Yeah, that's interesting.

We start with approximately 33 bits needed to uniquely identify her. She lives in Havana, which immediately slices 11 bits from our search space (the population of Havana is around 2.13 million, or ~2^21). She's female, so we can roughly cut our population in half again; now we're only at 20 bits.

She worked in the Havana embassy in 2017 and was one of the people impacted by the strange health issues. There were about 24 people impacted (insofar as I can quickly find online), which means she must be one of these 24 people. Assuming all of the other 23 are also female, now there are only 4 bits remaining (24 = 2^4.58).

Finally, she has twin 12 year old children. We'll have to make a few fuzzy assumptions here, but given 1) a birth rate of ~1.5 per female per year, 2) a world female population of ~3,232,000,000 in 2005, and 3) a chance of having twins at about 3.33%, she is most likely in a set of about 159,984,000. This is only about 27 bits, which means we get a little over a 5 bit reduction by placing her in this set. That gives us the last 4 bits we need.

This is all assuming that the information given in this article is correct and the foregoing estimates are comparable to the real world statistics. This is a little fuzzy because I'm not sure if she's actually Cuban or American (and therefore where she was in 2005, or which estimates to use for calculating twin and birth rate statistics).

She doesn't live in Havana anymore.

Well actually between having worked in the embassy and having twins in 2005, there are still theoretically enough bits to uniquely identify her. Knowing where she lives just bolsters the selection a bit.

Unless the real one doesn't have twins, and they added it in the story to protect his/her identity.

> There's a pretty high probability that the number of FSI agents in Havana with 12-year-old twins is precisely one.

And strangely enough I am pretty sure I know who this person is. Just based on those facts and other things from the article.

Her privacy is probably more about her life here in America with her neighbors, than it is about Cuban agents coming to get her.

I guess (hope) they changed the details. It's not uncommon in these cases to change the irrelevant details to protect the identities. I won't be surprised it her children are not 12-year-old or twins.

this is the New Yorker, the crown jewel of the conde naste empire and they wouldn't do that with their editorial process. Either it wouldn't be printed, the anonymity wasn't important or there were other people who fit her profile obscure her.

How do you know the fact that "she" had a husband and twins is not also made up?

That's a good point, but why add it in the first place?

There are several mentions of the timing of CIA operatives getting sick that would allow foreign intelligence analysts to identify them if they had other sources of information about the events.

There's unlikely to be the information you think in that article otherwise the CIA is going to be having a hard time. In all likelihood the CIA worked with the reporter to ensure the right disinformation came out. Note that the FBI refused to comment but there seems to be a lot of inside info about the CIA...

To be ahead of the curve and mislead?