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I did not read the full article (it is big on social media photos of Russian kids with sniper rifles, and short on anything definitive, or even a correlation coefficient), but I am still skeptical based on priors. For the sake of the argument, let us assume that Russia has developed through some significant effort some tech with which it can give concussion-like symptoms to of diplomats from a van parked across the street.
They then decide that the perfect use for this weapon is to annoy US and Canadian diplomats/spooks in Havana in 2016. Why? Were the Canadians staging an anti-communist coup from their embassy, and this was the only way the Castros could be kept in power?
It might be possible that the Russians have a weapon which is invisible to the naked eye. It seems very unlikely that they have a weapon which is totally beyond the ability of any American sensor system to detect. The natural response would be to put up sensor kits. Have every diplomat carry a small black box capable of detecting the top five guesses what that weapon could be.
Like zero-days or Death Note, using a covert method risks giving that method away. So why Havana, why Canadians?
On the other hand, the mass hysteria is real. If you want to measure an increase in the prevalence of some symptom, you have to be very careful to avoid priming your patients. I think it is unlikely that some government bureaucrat woke up one day and thought "today I will try to falsify the theory that some symptom affects the US embassy staff in Havana" out of the blue. Much more likely that the embassy staff discussed their symptoms with each other, allowing for memetic infection.
I have as much disdain for the US intelligence community as anyone here, but even I don't think that "bringing the truth to the American people" is in their job description. If the CIA is learning of the existence of Unit bignumber from the press, that would be a failure on their part. But it is also possible that all of the stuff in the article was well known to the spooks in 2016, and they decided to keep it under wraps for some reason.
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