Possible detection of Sarin reported at Facebook facility in Menlo Park, 'no employees exposed,' may be false positive

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/01/sarin-gas-exposure-reported-at.html

No employees have been exposed to the substance, officials said.

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Well, thereā€™s always tomorrow

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Provided this doesnā€™t turn into something really tragic, Iā€™m going to just assume it was detecting Facebook.

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Maybe it was just a berg of zucher.

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I call false positive.

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Standdown: Was just a tech bro wearing Axe body spray.

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ā€œThis definitely smells like sarin.ā€

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Everybody panic!

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AURIC%20SPECTROMETER%20HUGE

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Iā€™m pretty sure that using high end chemical warfare detection capabilities is very niche(they certainly donā€™t use them at the entrances to military bases of my acquaintance, at least not routinely); but if someone was going to do it; a company with a variety of unsavory foreign policy entanglements and a business model that involves cultivating ā€˜engagementā€™ from a not always well-hinged userbase in most any flavor and at almost any cost seems like a plausible candidate.

That said, given how similar a lot of G-series are to common, legal, pesticides false positives would be quite trivial; by accident or for the lulz.

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If only they had that level of security from election interference.

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Iā€™ve always suspected that was one of the ingredients. Certainly something neurotoxic!

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Possible detection of Sarin reported at Facebook facility

Capital-s sarin?

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We went to Target one day and walked down the aisle where that stuff is and some kid was spraying some around. I said ā€œmother of god, what the hell are you trying to do, kill me!ā€ He stopped.

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Sheā€™ll never forgive her parents for naming her that.

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What worries me the most about this story? Someone at Facebook has done the risk assessment and has decided they genuinely need the capability to detect nerve agents being mailed to them.

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My guess is that they have some fairly generic instrument for detecting things like neurotoxins, and will send samples off to a real lab if they get a match.

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Update: Suspicious package delivered to Facebook doesnā€™t contain sarin.

Between 10 and 11 Monday night, crews re-entered the building and recovered the package, and put it in a mobile containment device and removed it from the area.

More sophisticated detection equipment was used and the presence of sarin was ruled out.

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