Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
Loquebantur | on: US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
It's a systemic issue, not due to one man.

What gets overlooked here is the US IC itself being a probable cause: the habit of "housecleaning" by killing individuals suspected to be possible (even only prospective) leaks of inconvenient information is very real.

The recent cluster of weird deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research has a similar pattern to it: a statistically highly unlikely density of "suicides, accidents & mishaps".

The assumption, those actions were "justified" somehow is entirely baseless: there is no transparency and no effective oversight. What is supposedly being kept secret there might simply be illegal corruption or embarrassing and inconvenient to those in power.

TFNA | parent | next
Almost every discussion here on HN about those "deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research" has been about how, when you actually dig into the data, they have been very statistically likely.
mikestorrent | parent | next
Calling things "systemic" is unfortunately often just a way of offloading the problem into the pile of Things We Can't Fix. It removes individual accountability, in an era where we are increasingly able to assess the effect an influential individual actually has - because their dialogue is public and recorded, and the consequences of that can be studied.

I think there are plenty of individual men who are absolutely responsible for things becoming worse, and we do the world no favours by helping them shrug the burden of their actions.

andrewflnr | parent
There are long standing systemic issues, and then there's also one man making things dramatically worse in new, stupider ways.