have in common is that we're both English-language readers who consume much of the same media.
They’re also apparently long range and easy to aim. I imagine agents could carry microwave detectors, though it’s not clear how long the exposure needs to last, and the only recourse seems to be running toward the interior or other side of whatever building you are in (if indoors).
That might create a lot of false positives unless calibrated correctly, so everyone would need to carry logging devices or something, and then wait for a few attacks.
So somehow they do not have the ability to tease out malicious radiation from just background noise, and yet we are to believe this is some kind of high intensity targeted attack?
I'd expect embassy in a potentially "hostile" country would have basic detectors for common suspects - ionizing radiation, ultrasound, strong EM waves, common toxins etc. Especially once the suspicion is there: detecting microwaves that are strong enough to cause biological effects isn't hard (wideband antenna, detector. The energy density must be immense), even outside of the main beam - it will scatter all around.
"It's not peer reviewed," "I didn't read the paper and I don't know much about microwaves but I personally don't think microwaves work that way", "But I read something else about pesticides two years ago."
Anyone want to read the paper and respond to it instead of racking their brains for weird meta-arguments?
How could a strong microwave beam not have been detected? It's not hard. Just clip a multimeter across a diode and see if it detects anything. You can buy microwave leakage detectors, but that's all they really are. Embassies are routinely swept for much lower power RF emitters.
The summary of the report is the first hyperlink in the article. It mentions:
> Multiple hypotheses and mechanisms have been proposed to explain these clinical cases, but evidence has been lacking, no hypothesis has been proven, and the circumstances remain unclear.
Which is very different than the press stories stating that it was "likely caused by directed microwaves." I guess "Havana syndrome report has no clue what happened" isn't as catchy.
The attacks also happened in China, Russia, and elsewhere. It started in Cuba, but isn’t limited to a particular geometry. It does seem to be limited to US agents and people in their immediate vicinity.
I have a much higher skepticism of self reported symptoms like this than the average person. I know a lot of hypochondriacs personally, so that may be a factor in my judgement. I think the human brain is excellent at coming up with little stories about how we are victims of bad actors.
The federal government and the "corporate news media" have a lot more to lose by making shit up. They have actual jobs. What are your sources of information? A rando on Facebook under a fake handle?
Possibly you should read Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky. You know that rando who came up with several core concepts in linguistics, computer science and politics...
> Possibly you should read Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky. You know that rando who came up with several core concepts in linguistics, computer science and politics...
Talent in one area doesn't translate to the same level of talent in other areas. For instance, Nobel Prize-winner Linus Pauling, called "one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time" by New Scientist, promoted high-dose vitamin C as a cancer treatment long after it had been discredited (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Pauling#Medical_research...).
Also, IIRC, Chomsky's contributions to linguistics are somewhat controversial, and I've read that his lock on the field may have set it back by decades.
In fact, Chomsky's formal training was IN linguistics. He was not an expert in politics in any way, and hence his opinion was as valid as anyone's in academia, for example. This is even mentioned in Tom Nichols's "The Death of Expertise".
The vitamin C episode is also covered in the same book :)
Agreed on Chomsky's controversial influence on linguistics (I know a few linguists who have said this).
Also agree the point on talent in general.
In this specific case though I get the impression Chomsky is more highly regarded than most political scientists.
GP comment set the bar rather low by associating criticism of mainstream media with randoms on facebook. Regardless of whether you agree with him I think Chomsky safely exceeds that bar.
It would also fry your electronics and be incredibly noticeable and very easy to prove.
Also, 10 000W wouldn't be enough because that power isn't into a single resonant cavity, we'd be talking about pulses with instantaneous power an order of magnitude higher at the very least.
The pulse was still nowhere near directional enough to only impact a single person over long ranges and not essentially act as a massively detectable EMP.
By noticeable, I mean as in electronics being destroyed, and any kind of equipment the US would have obviously deployed to attempt to detect it would register an absolutely massive signature.
Here's a pair of twitter threads detailing why this seems like unsubstantiated nonsense, one posted after this was announced and one with access to the report.
https://mobile.twitter.com/weinbergersa/status/1335096557079...
https://mobile.twitter.com/weinbergersa/status/1335304431756...
Just a ton of hot air blown for no purpose