If the intention is to convince whistleblowers #3 through #30 that they should find a healthier hobby? Then yeah, they don't really care if it's obvious to the peanut gallery, so long as it's obvious to any other witnesses.
That seems to presume the murder conspiracy theory. But if the conspiracy theory is effective in silencing whistleblowers then the murder is unnecessary. But if the murder didn’t happen the conspiracy theory is false then there was no reason for whistleblowers to be silent for fear of being killed. So this speculation in the absence of evidence serves the interest of corrupt corporations by undermining the confidence of whistleblowers.
The assumption here is that Boeing is responsible for these.
What exactly does Boeing gain from murdering whistleblowers after the fact? At this point Boeing's reputation is already tarnished and they're already going to be under a microscope, so what does murdering whistleblowers even achieve?
A deterrent to prevent additional whistleblowers from coming forward? If the issues are as massively systemic as facts to date suggest, it seems like there might be a number of other shoes that could drop. Boeing's reputation (as well as that of its higher ups) could get a hell of a lot more tarnished and even breach further into legal culpability territory.
I'm not fully convinced that's what's happening here, but two whistleblowers on a massive US company that also happens to be a defense contractor dying in suspicious and unusual ways (especially that first one "killing himself" after he said if he died it wasn't suicide and also smack in the middle of his deposition days...) certainly warrants a non-trivial amount of concern and a deeper investigation.
This assumes the risk of getting caught offing whistleblowers is less than the risk of more whistle-blowers coming out. Does it really make sense that you'd risk exposing a whistle blower murder program as opposed to whatever corporate problems they have? Not to mention, it's a lot easier to smooth over corporate screw ups than getting caught hiring hit men.
If these are hits, i would think it's one or two rogue execs or stakeholder with a lot of personal money to blow doing this, OR they are leveraging US military contacts to get it done. It's probably impossible to keep an assassination program from leaking carried out in any other way.
I think if Boeing care's about their reputation so badly, they'd get out of the defense contractor business. But there's too much money to be made there. Silencing whistleblowers could be very beneficial to their bottom line:
* Protects their existing IP, as well as any classified information the whistleblower may have had access to.
* Prevents further leaks from the whistleblower, which could impact existing/future contracts, or the company's ability to win them.
* Sends a chilling message to future would-be whistleblowers.
* Sends a reassuring message to the defense industry: "we have a zero-tolerance policy for leaking information and your business is safe with us."
>I think if Boeing care's about their reputation so badly, they'd get out of the defense contractor business.
Huh? Boeing's defense products are a separate division from commercial aviation. And those products are the best out there. Maybe expensive, I guess, and the usual criticism of scope creep and project management applies.
That may be the case, but I think many people will hear "Boeing" and immediately classify them along with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon etc.
I mean… isn’t the obvious answer a “chilling effect”?
If you were to subscribe to the idea Boeing murders whistleblowers, how is the most obvious reason for why not to prevent more people from speaking out?
It's... just barely probable with two people. Assuming 30 whistleblowers, and an actuarial likelihood of 1.2% death[1] in a given year at their ages, we can use binomial probability[2] to determine the chance of two dying in a given year.
The math works out to a 4.4% chance. That's a bit of an eye raiser, but still just believable. (Look, we all believe it can happen we roll a critical in D&D ;)
3 or more dying in a year, we're at 0.5% - I'd really assume that's deliberate.
Can we not make a reasonable assumption that whistleblowers against a powerful company have a much higher than average risk of dying? Knowing nothing about them personally we can reasonably conclude:
- They get regular death threats.
- The opposing law firms probably have PIs digging into their lives for dirt to discredit them.
- Their careers in their line of work are over and as far as I know, there's no whistle-blower retirement fund.
- Everyone they knew and worked with for many years and who still works there probably cut them off for fear of being associated with them.
- Because of all this their sleep is probably horrible, they're much more likely to have unhealthy alcohol habits, and to have financial problems.
Maybe. But these are all random assumptions, and we have no way of taking them into account without a lot of work on the modeling.
But the point I was trying to make (badly, based on where the discussion is going :) was that "two whistleblowers dying is still somewhat probable". Increased likelihood of death just makes it more probable.
MRSA has some benefits to consider alongside its detriments. It is capable of surviving on surfaces so you could apply it to a surface that your target interacts with and be relatively confident that it will be viable when the target contacts it. It's common, so it's not some sort of exotic bio-weapon that screams cloak-and-daggers: you can get MRSA in a hospital even. I think it's pretty resilient too so once your target has contacted the MRSA simple hygienic practices wouldn't neutralize it like taking a shower or bath.
But as far as I know it is very treatable by knowledgeable medical professionals if caught early so in that sense it's not a guaranteed attack-vector and a poor choice for an assassination. Depending on a target who doesn't visit the doctor until too late, maybe less of an issue.
It also colonizes a large fraction of hospital workers so unless you injected it into the victim or got them to inhale a large number of aerosolized bacteria, it won't be effective.
Assassination seems unlikely here to me. The presentation of sudden illness with multiple agents flu B, MRSA, and strep all at the same time is unusual. The presentation probably IS consistent with a sudden exposure to a very high number of infectious organisms into his lungs which could overwhelm the immune system and potentially lead to death. It wouldn't be impossible to orchestrate but it sounds difficult, finicky, unreliable, and tough to correctly execute without collateral damage. It would almost certainly require a state actor.
It's also plausible he contracted influenza B and suffered from an opportunistic infection of the lungs.
By Occam's razor I think the latter is quite a bit more likely.
Is there any kind of Bayesian modeling to calculate the probability of deaths in a subpopulation like employees of a company over a given period of time? I guess none of this would be public knowledge to know the background death rate of that population, but assuming it was all public where we knew how many deaths per employee was typical could something be calculated to show this pattern is a mathematical outlier of somekind?
I keep seeing headlines similar to the above ("Second Boeing Whistleblower").
The headline is simply a lie and misrepresentation. Josh Dean was not a Boeing Whistleblower. He is a Whistleblower against his employer, Spirit AeroSystems, not Boeing.
How many whistleblowers have there been and what’s the demographic? Not to be too much of a downer but if there are a good number of whistleblowers and they’re over-represented by retirement age men that have worked in production plants all their lives then there is some level of morbidity to be expected.
But also: yeah, when you look at it face on it’s absolutely wild that there have been two whistleblower deaths.
Influenza and MRSA — allegedly the MRSA was contracted before hospitalization, which is odd. Though MRSA would also be an odd way to try to intentionally kill someone.
The point still stands. There ought to be some level of statistical analysis to tell you how likely an event this is rather than immediately reaching for the conspiracy theory lever.
In that "statistical analysis" the company and more importantly the time must be factored in.
Yes, I am sure out of all whistleblowers, all over the world, for all types of stories (war crimes, finance (insider trading), etc) there must many that do just die.
But...
1. The same 'set' of whistleblowers (exposing manufacturing faults in Boing aircrafts)
2. In less than two months..!
Not to mention not just at any time but during multiple ongoing investigations...?
I'd be very surprised if organizations such as the CIA or similar haven't at least put some resources toward researching the viability of weaponizing MRSA or similar.
I'm not sure, but I think in suspicious deaths like this folks should DNA sequence all viruses and other stuff found on the body of the poor individual. I've been curious about autopsies from a proactive angle. Can the family of the deceased, or even the person in their own will expressed before they died, can they force a municipality or county or whatever agency the coroner operates under to release the body for a private autopsy?
Good point, the statute of limitations for killing your customers should probably only be two years. That's, like, ancient history in tech years! GPT 4 wasn't even released at that point!
We can't keep holding them accountable for such negligence, after all they've been really really good in the two years since- they only let a door fall off of a plane once! And no one died from that! We don't need to mention that if the seat next to the door was filled and they were not wearing their seatbelt, it is highly likely they would have died.
EDIT: My bad, it was 5 years ago, not 2 years ago. I skimmed the Wikipedia page too fast, much like Boeing's engineers did while trying to bypass FAA regulations. I should be punished, but Boeing did nothing wrong.
Oh that's fair, you're right, that accident happened 5 years ago. Even more reason to excuse them from doing engineering badly! That is basically the beginning of the universe!
No. In the case of Ethiopian airlines they knew exactly what was going on when MCAS kicked in and almost immediately responded. MCAS pushed the plane down SO hard that something in the tail got stuck. Boeing spent a lot of time trying to blame this on pilots when 1.) they initially didn't even train them on it, and 2.) even if trained...once it happens...you have extremely little time to react.
>Which was due to MCAS malfunction and pilots responding poorly to it.
I think if they are the point where they are murdering whistleblowers than I wouldn't take Boeing gaslighting about who was to blame for that on face value.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40230790