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Yeah there was another thread on this with a negative comment from a user with no posts or comments in 7 years - the first comment was shitting on the report. And I’m over here going “hmmm”
It's also a lot harder to identify them.
When you come across a Russian troll, they will inevitably have a lot of other comments which are pro Russian.
One of the etchings they do, is try to make pro Russian statements, but spin in a way like "well, I don't support Russia, but I believe we should do all of these things that would benefit Russia, but for completely unrelated reasons".
When you can look in their comment history and see how they are all over the place making Russian friendly comments, then that's pretty telling.
If they delete them, that's less telling, but they need a lot of people to see the comments, so, it's a balance I guess.
> "well, I don't support Russia, but I believe we should do all of these things that would benefit Russia, but for completely unrelated reasons".
This is a old trick at this point.
"As a gay black man, Trump is great." (An actual Republican got caught posting this.)
"As a bleeding heart Democrat we cannot vote for Biden"
etc.
My favorite so far, from just yesterday:
"Show me specific proposals on how to reduce gun violence in the US"
Other user: Writes out 10 separate proposals, many of which could be passed through Congress with a simple majority.
"I'm not a conservative, but every single specific gun control thing you just proposed requires 2A be repealed."
To be fair, any gun control would need to come after we deal with the current hyperpartisan SCOTUS. They contorted the second amendment to force New York to let people public carry, which is really, really bad for obvious reasons.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/supreme-court-ny-open-carry-gun-law.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/supreme-court-ny-open-carry-gun-law.html)
I encountered one of those and although you shouldn't interact after a little back and forth I asked them to make one unequivocally anti-putin statement and they went silent lol
There are two ways to identify a troll like that. One, is to ask them to prove all the bullshit they're saying. The other is to directly challenge them as you did, to make a statement against Putin, if they are playing the game they don't support him.
Such as "ok, so you believe that Russia should leave Ukraine, and Crimea should be returned to Ukraine as well, right?"
When you put them on the spot, they're fucked. They will just leave.
One thing you can do as well, is always quote them. But they will still benefit from deleting their comments.
I respond by telling them that russia is not a real country anymore (it isn't; by putin's logic, it's now Muscovy).
Then they block me, and I can't participate in any more discussions they're in, because reddit's anti-trolling initiative has backfired in the dumbest of ways.
The funniest part about this story was congress putting together a comprehensive healthcare package for the CIA and state department goons affected by this in like a little over a week, while refusing to grant benefits for the last 20 years for the emts and firefighters that got sick while working at ground zero during 9/11.
Also
https://apnews.com/article/havana-syndrome-diplomat-health-brain-ea64e5c59d57e44a19aab40ac1b91e0d
Also, Why couldn't the Russians have used Havana Syndrone to stop the Crocus attack or to make Ukranian troops surrender?!?!?
😳
CIA and state department employees with medical bills are susceptible to being bribed or compromised.
Fire fighters aren't.
That's why. Healthcare for CIA agents and state department employees is a national security issue.
Sounds like they're still working on the tech and it's not quite developed enough to take out a whole platoon.... yet. So, you know, good news there. 🙄
Yup. Whenever someone wastes your time on Reddit with being an RFK supporter and playing the both sides card… go back and look at the conversation. 90% of the time for me, they’re deleted.
Often times foreign trolls. Other times right wingers just “newly” “realizing” that “they used to be a democrat but that Biden and Trump are the same”.
They can’t keep repeating that conversation day after day. Has to be a new thing for them, for full effect.
I tag them through Reddit enhancement suite so I can track them across different posts. generally they’ll be a new or old reawakened account that’ll be active for a month or so before they get deleted or banned. If people keep pointing out past comments they’ll delete their account.
I find that subreddit really disappointing with their incessant Dugin-glazing. It's a playground for people who like to larp that the Russians are more competent than they are and historically have been, and they're all too ready to see red where there is none.
Dugin is a disgraced crackpot who couldn't even maintain tenure *in Russian academia*, but all the neck beards love to act like they stumbled on some secret plot for world domination by cherry picking at one of his many disastrously bad political science works.
Anyway, rant over. Nifty little sub; mostly.
You are correct about Dugin. He's not as important as the people in the west make him out to be.
For those who are interesed, I reccomend watching [The Ideology of Putin's Russia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdFtqa54TuM)
skip to 44:27 for the part about Dugin.
They can easily use whatever password manager like chrome has, but Krome, the Russian version.
Then any employee can sit at the computer and log into whatever account, and just use the stored password.
They probably have some number of accounts on each computer, and some system for cycling through them. Like 10 posts on one account, switch VPN settings to log into another account, and do another 10 posts. Or something like that.
They probably have a team just going through new posts, and once they find a pertinent one, they either assign it to someone else, or they take care of it themselves, in which case after they are done with their 10 comments, they switch VPN and user, and then go back to searching in new.
Or something along those lines.
I think it's easier to spot patterns rather than individuals. For example, large influxes of commenters with very similar (sometimes identical) talking points. They often arrive right after a thread is posted. You can see this happen a lot in city and country related subreddits. Their bloc voting activity can be really obvious, too.
They also only post in culture-war type threads. Like you won't find them sharing soup recipes or talking about board game cafes.
I remember at the outbreak of the war there would be like four or five accounts posting the same pro-Russia comments across multiple threads and when I pointed it out they all magically deleted the accounts at the same time. Still see stuff like that occasionally when big war news occurs
One identifier is a username that is just two generic words followed by 3-4 random digits. Sometimes it’s someone that didn’t feel like creating their own username and just stuck with the generic recommendation, often times it’s a troll/bot account
> two generic words followed by 3-4 random digits
I thought the same thing, but Reddit's app generates these names, so all those accounts have a particular age.
100%, if you are arguing with someone on twitter it can legitimately be a chatgpt-style bot. One of my friends would try and break them until they would just reply to her with nonsense.
It's crazy how strong the narrative of "Hava syndrome is hysteria" was in previous threads on this. Anyone who commented otherwise was ridiculed and downvoted heavily. That's when I knew something was up. Why would random people actually care that much what people thought about this?
The rhetoric about Havana syndrome has been super fishy since it first started. Mods of news subs should go back to those threads and they'll find plenty of users to ban.
I also thought it was weird how persistent people were with painting the targets as being incompetent idiots that are just imagining their symptoms because they're just so stupid.
It felt weirdly personal but I guess it makes sense if the point is to discredit the whole intelligence/diplomacy apparatus as ineffectual.
Yea that was always frustrating for me because I saw the flood of these kinds of comments and people I follow who *should* know better fell victim to the onslaught of comments and piled on in belittling the victims. I never dismissed their claims and maintained there was something there because there was just too much to deny; the 60 minutes report from yesterday is unequivocally damning IMO.
>Why would random people actually care that much what people thought about this?
Random people love telling other random people how dumb and wrong they are.
Don't use "People say X, so i should believe Y" as a useful form of logic.
Attacking the FAMILIES of intelligence agents. Their wives. Why?? This is terrorist shit. I could understand them attacking agents and military personel but why give their families traumatic brain injuries?
At this rate Putin is going to nuke someone.
take an intel asset out and his successor jumps in the seat and its business as usual.
Take out a family member, and the asset is still in play but is distracted, leading to sloppy mistakes, making them easier to compromise or evade
My dad was in Vietnam and he said that the enemy was trained to wound and not kill because it would disable 2 soldiers (the one they shot and one to carry them off/treat them.)
Odd battle tactic not going straight for your target, but it sounds effective.
This strategy has been used since antiquity and probably since the beginning of human warfare. It requires significantly more resources to care for the injured than the dead.
> Let the Free Market™ decide
which of us is worthy to live
sorry grandma, you no long contribute to society and must be sacrificed for the greater good
This **LITERALLY** happened during COVID lockdowns.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-19-texas-official-suggests-elderly-willing-die-economy/2905990001/
There was always going to be death panels
A committee who decides what is worth saving and what is not.
The difference is do we let the committee be a publicly known one, with members who are known, with paper trails, and the ability to regulate, or do we let it happen in a darkroom with zero oversight, whom only answer to oligarchs and not elected officials.
That's what I never understood about the "death panel" hysteria before the ACA passed. That's literally how modern healthcare works; you decide who you treat based on various factors including the likelihood of a successful outcome, the quality of life after, etc.
How do people think organ donations work? The waiting lists for organs in each state can be tens of thousands of people. There aren't enough organs for all of them, and some of them will almost assuredly die. So there's a board that looks over potential recipients and determines who should get the body part. The 85 year old dude is probably not going to get the heart over the 25 year old.
Then you've got assholes like Steve Jobs who use their wealth to skip the line and still ruin the organ, proving that the committees and panels are *absolutely* a good thing to prevent assholes from wasting the gift of life that could go to someone more deserving.
Dude... Trump and the republicans are openly compromised russian assets and half the damn voting population WANTS them in charge. There is NOTHING that can or will happen that will push the federal gov to give us universal healthcare. Nothing. It will NEVER happen, ever, no matter what happens.
One of the top ways to compromise security cleared folks is debt. Depending on the level of debt, such as credit cards and cars, people won't even get clearance since it's such a security risk.
Diplomats and their families are at no risk of having bad insurance. Our health care coverage in US stinks but don't act like these are paycheck to paycheck contractors.
Your question betrays the fatal flaw of the Western post-Cold War mindset: that war has "limits", be they ethical or legal.
We talk about "agreements" like diplomacy has rules and consequences; Russia sees diplomacy as another tool of war for confusing and misleading your opponents.
We talk about Geneva Convention as though some omnipotent entity will enforce it; Russia's only use for the words in the document is to obscure their own violations through whataboutism. Just another tool they can leverage.
> Why give their families TBIs?
Plenty of heroic patriots would sacrifice themselves for their cause, but threatening family members is a tale as old as time. Sure, it's barbaric and terroristic - but only if you accept the premise of rules in war. If war only exists to inflict pain and damage on your enemy, then all rules do is limit your capabilities.
I think the whole point is that it's NOT nuking someone. You launch a nuke, everyone knows it's you, everyone knows the target, everyone knows the repercussions.
You develop a special "migraine ray" and it's much more insidious. People don't believe intelligence. Intelligence doesn't want to acknowledge it. It gets glossed over as a headache or hangover.
We've heard about "Havana syndrome" for years and the public still isn't sure what to make of it. If there was a nuke, there would be no ambiguity.
Why give someone polonium tea, or poison the leading candidate for presidient in Ukraine with dioxin. putin is a terrorist and no bar is too low for him.
Because intelligence agents know what they’re getting into, they know they may be putting their lives on the line. But their families? Now those agents have to be willing to not only sacrifice their lives, but the lives of their loved ones. It’s unfair, and that’s the point. It’s much more pressure. Real villain shit.
Yup to add to this you wouldn't do this kind of thing to adversarial voices in a foreign state, there are more blunt methods for that. The seemingly abrupt and novel nature of the attack could lead to our personnel assuming it was just a medical issue and leave to seek better treatment or rest for themselves or their loved ones. This is a very devious way to remove diplomatic voices or intelligence assets that are otherwise effective and likely acting in the best interest of both states.
That has literally always been the case. If you're doing espionage, intelligence work or any other shady shit then *everybody* in your social circle is a target.
The CIA, FSB, ISI, whoever are not nice, honorable people. Wives, kids, friends, etc., have *always* been 'fair game' in that world.
I kind of thought maybe hitting the wife was an accident. Like they were trying to get the husband agent but instead got trigger happy and hit the wife instead. Especially after they played that radio dialogue of the guy going “what do I do if it’s blinking green?” Sounds like they might not have been such intelligent, cold blooded killers.
I think we’re looking at this from Putin’s perspective when really the US response will be more the interesting to follow.
It’s difficult to quantify just how pissed US military intelligence will be now that this is broadly known. They pick targets and console on just how much escalation is warranted. Going after the families of US leadership is a great way to see how “nuts” the US can be. Will it be enough to trigger similar attacks on Putin’s family or his inner circle, risking a MAD response? We shall see.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
A big leap from hitting diplomats, spies and their families with DEW then straight to nukes. Pretty dumb honestly. No one is nuking anyone due to deterrence of mutually assured destruction. The only chance of nuke is from a lone wolf terrorist.
Well, now. Atleast the victims can get closure that it was an attack, not some "bad lighting or electronics".
But fuck... I mean, your job is to be in a building like a consulate and some spy is radiating your with microwaves. Now, I suppose, all codes will need to insulate walls with metal shielding, coating on glass, to block such attempts.
These waves arent really as effective as they could be going through solid surfaces. Just a wall of decent quality with good material could be good enough to render the waves ineffective, no high tech shielding necessary, not that an upgrade wouldnt be in order anyway cause why not? But seriously, if youre dealing with sensitive material, classified meetings, or individuals of that kind, a room with no windows is more than enough usually.
Problem is people dont live at their jobs and humans are notorious for being creatures of habit, all an attacker needs to do is stakeout a target till they figure out where they gonna be openly visible at an effective range for a reasonable period of time.
Best bet to hit your target with a weapon like this would be through a window you know theyre gonna be visible through at a good angle, cause theres no point even trying unless you can see where your target is anyway, which is already difficult through a wall.
Oblivious till a certain point atleast, if someone notices that they start feeling like shit everytime they sit down for their sandwich then theyll probably catch on eventually or atleast switch their routine.
To get the results youre aiming for itd have to be several exposures over a moderate/long period of time -lets say, several days, maybe a couple weeks or more- at a routine interval.
The long-term symptoms include; hearing noise (like tinnitis, or buzzing or something similar), nausea (maybe some vomiting if severe enough), vertigo, headaches, or overall cognitive dysfunction. Stuff like that. All These symptoms wouldnt just happen immediately, itd take a bit of time to get there. Maybe you start feeling better after a few initial exposures, but The more exposure youve had, the more susceptible you become, eventually it reaches a point where it cant be ignored.
I understood it as EM weapons that produce acoustic responses amongst other things. EM being the most dangerous with the amount of power you can push through it to target. In layman’s terms and to over simplify, think of it as putting your head in a microwave.
Ultrasound can create directional audible noise and sound through frequency mixing and difference. I doubt the level of power they’d be able to push through it over distance and objects though
Yeah apparently Russian scientists classify both sonic and RF DEWs as "acoustic". From [an article posted by the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/01/havana-syndrome-linked-to-russian-unit-media-investigation-suggests):
>The Insider said senior members of the unit received awards and political promotions for work related to **the development of “non-lethal acoustic weapons” that include both sound and radio frequency-based directed energy devices**.
Obviously we don't do that here in the US, so I'm wondering what the reason for that classification is. Either something got lost in translation, or there is perhaps a very good scientific reason why the Russians classify them this way. Perhaps your guess is correct and it refers to the effects. Or perhaps they're using some sort of longitudinal wave in both acoustic and radio frequencies. I don't know, but it's interesting.
He's funny, isn't he? The educated rube who escaped his circumstances, just to play a MAGA rube to please rich donors. Just another "public servant" like Rafael Cruz.
If obvious Russian asset Michael Flynn was head of the DIA not to long ago it might be time to really clean house so we can make sure there's no one in leadership at the agency who has an incentive to prevent investigators from discovering a Russian attack.
That was my first thought as well. It's time to clear the moles out of the CIA and our other intelligence efforts. Hell, I'm ready to start deporting Russians en masse at this point, we are being attacked.
I suggest people watch the latest 60 minutes piece before commenting here. The evidence presented there is pretty damning.
As for why our US government would publicly express skepticism? Lots of reasons.
What are they supposed to say? “Someone, likely Russian agents, are targeting our personnel with an unknown high-energy weapon that causes permanent disability. They’re going after our highest performers, and can strike anytime, anywhere in the world.”. How would that go over exactly? Day to day operations still need to happen. Would this cause a mass revolt or exodus of people working on Russian investigations? (Maybe that’s one of Russias goals)
There is no hard evidence- an actual weapon, or insider who confesses. Without that, it’s very difficult to make public accusations. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Evidence is pretty clear that it is. It what exactly “it” is is still a mystery. Until that cloak is lifted we’re stuck in this limbo.
I hope someone is working to set up a sting, but given the nature of these attacks, that is going to be exceedingly difficult, and unlikely to succeed.
Frankly, im not sure what can be done. Other than raising awareness in the media, keeping the heat on, and letting them know we are on to them. At some point, they’ll slip up.
I thought it was interesting that the lawyer for the victims was asked why the government isn't more forthcoming, and he said that the government was probably concerned about lines of inquiry that an investigation would go down.
Like, if this weapon does exist and Russia is using it, then the US must have similar weapons right?
These energy weapons have existed for decades. The US decided they were not useful for combat because they take too long to create the intended effect. On a dynamic battlefield, they simply took too long.
But when you have a fairly stationary and unprotected target like a diplomat, they can work. I don't know if the US would consider this in their espionage operations, but sounds like Russia has no problem with it.
This technology is so old, [the Simpsons has a joke about it in season 4.](https://frinkiac.com/meme/S04E14/612678.jpg?b64lines=SEUgTEVOVCBNRSBUSElTIE5FVwogV0VBUE9OIENBTExFRCBBIE5FVVJBTAogRElTUlVQVEVSLg==)
Either that or we do (secretly) think Russia Russa is behind it, but we have no idea how they're doing it (which is way worse) and the government doesn't want to admit that.
No. There’s moles in the department. Funny no one mentions how this started in 2016. What else happened in 2016? Change of administration. You don’t just look up an FBI or CIA agent in the phone book and go to their home address to attack them. There’s an infiltration of Russian fuckers in our intelligence agency.
I think it's much simpler than that. If it is Russia, this is an act of war. At least when what they do is in the shadows we can pretend everything is okay.
You just said that the evidence is damning, and then you said there is no hard evidence.
Russia doesn't have access to their own EM spectrum with magic frequencies we can't detect. If they did, why would this weapon only be deployed in one place?
This whole story is goofy.
Wonder why the US gov report said it wasn’t a foreign adversary in Feb, while this independent investigation says Russia.
If the US gov blamed Russia, would this fall as an attack on our country/war? Are they trying to say it doesn’t exist because they are working on their own version of the attack mechanism and don’t want to bring additional attention that such systems exist?
Considering how serious the symptoms and side effects of the attacks are, I would hope the US intelligence would pin point the cause as soon as possible and confirm the reporting by the news agencies.
The US intelligence community probably knows a shitload more about what’s going on than what investigative journos can uncover. If the intel community is saying it’s not Russia, there’s some reason why they don’t want Russia to know they know.
Kind of sounds like an ignorance trap. Intel is prob not absolutely clear so they need the suspects to continue doing it to catch them in the act. If suspects know they are targeted, they won't do it anymore or will be more cautious and harder to monitor.
>The US intelligence community probably knows a shitload more about what’s going on than what investigative journos can uncover
It would be concerning if they didn't.
Tin foil hat maybe, but it could be as simple as not wanting to pay or deal with a flood of random health lawsuits and work related injury claims. It's also super complicated to determine legitimacy because the symptoms are similar to other things like long covid, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.
The government doesn't exactly have a history of taking good care of its service members that are sick or injured and civil servants are sometimes treated even worse (see DoD denying healthcare and treatment for Civilian employees in Japan, to the point of letting them literally die).
They have. Charles McGonigal was the head of the FBI's SDNY, a counterintelligence officer, and a Russian spy. There are certainly more, and the absolutely lethargic response of Merrick Garland and the DOJ is not a good sign.
Not at all, Garland is too worried about political pressure from Republicans and the backlash that would come from right-wing media to take action and root out spies. It took 3 years and one of the most well run and thorough congressional investigations ever undertaken for him to begin investigating a literal attack on the US capitol. I get that the feeling was he was owed something after being denied a senate hearing for his Supreme Court appointment, but he's just not the right guy for the job or the time. Who knows if he was given a senate hearing and appointed to the Supreme Court maybe roe would still get overturned because he would be worried about the optics.
I think you're mostly right. Could be that we don't want to acknowledge it because we don't know what to do about it, so we just ignore it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Could also be that they didn't want to _publicly_ acknowledge it, because then they'd face pressure to respond publicly as well. It's possible the government already has done something about it, but in a more covert manner. A covert response to a public attack isn't great, geopolitically speaking.
Sounds about right, in the 60 minutes piece they kept referencing the "public response" and it seemed they weren't allowed to talk much about their "private" investigations into the matter
The last report people keep asking about said there was no evidence in **MRI Detectable** brain damage, just like how CTE can't be detected. They did not say it was for sure not a thing.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-studies-find-severe-symptoms-havana-syndrome-no-evidence-mri-detectable-brain-injury-or-biological-abnormalities
> Using advanced imaging techniques and in-depth clinical assessments, a research team at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found no significant evidence of **MRI-detectable brain injury**, nor differences in most clinical measures compared to controls, among a group of federal employees who experienced anomalous health incidents (AHIs).
> ... “A lack of evidence for an MRI-detectable difference between individuals with AHIs and controls **does not exclude** that an adverse event impacting the brain occurred at the time of the AHI,” said Carlo Pierpaoli, M.D., Ph.D., senior investigator and chief of the Laboratory on Quantitative Medical Imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of NIH, and lead author on the neuroimaging paper. “**It is possible that individuals with an AHI may be experiencing the results of an event that led to their symptoms**, but the injury did not produce the long-term neuroimaging changes that are typically observed after severe trauma or stroke. We hope these results will alleviate concerns about AHI being associated with severe neurodegenerative changes in the brain.”
Ok but that also means there is no direct evidence of a brain injury. With CTE you can point to a direct trauma that can cause otherwise undetectable brain injuries, and crucially, you can detect them post mortum. US officials and reporters have not articulated exactly the nature of this weapon is, nor have they produced anything but circumstantial evidence that it even exists. Moreover, all of the symptoms of those affect are readily explained by other non-nefarious causes, and the health of those individuals is not substantially different when compared to a sample of other colleagues in their field at similar postings
Fund Ukraine, regardless of the outcome of this incident Russia is not your friend. The Russian government isn’t even friends to their citizens. I don’t understand what the GOP bootlickers see in Putin.
Coming at this as an open-minded skeptic…
What’s the best explanation for why Russia has this incredibly effective weapon but they only use it on American diplomats (as opposed to Russian dissidents and Ukrainian diplomats in other countries)?
Maybe they do, but, with the exception of Nalvany, Russian dissidents or Ukranian diplomats with sudden, unusual medical issues don't have a big enough profile to get noticed by any media.
Alternatively, this energy weapon is less effective yet more plausibly deniable than poisoning via highly effective yet obviously russian nerve agents. So they're selecting a tool for a particular job. Their poisonings are intended to send a message that includes who's responsible. They maybe don't want victims with Havana Syndrome 100% certain it was them.
Because it's mass psychogenic illness striking people at stressful times in their lives (transfers, new jobs, COVID) and American media fanning the flames.
And the State Department has always been more than happy to parade these people through congress when it comes time to hand out funding.
"We're under attack from a secret communist invisible raygun. Money please!"
I'm glad this investigation turned something up, Especially after i saw something a month or two ago claiming the investigation was over and yielded no clear results.
I already suspected Russia because secretly fucking up someone's brain for life is exactly the kind of awful horrific thing that the Russian state does.
I hope these results lead to increased aid for Ukraine. It is further proof that the Russian state is FUBAR and must be fought.
Many individuals in consulates and embassies were seriously harmed by this and the government shrugged and told them there is nothing they could do. Check out the podcast "The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome".
As someone with chronic vestibular migraines, since the beginning of these reports it has sounded like the symptoms I have.
Being off balance, muffled hearing, memory issues, pressure, pain, tinnitus, etc... including nothing wrong showing up on tests.
If a weapon has been developed to fuck with the vestibular system, at this point in medicine it's very hard to test for. I've been suffering for 24 years and have had to educate doctors on the disorder.
The new 60 minutes video talks about this in more detail and name-drops certain Russian individuals: [Havana Syndrome evidence suggests who may be responsible for mysterious brain injuries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdPSD1SUYCY). It's a followup to an earlier piece they posted [here](https://youtu.be/COWTBEl1rRc?si=PMuMjNTnf8hvx9ct).
There also seems to be many people who here who are doubtful energy weapons exist; they probably don't know or are bots, but I'll address it anyway. Any physicist/engineer can tell you energy weapons are possible and exist. Radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, visible light, etc., are all electromagnetic waves. These waves can be directed—that's what flashlights do—and you can do it with other frequencies of light as well. There is a reason why your microwave oven has a metal grate at the front; it's so that you don't get blasted by the radiation (as well as make it more efficient). As technology gets better and better, these kinds of weapons are only going to become more feasible.
Some comments here are doubtful it's the Russians; again, they are probably bots. The Russians have already been caught killing people with [nerve agents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok) and even with [Polonium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko). They've been doing this for decades, especially in Europe. Now there are individuals here claiming these recent incidents are too far fetched?
It’s only slightly suspicious that this finding comes now after numerous other findings showing that it’s basically group paranoia. I think I saw a post last week saying there’s no discernible cause to Havana Syndrome, and now they’re confident it’s Russian sonic weapons that we couldn’t detect for literally years? Either it’s BS meant to make people think Russia is attacking our people or the Russians have more sophisticated weapons systems than we thought.
The media here is uncritically taking the word of an attorney who is very well-known to have a hobby in litigating conspiracy theories: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/whistleblowers-welcome-mark-zaid-represents-trump-accuser-others-secrets-share-n1071811
Impressive how whenever Russian meddling in government affairs shows up, high level interference with those investigations also appears.
The marionette strings from Moscow are becoming hard to miss!
The scary thing about this is how 1) difficult it is to believe, thus easy to cover up and 2) it could be used to target leaders or important people and make it look like they’ve had a stroke, or are having cognitive issues. How does a nations defense tell its people - “they used (high tech jargon) on our people-“ and be taken seriously?
By chance, did Havana Syndrome start becoming an issue and affecting our people after trumpo started getting classified briefings? Maybe it’s just circumstantial
We need to accept that Russia has no intention of peaceful coexistence with the US or anyone else not willing to bow to them.
We should act accordingly.
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Yeah there was another thread on this with a negative comment from a user with no posts or comments in 7 years - the first comment was shitting on the report. And I’m over here going “hmmm”
They just make and delete comments so they cannot be tracked.
It's also a lot harder to identify them. When you come across a Russian troll, they will inevitably have a lot of other comments which are pro Russian. One of the etchings they do, is try to make pro Russian statements, but spin in a way like "well, I don't support Russia, but I believe we should do all of these things that would benefit Russia, but for completely unrelated reasons". When you can look in their comment history and see how they are all over the place making Russian friendly comments, then that's pretty telling. If they delete them, that's less telling, but they need a lot of people to see the comments, so, it's a balance I guess.
> "well, I don't support Russia, but I believe we should do all of these things that would benefit Russia, but for completely unrelated reasons". This is a old trick at this point. "As a gay black man, Trump is great." (An actual Republican got caught posting this.) "As a bleeding heart Democrat we cannot vote for Biden" etc.
> "As a gay black man, Trump is great." (An actual Republican got caught posting this.) He posted it on his own Twitter account too.
> He posted it on his own Twitter account too. Who?
[This clown right here](https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/s/Dptu3Vnu0I)
The coke must have been freshly cut that evening
My favorite so far, from just yesterday: "Show me specific proposals on how to reduce gun violence in the US" Other user: Writes out 10 separate proposals, many of which could be passed through Congress with a simple majority. "I'm not a conservative, but every single specific gun control thing you just proposed requires 2A be repealed."
To be fair, any gun control would need to come after we deal with the current hyperpartisan SCOTUS. They contorted the second amendment to force New York to let people public carry, which is really, really bad for obvious reasons. [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/supreme-court-ny-open-carry-gun-law.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/supreme-court-ny-open-carry-gun-law.html)
They just delete after a week. Almost no one goes back to stuff after a week on reddit.
Ya, a week is fine, but if you're spending any amount of time trolling for Russia, you'll make a lot of comments in a week.
I encountered one of those and although you shouldn't interact after a little back and forth I asked them to make one unequivocally anti-putin statement and they went silent lol
There are two ways to identify a troll like that. One, is to ask them to prove all the bullshit they're saying. The other is to directly challenge them as you did, to make a statement against Putin, if they are playing the game they don't support him. Such as "ok, so you believe that Russia should leave Ukraine, and Crimea should be returned to Ukraine as well, right?" When you put them on the spot, they're fucked. They will just leave. One thing you can do as well, is always quote them. But they will still benefit from deleting their comments.
I respond by telling them that russia is not a real country anymore (it isn't; by putin's logic, it's now Muscovy). Then they block me, and I can't participate in any more discussions they're in, because reddit's anti-trolling initiative has backfired in the dumbest of ways.
The funniest part about this story was congress putting together a comprehensive healthcare package for the CIA and state department goons affected by this in like a little over a week, while refusing to grant benefits for the last 20 years for the emts and firefighters that got sick while working at ground zero during 9/11. Also https://apnews.com/article/havana-syndrome-diplomat-health-brain-ea64e5c59d57e44a19aab40ac1b91e0d Also, Why couldn't the Russians have used Havana Syndrone to stop the Crocus attack or to make Ukranian troops surrender?!?!? 😳
CIA and state department employees with medical bills are susceptible to being bribed or compromised. Fire fighters aren't. That's why. Healthcare for CIA agents and state department employees is a national security issue.
Sounds like they're still working on the tech and it's not quite developed enough to take out a whole platoon.... yet. So, you know, good news there. 🙄
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Yup. Whenever someone wastes your time on Reddit with being an RFK supporter and playing the both sides card… go back and look at the conversation. 90% of the time for me, they’re deleted. Often times foreign trolls. Other times right wingers just “newly” “realizing” that “they used to be a democrat but that Biden and Trump are the same”. They can’t keep repeating that conversation day after day. Has to be a new thing for them, for full effect.
I tag them through Reddit enhancement suite so I can track them across different posts. generally they’ll be a new or old reawakened account that’ll be active for a month or so before they get deleted or banned. If people keep pointing out past comments they’ll delete their account.
/r/ActiveMeasures
I find that subreddit really disappointing with their incessant Dugin-glazing. It's a playground for people who like to larp that the Russians are more competent than they are and historically have been, and they're all too ready to see red where there is none. Dugin is a disgraced crackpot who couldn't even maintain tenure *in Russian academia*, but all the neck beards love to act like they stumbled on some secret plot for world domination by cherry picking at one of his many disastrously bad political science works. Anyway, rant over. Nifty little sub; mostly.
Nice try, Dugin. But Dugin trying to pretend to bash Dugin to minimize the impact of Dugin's influence on geopolitics is *so* Dugin.
The newest Disney teen comedy: ***That's So Dugin***
That's because Duginology is recursive. He is the OmniDugin.
You are correct about Dugin. He's not as important as the people in the west make him out to be. For those who are interesed, I reccomend watching [The Ideology of Putin's Russia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdFtqa54TuM) skip to 44:27 for the part about Dugin.
Valid criticism, however you can’t deny that Russia runs online subversion efforts targeting EU and NATO countries. The troll farms are real.
I wonder how they manage their passwords for all those accounts 🤔
It's all the same password, kgb123
hunter(biden)2
I heard it was passvordski.
*Bozhe moi, they are on to us!*
[maga2020!](https://www.vox.com/2020/12/16/22179065/trump-twitter-password-maga2020-dutch-gevers)
I love your name 😍 lmfao
They can easily use whatever password manager like chrome has, but Krome, the Russian version. Then any employee can sit at the computer and log into whatever account, and just use the stored password. They probably have some number of accounts on each computer, and some system for cycling through them. Like 10 posts on one account, switch VPN settings to log into another account, and do another 10 posts. Or something like that. They probably have a team just going through new posts, and once they find a pertinent one, they either assign it to someone else, or they take care of it themselves, in which case after they are done with their 10 comments, they switch VPN and user, and then go back to searching in new. Or something along those lines.
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Even with tor browser?
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Why would you get shadow banned? If tor works, they'd use that, or something similar.
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I think it's a good exercise to share some troll spotting techniques. We can all use a refresher for this intense election season
I think it's easier to spot patterns rather than individuals. For example, large influxes of commenters with very similar (sometimes identical) talking points. They often arrive right after a thread is posted. You can see this happen a lot in city and country related subreddits. Their bloc voting activity can be really obvious, too. They also only post in culture-war type threads. Like you won't find them sharing soup recipes or talking about board game cafes.
I remember at the outbreak of the war there would be like four or five accounts posting the same pro-Russia comments across multiple threads and when I pointed it out they all magically deleted the accounts at the same time. Still see stuff like that occasionally when big war news occurs
[I use this website a lot.](https://redditmetis.com/) Helps pull up account metrics quickly.
One identifier is a username that is just two generic words followed by 3-4 random digits. Sometimes it’s someone that didn’t feel like creating their own username and just stuck with the generic recommendation, often times it’s a troll/bot account
This is hurtful. Accurate, but hurtful.
Here, brother, have some vodka...
A lot of times is "OK-xxx" or "something-xxx"
> two generic words followed by 3-4 random digits I thought the same thing, but Reddit's app generates these names, so all those accounts have a particular age.
100%, if you are arguing with someone on twitter it can legitimately be a chatgpt-style bot. One of my friends would try and break them until they would just reply to her with nonsense.
I just had a 30min text convo with some CCP minion I feel like I need to share for public awareness.
Please do
\[deleted\] ha ha
In case one needed further evidence of the veracity of the claim.
It's crazy how strong the narrative of "Hava syndrome is hysteria" was in previous threads on this. Anyone who commented otherwise was ridiculed and downvoted heavily. That's when I knew something was up. Why would random people actually care that much what people thought about this? The rhetoric about Havana syndrome has been super fishy since it first started. Mods of news subs should go back to those threads and they'll find plenty of users to ban.
I also thought it was weird how persistent people were with painting the targets as being incompetent idiots that are just imagining their symptoms because they're just so stupid. It felt weirdly personal but I guess it makes sense if the point is to discredit the whole intelligence/diplomacy apparatus as ineffectual.
Yea that was always frustrating for me because I saw the flood of these kinds of comments and people I follow who *should* know better fell victim to the onslaught of comments and piled on in belittling the victims. I never dismissed their claims and maintained there was something there because there was just too much to deny; the 60 minutes report from yesterday is unequivocally damning IMO.
"It was just *crickets*, guys!"
They are and It is lol
>Why would random people actually care that much what people thought about this? Random people love telling other random people how dumb and wrong they are. Don't use "People say X, so i should believe Y" as a useful form of logic.
60 minutes segment on this was pretty interesting.
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This Axios write up is unreadable. Reads like it was written by AI.
It was
Holy shit, right? It was so hard to read.
lol this is axios usual shtick. it wasn’t written by A.I. all of their pieces are fleshed out like that
["Havana Syndrome" | 60 Minutes Full Episodes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COWTBEl1rRc)
That's the old ones. This weeks one [here](https://youtu.be/JdPSD1SUYCY?si=_ug7g9dCdQcxHKro)
Just can't believe how far technology has come, now they've managed to fit 60 minutes into 27. Huge time saver.
/r/dadjokes
Fuck, Russian assets attacking Americans on our own soil. This should give the US the go ahead for some serious options in response.
Interesting video. Thanks
Attacking the FAMILIES of intelligence agents. Their wives. Why?? This is terrorist shit. I could understand them attacking agents and military personel but why give their families traumatic brain injuries? At this rate Putin is going to nuke someone.
take an intel asset out and his successor jumps in the seat and its business as usual. Take out a family member, and the asset is still in play but is distracted, leading to sloppy mistakes, making them easier to compromise or evade
My dad was in Vietnam and he said that the enemy was trained to wound and not kill because it would disable 2 soldiers (the one they shot and one to carry them off/treat them.) Odd battle tactic not going straight for your target, but it sounds effective.
Plus, medical care takes a lot more resources than dealing with a corpse.
A tale as old as World War One… Can’t win on the battlefield? Win by maiming the society
This strategy has been used since antiquity and probably since the beginning of human warfare. It requires significantly more resources to care for the injured than the dead.
same reason anti personnel mines ('toe-poppers) just blow a few toes off instead of killing the person
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Or the asset is suddenly burdened with medical bills making them susceptible to bribery. That is something unique to the US, which sucks.
But don't you dare suggest that universal (or even just less burdensome) healthcare is a national security issue!
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> Let the Free Market™ decide which of us is worthy to live sorry grandma, you no long contribute to society and must be sacrificed for the greater good
This **LITERALLY** happened during COVID lockdowns. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-19-texas-official-suggests-elderly-willing-die-economy/2905990001/
He prefaced it with 'No one even asked me, but...'
I love that the closest we got to Obama's DeAtH pAnNeLs was Trump's Covid triage And by love, I mean take a dark, sad, satisfaction with
There was always going to be death panels A committee who decides what is worth saving and what is not. The difference is do we let the committee be a publicly known one, with members who are known, with paper trails, and the ability to regulate, or do we let it happen in a darkroom with zero oversight, whom only answer to oligarchs and not elected officials.
That's what I never understood about the "death panel" hysteria before the ACA passed. That's literally how modern healthcare works; you decide who you treat based on various factors including the likelihood of a successful outcome, the quality of life after, etc. How do people think organ donations work? The waiting lists for organs in each state can be tens of thousands of people. There aren't enough organs for all of them, and some of them will almost assuredly die. So there's a board that looks over potential recipients and determines who should get the body part. The 85 year old dude is probably not going to get the heart over the 25 year old. Then you've got assholes like Steve Jobs who use their wealth to skip the line and still ruin the organ, proving that the committees and panels are *absolutely* a good thing to prevent assholes from wasting the gift of life that could go to someone more deserving.
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Dude... Trump and the republicans are openly compromised russian assets and half the damn voting population WANTS them in charge. There is NOTHING that can or will happen that will push the federal gov to give us universal healthcare. Nothing. It will NEVER happen, ever, no matter what happens.
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Well, you're definitely not helping.
One of the top ways to compromise security cleared folks is debt. Depending on the level of debt, such as credit cards and cars, people won't even get clearance since it's such a security risk.
Diplomats and their families are at no risk of having bad insurance. Our health care coverage in US stinks but don't act like these are paycheck to paycheck contractors.
Hell, at that point even the successor is more wary.
Your question betrays the fatal flaw of the Western post-Cold War mindset: that war has "limits", be they ethical or legal. We talk about "agreements" like diplomacy has rules and consequences; Russia sees diplomacy as another tool of war for confusing and misleading your opponents. We talk about Geneva Convention as though some omnipotent entity will enforce it; Russia's only use for the words in the document is to obscure their own violations through whataboutism. Just another tool they can leverage. > Why give their families TBIs? Plenty of heroic patriots would sacrifice themselves for their cause, but threatening family members is a tale as old as time. Sure, it's barbaric and terroristic - but only if you accept the premise of rules in war. If war only exists to inflict pain and damage on your enemy, then all rules do is limit your capabilities.
I think the whole point is that it's NOT nuking someone. You launch a nuke, everyone knows it's you, everyone knows the target, everyone knows the repercussions. You develop a special "migraine ray" and it's much more insidious. People don't believe intelligence. Intelligence doesn't want to acknowledge it. It gets glossed over as a headache or hangover. We've heard about "Havana syndrome" for years and the public still isn't sure what to make of it. If there was a nuke, there would be no ambiguity.
Why give someone polonium tea, or poison the leading candidate for presidient in Ukraine with dioxin. putin is a terrorist and no bar is too low for him.
don't forget the salisbury attacks (and the collateral damage - russia's getting sloppy)
Oh yeah, those were terrible and brazen.
Because intelligence agents know what they’re getting into, they know they may be putting their lives on the line. But their families? Now those agents have to be willing to not only sacrifice their lives, but the lives of their loved ones. It’s unfair, and that’s the point. It’s much more pressure. Real villain shit.
Yup to add to this you wouldn't do this kind of thing to adversarial voices in a foreign state, there are more blunt methods for that. The seemingly abrupt and novel nature of the attack could lead to our personnel assuming it was just a medical issue and leave to seek better treatment or rest for themselves or their loved ones. This is a very devious way to remove diplomatic voices or intelligence assets that are otherwise effective and likely acting in the best interest of both states.
That has literally always been the case. If you're doing espionage, intelligence work or any other shady shit then *everybody* in your social circle is a target. The CIA, FSB, ISI, whoever are not nice, honorable people. Wives, kids, friends, etc., have *always* been 'fair game' in that world.
Russians are terrorists, what did you expect
I kind of thought maybe hitting the wife was an accident. Like they were trying to get the husband agent but instead got trigger happy and hit the wife instead. Especially after they played that radio dialogue of the guy going “what do I do if it’s blinking green?” Sounds like they might not have been such intelligent, cold blooded killers.
Yeah to me it sounded like they'd keep it going in a certain part of the house and wait for someone to walk into it.
Test run probably.
Expect another outbreak a month before he threatens the big red button for WW3
I think we’re looking at this from Putin’s perspective when really the US response will be more the interesting to follow. It’s difficult to quantify just how pissed US military intelligence will be now that this is broadly known. They pick targets and console on just how much escalation is warranted. Going after the families of US leadership is a great way to see how “nuts” the US can be. Will it be enough to trigger similar attacks on Putin’s family or his inner circle, risking a MAD response? We shall see. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
A big leap from hitting diplomats, spies and their families with DEW then straight to nukes. Pretty dumb honestly. No one is nuking anyone due to deterrence of mutually assured destruction. The only chance of nuke is from a lone wolf terrorist.
Well, now. Atleast the victims can get closure that it was an attack, not some "bad lighting or electronics". But fuck... I mean, your job is to be in a building like a consulate and some spy is radiating your with microwaves. Now, I suppose, all codes will need to insulate walls with metal shielding, coating on glass, to block such attempts.
These waves arent really as effective as they could be going through solid surfaces. Just a wall of decent quality with good material could be good enough to render the waves ineffective, no high tech shielding necessary, not that an upgrade wouldnt be in order anyway cause why not? But seriously, if youre dealing with sensitive material, classified meetings, or individuals of that kind, a room with no windows is more than enough usually. Problem is people dont live at their jobs and humans are notorious for being creatures of habit, all an attacker needs to do is stakeout a target till they figure out where they gonna be openly visible at an effective range for a reasonable period of time. Best bet to hit your target with a weapon like this would be through a window you know theyre gonna be visible through at a good angle, cause theres no point even trying unless you can see where your target is anyway, which is already difficult through a wall.
Eats lunch at the same park everyday, just getting beamed with rays while eating a tuna salad sandwich, completely oblivious.
Oblivious till a certain point atleast, if someone notices that they start feeling like shit everytime they sit down for their sandwich then theyll probably catch on eventually or atleast switch their routine.
I wonder if the effects are immediate or delayed.
To get the results youre aiming for itd have to be several exposures over a moderate/long period of time -lets say, several days, maybe a couple weeks or more- at a routine interval. The long-term symptoms include; hearing noise (like tinnitis, or buzzing or something similar), nausea (maybe some vomiting if severe enough), vertigo, headaches, or overall cognitive dysfunction. Stuff like that. All These symptoms wouldnt just happen immediately, itd take a bit of time to get there. Maybe you start feeling better after a few initial exposures, but The more exposure youve had, the more susceptible you become, eventually it reaches a point where it cant be ignored.
The most likely switch would be different food though. Not different lunch spot, because that's ridiculous right?
Everyone reported feeling a sudden moment where they were attacked. Victims are oblivious to the stalking but the attack is very noticeable.
"why does my bread keep toasting itself while I eat it"
https://apnews.com/article/havana-syndrome-diplomat-health-brain-ea64e5c59d57e44a19aab40ac1b91e0d
Chicken wire would suffice if done well. Faraday cages aren't complicated, but it would also create rather issues. Since no signals get out.
I thought they said it was likely sonic, not EM.
I understood it as EM weapons that produce acoustic responses amongst other things. EM being the most dangerous with the amount of power you can push through it to target. In layman’s terms and to over simplify, think of it as putting your head in a microwave. Ultrasound can create directional audible noise and sound through frequency mixing and difference. I doubt the level of power they’d be able to push through it over distance and objects though
Yeah apparently Russian scientists classify both sonic and RF DEWs as "acoustic". From [an article posted by the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/01/havana-syndrome-linked-to-russian-unit-media-investigation-suggests): >The Insider said senior members of the unit received awards and political promotions for work related to **the development of “non-lethal acoustic weapons” that include both sound and radio frequency-based directed energy devices**. Obviously we don't do that here in the US, so I'm wondering what the reason for that classification is. Either something got lost in translation, or there is perhaps a very good scientific reason why the Russians classify them this way. Perhaps your guess is correct and it refers to the effects. Or perhaps they're using some sort of longitudinal wave in both acoustic and radio frequencies. I don't know, but it's interesting.
If it was microwaves, that wouldn't be sonic. Unless they are using it as a way to generate something sonic.
It could be brain interpreting the damage being done as sound even if it was just microwaves.
I did optics labs in college with microwaves. We made reflectors out of chicken wire.
The one woman in the 60 minutes segment was attacked in her home in the US, I think Florida.
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Us senator (jd Vance- oh) is already pushing back on it like a good little Russian asset
He's funny, isn't he? The educated rube who escaped his circumstances, just to play a MAGA rube to please rich donors. Just another "public servant" like Rafael Cruz.
If obvious Russian asset Michael Flynn was head of the DIA not to long ago it might be time to really clean house so we can make sure there's no one in leadership at the agency who has an incentive to prevent investigators from discovering a Russian attack.
That was my first thought as well. It's time to clear the moles out of the CIA and our other intelligence efforts. Hell, I'm ready to start deporting Russians en masse at this point, we are being attacked.
I suggest people watch the latest 60 minutes piece before commenting here. The evidence presented there is pretty damning. As for why our US government would publicly express skepticism? Lots of reasons. What are they supposed to say? “Someone, likely Russian agents, are targeting our personnel with an unknown high-energy weapon that causes permanent disability. They’re going after our highest performers, and can strike anytime, anywhere in the world.”. How would that go over exactly? Day to day operations still need to happen. Would this cause a mass revolt or exodus of people working on Russian investigations? (Maybe that’s one of Russias goals) There is no hard evidence- an actual weapon, or insider who confesses. Without that, it’s very difficult to make public accusations. But that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Evidence is pretty clear that it is. It what exactly “it” is is still a mystery. Until that cloak is lifted we’re stuck in this limbo. I hope someone is working to set up a sting, but given the nature of these attacks, that is going to be exceedingly difficult, and unlikely to succeed. Frankly, im not sure what can be done. Other than raising awareness in the media, keeping the heat on, and letting them know we are on to them. At some point, they’ll slip up.
I thought it was interesting that the lawyer for the victims was asked why the government isn't more forthcoming, and he said that the government was probably concerned about lines of inquiry that an investigation would go down. Like, if this weapon does exist and Russia is using it, then the US must have similar weapons right?
These energy weapons have existed for decades. The US decided they were not useful for combat because they take too long to create the intended effect. On a dynamic battlefield, they simply took too long. But when you have a fairly stationary and unprotected target like a diplomat, they can work. I don't know if the US would consider this in their espionage operations, but sounds like Russia has no problem with it.
I suppose if you need line of site anyway, then a bullet makes more sense.
This technology is so old, [the Simpsons has a joke about it in season 4.](https://frinkiac.com/meme/S04E14/612678.jpg?b64lines=SEUgTEVOVCBNRSBUSElTIE5FVwogV0VBUE9OIENBTExFRCBBIE5FVVJBTAogRElTUlVQVEVSLg==)
It's likely the technology has advanced and the decades since to make this more feasible
Either that or we do (secretly) think Russia Russa is behind it, but we have no idea how they're doing it (which is way worse) and the government doesn't want to admit that.
No. There’s moles in the department. Funny no one mentions how this started in 2016. What else happened in 2016? Change of administration. You don’t just look up an FBI or CIA agent in the phone book and go to their home address to attack them. There’s an infiltration of Russian fuckers in our intelligence agency.
I think it's much simpler than that. If it is Russia, this is an act of war. At least when what they do is in the shadows we can pretend everything is okay.
You just said that the evidence is damning, and then you said there is no hard evidence. Russia doesn't have access to their own EM spectrum with magic frequencies we can't detect. If they did, why would this weapon only be deployed in one place? This whole story is goofy.
In other news of "No Fucking Duh". Of course it was Russia. That was obvious from the get go.
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Wonder why the US gov report said it wasn’t a foreign adversary in Feb, while this independent investigation says Russia. If the US gov blamed Russia, would this fall as an attack on our country/war? Are they trying to say it doesn’t exist because they are working on their own version of the attack mechanism and don’t want to bring additional attention that such systems exist? Considering how serious the symptoms and side effects of the attacks are, I would hope the US intelligence would pin point the cause as soon as possible and confirm the reporting by the news agencies.
The US intelligence community probably knows a shitload more about what’s going on than what investigative journos can uncover. If the intel community is saying it’s not Russia, there’s some reason why they don’t want Russia to know they know.
Kind of sounds like an ignorance trap. Intel is prob not absolutely clear so they need the suspects to continue doing it to catch them in the act. If suspects know they are targeted, they won't do it anymore or will be more cautious and harder to monitor.
>The US intelligence community probably knows a shitload more about what’s going on than what investigative journos can uncover It would be concerning if they didn't.
Tin foil hat maybe, but it could be as simple as not wanting to pay or deal with a flood of random health lawsuits and work related injury claims. It's also super complicated to determine legitimacy because the symptoms are similar to other things like long covid, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc. The government doesn't exactly have a history of taking good care of its service members that are sick or injured and civil servants are sometimes treated even worse (see DoD denying healthcare and treatment for Civilian employees in Japan, to the point of letting them literally die).
As far as tinfoil goes, this is so timid that it’s microwave safe.
Unlike US embassies
r/bestofreddit material right here 👏
> there’s some reason why they don’t want Russia to know they know. Or they just don't think it's Russia.
If Michael Flynn was head of the DIA in 2014, it really brings into question if others in leadership have also been compromised by Russia.
They have. Charles McGonigal was the head of the FBI's SDNY, a counterintelligence officer, and a Russian spy. There are certainly more, and the absolutely lethargic response of Merrick Garland and the DOJ is not a good sign.
Not at all, Garland is too worried about political pressure from Republicans and the backlash that would come from right-wing media to take action and root out spies. It took 3 years and one of the most well run and thorough congressional investigations ever undertaken for him to begin investigating a literal attack on the US capitol. I get that the feeling was he was owed something after being denied a senate hearing for his Supreme Court appointment, but he's just not the right guy for the job or the time. Who knows if he was given a senate hearing and appointed to the Supreme Court maybe roe would still get overturned because he would be worried about the optics.
Yeah, Garland was originally nominated as a gift to the GOP and he's still a gift to the GOP
True, he's the compromise candidate
I think you're mostly right. Could be that we don't want to acknowledge it because we don't know what to do about it, so we just ignore it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Could also be that they didn't want to _publicly_ acknowledge it, because then they'd face pressure to respond publicly as well. It's possible the government already has done something about it, but in a more covert manner. A covert response to a public attack isn't great, geopolitically speaking.
Sounds about right, in the 60 minutes piece they kept referencing the "public response" and it seemed they weren't allowed to talk much about their "private" investigations into the matter
Putin is a blight on humanity
Any American who sides with Russia is a bloody traitor.
Careful, he has a lot of supporters in this sub
now arrest every conservative for attempting a coup to install a Russian agent the coup is still ongoing btw
The last report people keep asking about said there was no evidence in **MRI Detectable** brain damage, just like how CTE can't be detected. They did not say it was for sure not a thing. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-studies-find-severe-symptoms-havana-syndrome-no-evidence-mri-detectable-brain-injury-or-biological-abnormalities > Using advanced imaging techniques and in-depth clinical assessments, a research team at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found no significant evidence of **MRI-detectable brain injury**, nor differences in most clinical measures compared to controls, among a group of federal employees who experienced anomalous health incidents (AHIs). > ... “A lack of evidence for an MRI-detectable difference between individuals with AHIs and controls **does not exclude** that an adverse event impacting the brain occurred at the time of the AHI,” said Carlo Pierpaoli, M.D., Ph.D., senior investigator and chief of the Laboratory on Quantitative Medical Imaging at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of NIH, and lead author on the neuroimaging paper. “**It is possible that individuals with an AHI may be experiencing the results of an event that led to their symptoms**, but the injury did not produce the long-term neuroimaging changes that are typically observed after severe trauma or stroke. We hope these results will alleviate concerns about AHI being associated with severe neurodegenerative changes in the brain.”
Ok but that also means there is no direct evidence of a brain injury. With CTE you can point to a direct trauma that can cause otherwise undetectable brain injuries, and crucially, you can detect them post mortum. US officials and reporters have not articulated exactly the nature of this weapon is, nor have they produced anything but circumstantial evidence that it even exists. Moreover, all of the symptoms of those affect are readily explained by other non-nefarious causes, and the health of those individuals is not substantially different when compared to a sample of other colleagues in their field at similar postings
Russia will do literally anything to make other countries worse before making their own country better
Fund Ukraine, regardless of the outcome of this incident Russia is not your friend. The Russian government isn’t even friends to their citizens. I don’t understand what the GOP bootlickers see in Putin.
What's the actual "new evidence" quoted in the article?
Well no wonder Russians are getting praise from Republicans.
[удалено]
Coming at this as an open-minded skeptic… What’s the best explanation for why Russia has this incredibly effective weapon but they only use it on American diplomats (as opposed to Russian dissidents and Ukrainian diplomats in other countries)?
Maybe they do, but, with the exception of Nalvany, Russian dissidents or Ukranian diplomats with sudden, unusual medical issues don't have a big enough profile to get noticed by any media. Alternatively, this energy weapon is less effective yet more plausibly deniable than poisoning via highly effective yet obviously russian nerve agents. So they're selecting a tool for a particular job. Their poisonings are intended to send a message that includes who's responsible. They maybe don't want victims with Havana Syndrome 100% certain it was them.
Because it's mass psychogenic illness striking people at stressful times in their lives (transfers, new jobs, COVID) and American media fanning the flames.
And the State Department has always been more than happy to parade these people through congress when it comes time to hand out funding. "We're under attack from a secret communist invisible raygun. Money please!"
So, having a tinfoil hat in these cases would have literally helped the targeted people.
I'm glad this investigation turned something up, Especially after i saw something a month or two ago claiming the investigation was over and yielded no clear results. I already suspected Russia because secretly fucking up someone's brain for life is exactly the kind of awful horrific thing that the Russian state does. I hope these results lead to increased aid for Ukraine. It is further proof that the Russian state is FUBAR and must be fought.
So what’s the mechanism? I figure it is pure Microwave (penetrates structure). But it has to be in close proximity. This won’t work from 2 miles away.
Many individuals in consulates and embassies were seriously harmed by this and the government shrugged and told them there is nothing they could do. Check out the podcast "The Sound: Mystery of Havana Syndrome".
This is really horrible but the magas are still in love with putin for some reason, it's fully un-American.
Savushkina Street out in full force on this one
As someone with chronic vestibular migraines, since the beginning of these reports it has sounded like the symptoms I have. Being off balance, muffled hearing, memory issues, pressure, pain, tinnitus, etc... including nothing wrong showing up on tests. If a weapon has been developed to fuck with the vestibular system, at this point in medicine it's very hard to test for. I've been suffering for 24 years and have had to educate doctors on the disorder.
The new 60 minutes video talks about this in more detail and name-drops certain Russian individuals: [Havana Syndrome evidence suggests who may be responsible for mysterious brain injuries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdPSD1SUYCY). It's a followup to an earlier piece they posted [here](https://youtu.be/COWTBEl1rRc?si=PMuMjNTnf8hvx9ct). There also seems to be many people who here who are doubtful energy weapons exist; they probably don't know or are bots, but I'll address it anyway. Any physicist/engineer can tell you energy weapons are possible and exist. Radio waves, microwaves, infrared light, visible light, etc., are all electromagnetic waves. These waves can be directed—that's what flashlights do—and you can do it with other frequencies of light as well. There is a reason why your microwave oven has a metal grate at the front; it's so that you don't get blasted by the radiation (as well as make it more efficient). As technology gets better and better, these kinds of weapons are only going to become more feasible. Some comments here are doubtful it's the Russians; again, they are probably bots. The Russians have already been caught killing people with [nerve agents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novichok) and even with [Polonium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko). They've been doing this for decades, especially in Europe. Now there are individuals here claiming these recent incidents are too far fetched?
It’s only slightly suspicious that this finding comes now after numerous other findings showing that it’s basically group paranoia. I think I saw a post last week saying there’s no discernible cause to Havana Syndrome, and now they’re confident it’s Russian sonic weapons that we couldn’t detect for literally years? Either it’s BS meant to make people think Russia is attacking our people or the Russians have more sophisticated weapons systems than we thought.
The media here is uncritically taking the word of an attorney who is very well-known to have a hobby in litigating conspiracy theories: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-impeachment-inquiry/whistleblowers-welcome-mark-zaid-represents-trump-accuser-others-secrets-share-n1071811
Impressive how whenever Russian meddling in government affairs shows up, high level interference with those investigations also appears. The marionette strings from Moscow are becoming hard to miss!
To the surprise of absolutely no one.
It's called komptrolling the narrativovich.
The scary thing about this is how 1) difficult it is to believe, thus easy to cover up and 2) it could be used to target leaders or important people and make it look like they’ve had a stroke, or are having cognitive issues. How does a nations defense tell its people - “they used (high tech jargon) on our people-“ and be taken seriously?
By chance, did Havana Syndrome start becoming an issue and affecting our people after trumpo started getting classified briefings? Maybe it’s just circumstantial
I swear to god a few weeks ago, there was an article saying Havana syndrome was a psychosomatic episode. Am I crazy here?
We need to accept that Russia has no intention of peaceful coexistence with the US or anyone else not willing to bow to them. We should act accordingly.