This was a big thing for drone people based out of Eppley AFB in Omaha. Wake up, drive to work, attack enemies, drive home, sit there eating dinner with your family trying to pretend you didn’t kill someone and can’t talk about it. Combat troops get to lean on each other after a firefight: “dude, good shot. That guy was about to get us!” You get validation that you did something to safe you and your friends, and it’s still a heavy burden, but you have people who were there telling you that you’re a good person and did the right thing.
The Air Force did something shockingly reasonable (according to the newspaper coverage): they require all pilots to attend mandatory counseling sessions. Then there was no sign of weakness or any of that toxic nonsense. “Ugh, guess I have to go talk to the doc today, and I don’t want to, but guess orders are orders.”
A lot of people on HN have either served in the US mil or are sympathetic, and have successfully solved their cognitive dissonance about killing 10k people for 1 soldier.
But you're right, whoever they killed was most often either a civilian, someone defending their country, or someone forced to defend their country from an invader.
While the US soldiers kill either because they believe in the crazy narratives pushed by the US empire or because they want to go to university, and especially because the risk to them is mind-bogglingly low. What I'm saying is: US soldiers are war criminals. Those who find a way to see through their mistakes, whatever pushed them to engage and do what they did, can be redeemed, so I'm not discounting all of them, but so few do.
We sure do. They mostly work in federal government and government contracting corporations. There are multiple clearly documented repeated drone strikes on US citizens, even US citizen minors, who never were even indicted with a crime, that ended in assassination. Like the two intentional strikes it took to kill 16 year old US citizen from colorado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... . See also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix executive program in general.
> the most damaging part of direct combat is watching people that you consider to be family die or be maimed.
I've heard from various places over the years (documentaries, friends) that soldiers really fight for their comrades at the end of the day. As in when asked "why are you here fighting" if they are in front of a news crews or something where they have to say "we're bringing democracy to ..." they'll just say something like "those fuckers blew my buddy up and I am here to pay them back".
I was in the military and in my experience people that chose to go into war zones, it's optional, are fucked in the head and literally enjoy killing people, I've seen it a dozen times. They want to kill.
America is so obsessed with helping its own murder more and they're surprised when those doing the murdering have feelings, too. The Deer Hunter (1978) taught me this. It taught me that America will go to insane lengths to heal the wounds they cause to their own in the service of murdering others. It's a disgusting culture.
> One of the dead was Technical Sergeant Kevin Stallings, a digital network intelligence analyst whose family told Bloomberg they wanted him to be identified to bring greater attention to the suicides. Stallings was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, Cyber Command’s headquarters. He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37.
These people aren't "drone operators", they worked for USCYBERCOM, which does "hacker stuff".
The narrative peddled here repeatedly, the statistics were "completely normal" is egregiously wrong.
The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides", while the far more likely explanation is "housecleaning": murdering potential whistleblowers.
>The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides",
The article talks about 19 people. Given the size of those organizations that's statistically elevated but too small a number to descend into conspiracy theories. As the article points out they apparently had internal warnings and studies about lack of mental support for people in signals intelligence and cyber related roles.
Given that this cluster of deaths seems to have happened in June/July, the Iran war and how the American government has conducted itself I don't find it surprising there's elevated numbers of suicides. You don't need to be on the frontline, if you're in sigint and involved in that attack on the school that casually blew up 150 girls and probably the stuff we don't know about I wouldn't be surprised people off themselves.
Took me a year to get my secret clearance in the military, I promise you no one gives a s** about anything you say once you're out. It is a fun way to feel self-important though :-)
I was a part of the world's largest illegal operation in history and again I promise you no one gives a s**.
It’s hard to say exactly what the folks in the article are grappling with, not working with them personally. I never got to the point where I was anywhere near personal crisis from my classified work. These folks sound like they were associated with some kind of wet ops or drone programs. Not fun to deal with.
I know cleared psychologists are a thing. I never tried to speak with one but I’m told demand is high, and the ones out there are typically very oversubscribed.
I may be a bad counter example to this article. I never had to cope with super severe depression or crisis, or conops that would bring me a ton of personal crisis.
I just see a commonality in struggling with not being able to talk about it. Work is too big a part of my life to not be able to discuss it freely. That did cost me something, personally. I’m glad it didn’t cost me anything as dear as what it cost the people in the original article.
In all of my years messing with computers, I have met very few people who are as fluent with the technology and the terminology. There is virtually no one I know that I can talk to about the things I do. I do not work in IT. I do not know people in IT. I also do not go out of my way to find IT folks. For a while this bothered me a little.
On pondering this, I suppose everyone with a hobby has this same lacking. For that matter, anyone with a mind that contains unique thoughts has the the same lacking. A desire for comradery seems pretty universal.
That said, not being able to talk about it and not being allowed to talk about it is quite different!
There are chaplains and in-agency psychologists, both can have classified conversations with you. The problem is that you cannot change the underlying causes of any illness/sickness
It was, on a technical level, the most interesting work I’ve ever done. What people say about the US government being ahead of the commercially available technology curve is certainly true.
The work I did absolutely had positive impact on the world.
People rush to criticize and write off working in the defense sector, but it can be a very rewarding place to work. There are absolutely problems in that sector - bad management and regulatory capture being primary among them. (Ultimately, those are why I left.)
It’s hard to judge accurately from the outside. That’s the nature of classified work: by definition, you can’t know what you’re getting yourself into until you’ve jumped with both feet.
I'm against the U.S.'s broken leadership as much as any sensible person. But even in normal times with sane leadership, national defense is often a matter of "kill or be killed." This is certainly an uncomfortable truth, but that's the way of the world.
I mean it's not like we know those "adversaries" ever wanted to murder us. For example, the US has a long record of assassinating labor leaders in South America to protect our Banana Republics on behalf of Chiquita. I think it's absolutely fair to bring in skepticism towards the secrets our military keeps from us
I agree that blindly assuming that all "adversaries" of the U.S. (per labeling by the U.S. government) want to kill us. But it does seem that some indeed do. It would further seem that proportionate countermeasures would be appropriate for those cases.
Ah. Cool story bro. Meanwhile private equity doctors let their private corp owners kill people over insurance denials. But complain only when their malpractice copay rises.
Tech workers for Silicon Valley daily enable and positively contribute to the pervasive surveillance and exploitation of the majority of the world. To the point the poors cant even open the app or walk into the store without an algorithm raises prices to the mathematical max this person can afford. But they only complain when free bananas are removed from the snacks.
When you know you can't kill the message, kill the messenger.
This is the tactic used when journalist Gary Webb started reporting on the USA involvement with selling crack to Americans so they could fund Contra insurgents in Nicaragua.
They did this so well that other news organizations turned on the journalist.
I could easily imagine the USA not wanting to patch holes so they have access to the systems and these experts know this.
The US agency that we entrust with evaluating and recommending our encryption standards is the same one (albeit a different branch) that focuses on breaking encryption. There is an obvious conflict of interest with this arrangement.
Many examples of deliberate weakening are documented, especially with the "export approved" stuff that we sell to our allies.
This problem goes beyond just encryption, and also involves deliberate data leaking (with plausible deniability).
So yes, you don't need to imagine it at all -- the NSA works to create and maintain access to "everything everywhere."
It’s wild to, in a thread about an unusual number of suicides among a branch of government doing secret stuff, say that folks talking about that secret stuff would be a good idea.
I am absolutely not saying that is what’s happening here, suicide of folks put in stressful situations is to be taken seriously. But like… c’mon guy, surely this exact premise has been a direct-to-Amazon-Video release.
Way to pull a Tokyo Rose; the GP was alluding to "cool" and "impactful" things they had done to keep us all safe from malicious actors and you try to twist it into "illegal activities" and "unlawful orders".
Do not think we aren't catching on to this kind of nonsense.
If the activities were truly cool and impactful, and not illegal or unlawful as you suggest, wouldn’t it be possible that the suicide could be due to a culture of not speaking out and then left to deal with the after effect of guilt? A slanderous retort vs a different lens to review the events isn’t helpful
I seriously doubt the GP (who was proud of their work) was one of the suicides. If they were, the mere fact that they are able to post here after taking their own life would be the far bigger story.
It's possible that they think they are doing good things according to their moral framework. There are hundreds of millions of people with truly insane moral frameworks.
It's possible that their particular job was, as far as they know, doing good things according to most moral frameworks.
I have strong doubts that everyone who kills people by clicking on them on a computer screen thinks that what they are doing is wholly compatible with their personal moral framework. Presumably, some of those people feel very guilty about what they do.
This is about network security, defending against cyber attacks. You may or may not agree that we should have people doing that, but conflating it with imagined nonsense like this is counterproductive.
Counterpoint, industry cyber security is so generally weak, if there were actually a secret "huge cold cyber war" on-going, we'd see real world impact.
This thing probably never stops and doesn’t have holidays. I read about Operation Gladio back in the day, which was not a cyber operation, but a preparation of guerrilla operations in case the WP occupied EU. But I got the feeling that the war in darkness (cyber is part of it) is non-stop.
How about that they do bad stuff and feel bad about it? You make it sound like they are taking a bullet or something. Desillusion is probably way worse.
There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
Starts with simple stuff like package rerouting, then goes on to gathering intel about places, people, putting in USB flash drives to their laptops, theft, death threats, arsony, and actual murder. Each step of the way the kids get deeper into trouble because they have to prove that they have done it for the payout, making photos of themselves... which gives the other end increasingly more doxxing material on them.
It's a real problem, and they use the luckystrike branch also to go after witnesses in big lawsuit cases, which then fall off due to all witnesses accidentally dying under seemingly random causes.
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 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 recent cluster of weird deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research has a similar pattern to it
The pattern being that the deaths and disappearances among people with top secret clearances is lower than the national average would suggest.
> According to science writer Mick West, more than 700,000 people work in top-secret-cleared positions in the U.S. aerospace and nuclear sectors. When viewed against existing mortality rates and causes, this would suggest around 250 persons in the industry would normally succumb to homicides and suicides over the time-period during which the 10 or 11 alleged "missing scientists" had died or disappeared, with thousands more dying of natural causes.
You have absolutely no information on whether this is probable or likely, and the recent news on scientists was a conspiracy theory powered as usual by a cherry picking facts and exaggerating biographies.
The US doesn't even kill foreign leaders. Our intelligence service doesn't have the skills or appetite, let alone citizens. The resulting scandal would make the Church commission look like nothing, not to mention the impact on recruitment.
Yes, they only kill random fishermen in the Caribbean, foreign leaders get kidnapped and tried in kangaroo courts. Except Iranian leaders, those do get killed. But that's just the last 6 months.
> There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
Before someone from the US claims some leftist bullshit about this (as this is what Russian bots typically do), here's a mix of newspapers including more right/conservative ones:
Also check netzpolitik and other CCC-related media outlets, there's been extensive research about this topic from us. (Didn't want to post articles where I've personally been involved, but you can find them easily with similar search keywords.)
(Replying to my own post). Also, it’s gotta be mentally draining to be told by the president they have to win but also always let Russian attacks though.
I'm an agnostic, but when I read about what he does, it makes me devoutly wish that hell exists. He has made countless people's lives hell on earth, and he doesn't care at all. No one is holding him accountable in this life: it's inconvenient for those in power.
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.
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.
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.
The only difference is, is that before him we had "Iraq has weapons for mass destruction! we must attack them, before they attack us, we're in danger!", and now there's "we're going in and we're taking the oil!".
So from "we can do whatever we want if we lie" turned into "we can do whatever we want", not really relevant to all the people killed.
This was wasn't after January 2021, and hasn't been during his second term. There are methods to hold presidents accountable, there are institutions to prevent the harm from happening.
Just as important, the US will need to figure out exactly what strings Putin's managed to attach to Trump - kompromat? threats? bribes? elaborate man management? something else? - or this vulnerability could be exploited again.
Our vulnerability is an open internet that includes Russia, leaving our populace completely open to Russian influence campaigns of micro targeted propaganda, recruitment, and incitement.
I like how the “Chinese propaganda” against datacenters was found to be mostly a collection of facts.
While Russian propaganda is more clumsy and emotional, we’ve produced such an unequal society with such low regular education and outright corruption that people fall for it. That says something negative about US, not them.
If we admit our system cant even survive an open internet, it should be dismantled or reformed rather than free exchange closed.
Education would blunt, but not eliminate the threat of nation-state funded micro targeted influence campaigns. Moreover, it would take years, and we have the problem now.
In terms of data center propaganda and fact. Both are true. China is funding anti data center sentiment for geopolitical power, while at the same time, there are legitimate reasons for people to not like/ or fear AI. The problem is we (the U.S.) have to solve both. We cannot let China have significantly better AI models than we have because that is a real national security threat, while AI also threatens potential mass destruction dangers and an avenue of utter concentration of wealth, etc
I lived in a communistic country, where BBC/Voice of America/Radio free Europe were banned/jammed, under the pretext of 'your feeble minds will not be able to resist the insidious allure of western burgeois propaganda'.
Seeing the same argumentation from the west's side is disheartening. We are now in the west, but (almost) full circle back where were before.
It's almost certainly just that Trump is a fundamentally fragile, insecure man. He has proven over and over that he will happily fellate (proverbially speaking) any man who says nice things about him, and at least refrain from assaulting most women who say nice things too.
Idk maybe there is something nefarious but afaik Putin's always been cordial with Trump as well as let him do various investments in Russia. I'm not sure there's much reason for Trump to alienate his friend; if you've ever see Trump's staff meetings you'll know how much cordiality is important to him.
Trump isn't the weakness. The weakness is the almost complete collapse of the checks and balances around the president. If those were in place Trump would have been in prison by the end of 2021 at the very latest.
The DOJ, the military, both houses, the AIPAC wing of the Democrats, and corporate media are all fully captured. So are "independent" organisations like the NRA.
The Supreme Court is mostly captured. The lower levels of the judiciary are still holding out, but have limited enforcement ability without the DOJ.
It's why I don't see the US making the course correction it actually needs - realistically the "best" feasible outcome is that a presidential election is held and a business as usual democrat is elected who will immediately not address any of the problems for whatever reason (part of the system/paid by the same people pick one).
Candidates come and go but the system endures and it is the system that is rotten at every level all the way down to the core.
Then 4-8 years later the GOP candidate wins subservient to the same interests as Trump and the US Gov is back there again.
Not really sure what the outcome is for the US at this point, things will have to get a great deal worse before enough Americans decide this is unacceptable but that state can last years/decades before the dam breaks.
The winning Presidential campaign message would be this: I promise to work to reduce the power of the Presidency via supporting and campaigning for legislation and Constitutional amendments. It is time for Congress to once again be ascendent like it was in the first century of our great Republic.
We need a G. Washington, who refused more power than he was offered, setting precedents and expectations.
Based on recent years and the power of personalized AI influence campaigns, the winning Presidential campaign message (after 4 years of 'change nothing substantial Democrat' would most likely be 'I need real, full (silently: fascist) power, to finally drain the swamp'.
The article doesn't say anything of the sort. Literally just said to put a halt on OFFENSIVE operations.
If I were to guess I'd say it was an overly ambitious negotiation tactic.
Also, that was a year and a half ago. The current status quo is that Ukraine is producing more drones than Russia can deal with, bombing Russian targets daily and the US-Ukraine relationship is much closer, with Ukraine sharing drone technology and intel with the US.
The new US policy under Trump is giving up trying to win the world and instead focusing on internal market and dominance over the American continent. Causing and sustaining friction everywhere is aligned with this policy.
This is the result of a shift of power in the US politics, from the global financial capital of the last decades back to the military and industrial sector.
> The new US policy under Trump is giving up trying to win the world and instead focusing on internal market and dominance over the American continent.
Is that why he bombed Iran and single-handedly caused a global energy crisis? A shift of focus to “dominance of the American continent”?
Unfortunately this slows down adoption of renewables even more, China produces most of world’s renewables and batteries but bootstraps this industry with oil.
That's just deliberate damage to the US, his actions have increased move to energy sovereignty globally and done more for net zero than any president before him.
> Is that why he bombed Iran and single-handedly caused a global energy crisis?
Yes. Oil price hurts China industrial capacity more than the US economy. Oil companies made a $93 billion profit amid the war [1]. The US is a net oil exporter, while China halved their oil imports [2].
ExxonMobil and Chevron are US-incorporated. TotalEnergies (French)
BP (UK), Shell (UK) also have significant US-based ownership (~50%, ~25% and ~25% respectively), including BlackRock, Vanguard, mutual funds, and US pension funds.
> A shift of focus to “dominance of the American continent”?
1. Venezuela was under embargo and selling oil to China. The Nicolas Maduro hijack and the country's political realignment with US will have the double effect of negating oil to China and securing large nearby reserves.
2. Argentina has a Trump-aligned president, who is vocal about undermining the Mercosul agreement and is currently in diplomatic attrition with Brazil. Recently signed a $20 billion loan from FMI.
3. Paraguay signed a treaty for a US forward operation base in their territory. The Paraguay border is home to a large hydroelectric, a major power source for 3 countries: Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.
4. Colombia has a new Trump aligned president. It's a young president with no political background. The US State Department announced a $1 billion assistance upon his election for military investment.
5. Peru’s new president Keiko Fujimori is Trump-aligned.
6. Chile’s new president Jose Antonio Kast is Trump-aligned.
7. US retaliated against the prosecution of former Trump-aligned Brazil president for attempted coup by announcing an 50% emergency tariff (which didn't hold legally), then crafting a Section 301 investigation to justify a 25% tariff in July 2026.
8. US is giving asylum to the former president's son, who is vocal on social media about defending the US tariffs as retaliation, defends military intervention of the US in Brazil, as well as stating (but without proof) that Brazilian polls are rigged – not the one his father ran and won, apparently.
> The US is a net oil exporter, while China halved their oil imports [2].
This seems to be the opposite point you want.
Everybody is going to have increased expenses for everything due to their oil dependency _except_ China. Which will raise the price of Chinese exports to the market price but giving China a lot of producer surplus.
Or China can keep doing it's Belt & Road plans and grant other countries money to help with their oil problems in exchange for territory. Or also keep prices lower to continue hollowing out other countries manufacturing capabilities.
--
The leaders of South America claiming to be "Trump aligned" is good for Trump. Trump is not the average american citizen.
And boy will those leaders flip the second he's out of the presidency.
It's believed China managed to halve oil imports due to large (undisclosed) reserves, emergency public policies and overdriving coal use, but this can't last. China is also extremely dependent on Russian oil, which is a country at conflict and having its key infrastructure destroyed. China is building their renewable energy capacity fast, but this has to be quick started on oil.
Increasing oil prices have the double effect of slowing China expansion and energetic transition long-term while increasing dollar demand in the short term - just look what happened to gold prices once Iran war started.
The new Trump-aligned leaders of South America are puppets to secure cheap, nearby materials and food in a future world in conflict, where the US has to re-industrialize rapidly. The US navy would be spread too thin, and the US currently doesn't even have capacity to build its navy - the US recently sought the help of South Korea in this matter.
Please note none of this my opinion, the current US foreign policy strategy is a public fact. [1]
> Please note none of this my opinion, the current US foreign policy strategy is a public fact.
This is beyond arrogant and makes discussion impossible. Your opinion is not automatically a 100% accurate reflection reality because you have citations.
that’s a lot of words about South America in order to paper over what we are all currently feeling at the pump and in the economy at large.
Between his incoherent tariff policies and the paltry job numbers we are seeing, I think you’re going to have a hard time convincing me he’s doing things that are good for us domestically. I’m not even touching the heated social issues he’s been pouring gas all over.
Unjust wars and enabling genocide is probably the more likely factor here, realizing there is no honor in defending these things overseas.
This has been an issue for decades: overseas, not knowing 'why' Americans are dying for nothing, and, the veterans being treated as refuse when they return.
Edit: that may have come across too callous.
The crushing of ones consciesness for unjust foreign wars, protecting a global network of the worst crimes (Epstn files and the international group within it, operating under the umbrella protection network of the US vis a vis NATO).
The most immoral army in the world, the IDF, also has a very high suicide rate - ones conscience cannot be destroyed, it can only be atrophied and dulled, and then depression hunts you.
"Between early June and early July, as many as five individuals who worked in or closely with US Cyber Command died by suicide, based on internal communications, public records and sources. The deaths have raised concern among lawmakers and military leaders within the highly secretive command, which is responsible for defending US networks and conducting offensive cyber operations."
Assuming a predominantly male population, the suicide rate should be around 20 per 100000 per year. 5 people in a month gives 18x higher rate. Too short period to draw any statistical conclusions but it’s a large blip.
I think you’d have some statistical complications around stress: beyond the inherent pressure of the job itself, it’s highly likely that they were understaffed even before losing a lot of support when the DOGE chainsaws were in “cut first, measure later” mode — I know multiple people in the military who are still running at like half productivity because telework was cancelled so everyone’s day is a couple hours longer commuting into an office where they’re sitting on the floor because there aren’t enough desks — and if they were married to another federal employee they might be dealing with loss of income or childcare (DOGE closed the GSA office which handled that, apparently to pressure parents into resigning) at the same time.
The suicide rate isn't uniformly distributed given gender. There are likely screenings (previous mental health history) and rejection of the most affected age group (70+) that should lead the baseline to be even lower. Meaning 18x is probably on the low end.
I think that it would be necessary to correct for things like income and education level since engineers in cyber command are likely not representative of the general public.
I agree with you generally but a lot of professions that are well-paid and educated still have high rates. Dentists, for example, are 2x the general population
most medical professions have higher rate. it's usually attributed to being constantly subjected to pain and suffering plus physicians can source pharmaceuticals to exit softly. never heard that it professionals are particularly prone to suicide.
This particular population is highly selected because of the work they do and the types of clearances they hold. I would expect the suicide rate to differ significantly from the general population.
Ah yes- your old job where your boss could put you on twelve hour shiftwork indefinitely while making you pt while denying you adequate housing or food all under the threat of military justice and telling you if you tell anyone anything you're breaking a dozen national security laws.
> > In some cases, they suffer from insomnia, memory loss, rumination and physical illness,
> So, like most middle-aged desk jockeys then?
Is this really so common? I'm 38 and had some medical issues this past year, but one of the big things I've been grappling with is severe brain fog and memory loss. I could not tell you any of the projects I worked on in my previous three years, honestly. Maybe longer. It's been pretty demoralizing
I like to think the brain is doing its work and just trashing info it doesnt need and making space for new info when i forget stuff... I guess if it was truly important i'd be worried, but work stuff usually isnt important once its done, emotional/personal stuff would be more worrisome, like alzheimer and others, but work stuff? Im happy to forget it if its done lol
Well, I'm only 38 so alzheimers is unlikely. It does run in the family though
But no, my real worry is I'm going to wind up having to interview and talk about stuff I've done and I can't seem to remember any of it. That's a real problem and probably not good
I wonder whether any American civilians are losing sleep over how the current administration and its supporters' robust "race realist" rhetoric and worldview might be used by adversaries for some very cruel and effective psychological warfare on military and bureaucratic personnel from minority groups in the US.
Glad to see this brought up! My entire Air Force experience is blocked to comment on besides basic training...Tech school and forward is NDA'd, read in, etc
You don't really get to sneak a glimpse of operations and write a book like the SEALs seem get to (jk!)
I’ve worked with folks from The Citadel who had parts of their studies they were not allowed to talk about. When doing a hiring reference check that was confirmed by school staff. I don’t know if it was an NDA in the traditional sense; I was just a tech interviewer.
So just suffer in silence because you signed some papers when you were too young to understand what they really meant?
That's horrible.
I almost signed up for the Canadian Military back in the early 2000s and I think my lucky stars every day that I skipped that last recruitment meeting.
I'm curious if LLMs have a role here. They're phenomenally capable at cyber stuff, and the military is without doubt taking full advantage of this. For people who's sole identity is tied into something that LLMs become better than them at, it seems easy to imagine that zooming straight on over to existential crisis territory.
Absolutely not. The problem is solely op tempo since the Iran war started. Leadership in cyber is famous for "surging" It's quite normal. But cyber specifically refuses to allow the surge to end. It becomes "the new normal." This was already straining the force before the Iran war but the civilian leadership now demand constant cyber effects and that pressure cascades down. It's hard to emphasize how effective cyber is, bc of course you want proof. But the proof is in the optempo and you can see that leadership is literally killing their Soldiers to get more and more of it.
The LLMs play a part, but it’s the tempo; the pace.
Fully autonomous w/LLM isn’t true. Leadership wants it true. The technological capabilities and acceptance of scapegoating a machine got rejected by society, so that leaves perfectly capable individuals as the gatekeepers of decision making, completely overloaded by the amount of information they need to deal with.
If you as a human can’t keep up, but the onslaught continues, and you’ll be held responsible for the outcome regardless… yeah. People will punch their ticket out. It’s not unique to LLMs, but LLMs have certainly automated the process of reaching the worst possible conclusion.
Don’t for a second try to hold the computers accountable or blame them for this outcome. This is a leadership issue and always will be. Believing otherwise is just allowing suicides to be scapegoated as a computer’s doing.
It's sad how many people are commenting on this with insane conspiracy theories and that people are actually responding in support of them. Really shows how falling into echo chambers online and buying into conspiracy theories can cause significant harm to ones ability to think rationally.
> "The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people," science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West wrote on 16 April on his Substack.
> "Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10 … The deaths are real. The families' grief is real. The pattern is not."
> Louise Grillmair, similarly, says that - while her husband "would laugh" at speculation that the deaths might be connected - he would also "probably talk statistically" to squelch conspiracies.
I'm not sure how much value there is in comparing it with ordinary mortality considering the fairly strict selectivity on handing out TS clearances. You're definitely not going to give one to anyone who looks like an alcoholic or habitual drug user. You'll be less likely to give one out to people who struggle with cravings like heavy smokers or the morbidly obese. Gambling and financial instability are are also exclusionary factors. You would prioritize people who are highly disciplined and exhibit a preference for fitness and a survival mindset in general. So before you get into psychological issues at all, your population will be significantly healthier than the median, less likely to fall victim to homicide, and have fewer life problems than the general population.
A useful comparator is military suicides, which are a growing problem; among enlisted ranks (E1-E4) the rate is about 26/100k. Enlisted personnel tend to be younger, less well educated, have less personal autonomy, and earn less money etc. Among commissioned officers (with command authority) and warrant officers (occupational specialists) the rate falls to ~14/100k, nearly half. Non-combat morbidity exhibits similar disparities. I would guess that the selectivity for TS clearance is more rigorous that the occupational qualification alone.
> fairly strict selectivity on handing out TS clearances
I have known two people with clearance(not TS). One was an EOD in the army, whom was one of the last people I would have trusted with explosives back then. The other did IT work for a defense contractor in the middle east. The latter did lots of drugs of all kinds and stole close to $5k of my gun and ammo. He's now in the military repairing helicopters.
Whenever I hear some big AI CEO say that AGI/ASI might end humanity, I imagine it doing so by conditioning people to commit suicide or some kind of massive-scale manipulation. Probably setting people up into complicated bad situations and then blackmailing them.
I don't know if this is it here. These sorts of jobs can have tough moral implications. But it seems like a hierarchy of blackmail has been set up in our society and it seems like a dangerous vulnerability.
Once you know about the NSA backdoors you become a walking security risk. Forget about that vacation in beautiful China, you will be held on a short leash for life.
It seems to me that if you end up adjacent to an operation that exposes you to certain technologies, you will be harassed and attacked with covert directed-energy weapons until you are suicided or institutionalized and discredited.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the significance of "cluster" here. It's not just a statistical anomaly where a disproportionate number of deaths happen in a short space of time. Clusters also happen because suicide by one member of a group can influence other people in the group to do the same thing. This is also why details of how people went about it are scarce in reporting. It's also a big reason why the infamous scene from 13 Reasons Why got removed later on.
It's hard to determine what the expected rate should be. The military as a whole skews younger and more male. But people with mental health issues tend to leave or wash out eventually. So you see a disproprotionate rate of suicide among veterans. It's where the "22 veterans a day" [1] number comes from (although later research seems to indicate the real figure is now lower).
The US military is a difficult psychological environment. Arguably, this is completely unnecessary. There are many jokes about this like having to come in on the weekend because somebody wore the wrong color socks or having to show up at 3am for a 10am formation ("hurry up and wait"). Also, the US military constantly moves servicemembers around (ie PCS). Other militaries don't necessarily work that way. It's conformity taken to an extreme level.
One author (Daniella Mestyanek Young, a former Army intelligence officer herself) has written two books claiming the US military is essentially a cult.
If one wants a conspiracy theory in USSR a First Deputy Chairman of the KGB offed himself when an investigation he was coordinating led to the daughter of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev.
This isn't Russian assassins. They kill specific notable people, not functionaries. Nor is this about not being able to talk about work. Working in these fields becomes your life. You talk about it all day. They don't want to talk about it more, certainly not at home.
This is about over-qualification in a narrow field. These are people for whom there is only the one job. Then ... something happens that threatens that existence. Think of a young airline pilot being diagnosed with an eye problem. His flying days are over. His entire experience is meaningless to any other jobs and he must start from scratch: a 40yo with no qualification beyond highschool.
Dig into these people and I think you will find something related to their security clearances. Something bad, or something totally innocent, that threatened their clearance. They are faced with a professional reset, something that will impact them and their family in a negative and permanent way.
From the article:
Sergeant Kevin Stallings ... He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37.
... grew up in a military family
... enlisted in the Air Force right out of a Virginia high school
... earned a degree in intelligence analysis
So he had no qualifications outside of intelligence. He had little to no perception of any life outside his field. So anything threatening that job, real or imagined, would be instantly existential.
I see your point but I think you're overstating it. To be sure, if a pilot is suddenly cut off from the thrill of flying, that's a big psychological blow. OTOH if you're a pilot at 40 it's probably because of diligence and reliability, not the pursuit of thrills - such a pilot would already be mindful of the risk of ocular degeneration with age and have a plan in place to move over to training or operational management in case of having to retire early from flying. There are a lot of transferable skills and career professionals to asist with transitions like that, even individual employer doesn't maintain those support structures.
So he had no qualifications outside of intelligence.
Again, working in the civilian sector certainly means fewer pure thrills than working in military intelligence, but the professional skills are massively transferable to other contexts absent a dishonorable discharge. I find it much easier to imagine some issue that didn't comport with his whole-life military ethos - a personal failing, grossly anti-meritocratic discrimination, repeated subjection/exposure to unconscionable command decisions or somesuch.
Cybersec is not intelligence. The people suiciding in the article seem to be from intelligence rather than cyber. The fields are often conflated but they are different communities. One feeds data to the other.
Clearances are under more scrutiny for intelligence operators than cyber because, generally, the cyber people should not have access to finalized intelligence, the assessments and recommendations passed to decision makers. Cyber people also only work in cyber and know nothing about other sensor areas (ie human spy programs).
there was pretty large intelligence side that did attribution and investigative type work into orgs money movements etc. some of those people def came from non tech backgrounds.
That's an interesting theory and I am not saying you are entirely incorrect, but I'd imagine that the vast personnel of cyber-adjacent roles in the US Military have better civilian prospects in tech than a Air Force pilot with an eye problem.
Well, I did say airline pilot. An AirForce pilot is still a military officer and can find work inside or outside the military as a team leader. A modern airline pilot is an infamously hyper-specialized job where all they do is operate the aircraft. They don't even do real flight planning anymore as that is a separate airline trade.
I have always wondered how the Ukrainian FPV drone operators cope - some of footage is pretty gruesome - esp when the drone chases some hapless Russian running away before zeroing in and then blowing him up.
Some even shows double tap mortar rounds being dropped on Russians and then gravely wounded they drop another one to finish them off.
The operators know they are in danger themselves, most notably from gliding bombs on their bunkers, so it's a clear him-or-me, makes things simpler. Also: Bucha.
ps. do you to watch all these videos? how is it affecting you?
now imagine they aren't even allowed to talk about it and/or being given illegal orders
but the thing about military bases around Iran, all their defense missiles are being taken away and given to Saudis etc. which is why deaths are happening and massive number of wounded not reported
Please, a reminder that OPM shredded/chainsawed longstanding Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which monitors federal workers satisfaction & requires public reporting. https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library...
This doesn't impact military personnel directly, but it does impact a ton of civilian DoD and DoD adjacent people who work alongside military personnel every day, making them good reliable signals. And these people have been sending up distress flare after distress flare after distress flare, at meltdown levels of dissatisfaction. Workers and enlisted care, and our government now is anti caring, is vice signalling, through and through. The tension is real. There are consequences. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/03...
IMO the state has become a reckless lawless force. One that knows nothing it's doing is any good, and which is concealing itself to keep doing bad anyways.
Cyber in particular has been absolutely gutted, by what naively to an outsider here looks like treasonous acts designed to destroy our ability to monitor and handle cyber issues. Gabbard disbanded Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC), all but destroyed Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC)'s role, and cut 40% of Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI, the directorate for intelligence!). Our nation has been flying part way blidnfolded, and it can't be anything but deliberate. And I expect people in the vicinity, people who've taken this job seriously, to have incredible woe at seeing the chainsaw fall so, for what they know to be fairly vital functions.
> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. -Russel Vought
IMO again, it's even worse than that. I think we are giving quarter to enormously bad forces, because they are friends to the ultra wealthy right wing wackos who have seized power in the United States. That these moves propel the grift and propaganda and malign forces that some in this administration feel great affinity for and have mutual benefits with.
I fully expect many of these Cyber people have been told to target patriotic Americans at home (and other leftist forces) too, who want nothing more than life liberty pursuit of happiness and brotherhood. I'm speculating deeply here, but of all "abuse of power comes as no surprise" times, a treasonous-to-democracy mis-use of otherwise crucial Cyber systems to go after ICE protestors, having them using Palantir or whatever to track them would be all too likely an outcome for this administration by insurgents. I truly feel it extremely likely that many of the cyber and mil people have been made to face impossible situations, which will likely never be reconcileable. (Worse even than the pointless other wars we have started, the lawless murder of boats.) Ordered by this nation to violate their oaths to the constitution, and to betray their loyalty to actual America, by wicked sinister evil forces. There is no escape from the torment placed upon them by having to follow a malign domestic command.
There's a lot of conspiracy brained posts here already, and I apologize for the glonzo. But we have conspiracy level bad people doing multiple conspiracies a week right now, and they are our leaders. It must be hell to be so torn, to have to work under such nepharious lawless psychopaths who have such a warped injurous to America views and machinations. Cyber probably sees a lot, is probably asked a lot, and to be torn, between such a clear mission and these domestic hounds of hell is a forever nightmare that will torment good men and women, who deserve to serve a military that has not been warped to being a force for din and bedlam on earth.
I suspect the Cold War of cyber warfare that is happening is orders of magnitude bigger than the public knows.
Imagine knowing this and not being able to get emotional support from your friends and family.
This was a big thing for drone people based out of Eppley AFB in Omaha. Wake up, drive to work, attack enemies, drive home, sit there eating dinner with your family trying to pretend you didn’t kill someone and can’t talk about it. Combat troops get to lean on each other after a firefight: “dude, good shot. That guy was about to get us!” You get validation that you did something to safe you and your friends, and it’s still a heavy burden, but you have people who were there telling you that you’re a good person and did the right thing.
The Air Force did something shockingly reasonable (according to the newspaper coverage): they require all pilots to attend mandatory counseling sessions. Then there was no sign of weakness or any of that toxic nonsense. “Ugh, guess I have to go talk to the doc today, and I don’t want to, but guess orders are orders.”
I feel more compassion for the innocent people they killed and it's not even close.
A lot of people on HN have either served in the US mil or are sympathetic, and have successfully solved their cognitive dissonance about killing 10k people for 1 soldier.
But you're right, whoever they killed was most often either a civilian, someone defending their country, or someone forced to defend their country from an invader.
While the US soldiers kill either because they believe in the crazy narratives pushed by the US empire or because they want to go to university, and especially because the risk to them is mind-bogglingly low. What I'm saying is: US soldiers are war criminals. Those who find a way to see through their mistakes, whatever pushed them to engage and do what they did, can be redeemed, so I'm not discounting all of them, but so few do.
A thought for Aaron Bushnell.
https://aaronbushnell.org/
Didn't know we had terrorists on HN
Yes, the US government is literally everywhere.
We sure do. They mostly work in federal government and government contracting corporations. There are multiple clearly documented repeated drone strikes on US citizens, even US citizen minors, who never were even indicted with a crime, that ended in assassination. Like the two intentional strikes it took to kill 16 year old US citizen from colorado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... . See also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix executive program in general.
Can’t speak for others but the most damaging part of direct combat is watching people that you consider to be family die or be maimed.
> the most damaging part of direct combat is watching people that you consider to be family die or be maimed.
I've heard from various places over the years (documentaries, friends) that soldiers really fight for their comrades at the end of the day. As in when asked "why are you here fighting" if they are in front of a news crews or something where they have to say "we're bringing democracy to ..." they'll just say something like "those fuckers blew my buddy up and I am here to pay them back".
I was in the military and in my experience people that chose to go into war zones, it's optional, are fucked in the head and literally enjoy killing people, I've seen it a dozen times. They want to kill.
No one runs into machine gun fire to bring democracy to someone else I can assure you of that.
Not bombing weddings could help as well...
America is so obsessed with helping its own murder more and they're surprised when those doing the murdering have feelings, too. The Deer Hunter (1978) taught me this. It taught me that America will go to insane lengths to heal the wounds they cause to their own in the service of murdering others. It's a disgusting culture.
Go ahead and downvote me. I don't give a shit.
America has been an evil empire for a long time the people making money don't want to admit it.
https://archive.ph/W2tpE
> One of the dead was Technical Sergeant Kevin Stallings, a digital network intelligence analyst whose family told Bloomberg they wanted him to be identified to bring greater attention to the suicides. Stallings was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, Cyber Command’s headquarters. He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37.
These people aren't "drone operators", they worked for USCYBERCOM, which does "hacker stuff".
The narrative peddled here repeatedly, the statistics were "completely normal" is egregiously wrong.
The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides", while the far more likely explanation is "housecleaning": murdering potential whistleblowers.
>The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides",
The article talks about 19 people. Given the size of those organizations that's statistically elevated but too small a number to descend into conspiracy theories. As the article points out they apparently had internal warnings and studies about lack of mental support for people in signals intelligence and cyber related roles.
Given that this cluster of deaths seems to have happened in June/July, the Iran war and how the American government has conducted itself I don't find it surprising there's elevated numbers of suicides. You don't need to be on the frontline, if you're in sigint and involved in that attack on the school that casually blew up 150 girls and probably the stuff we don't know about I wouldn't be surprised people off themselves.
Used to work in this field. You're correct: not being able to talk about it is the worst part.
This is equally true of successes as well as challenges.
I did some cool, very impactful stuff in that job. I will go to jail for a long, long time if I ever go into detail about it.
> cool, very impactful stuff in that job
When the job is killing people who stand in the way of US empire.
Shameful, I'd say, but shame is not a feeling you seem to be able to feel.
Took me a year to get my secret clearance in the military, I promise you no one gives a s** about anything you say once you're out. It is a fun way to feel self-important though :-)
I was a part of the world's largest illegal operation in history and again I promise you no one gives a s**.
Is there any type of internal support where you're allowed to chat about it?
It’s hard to say exactly what the folks in the article are grappling with, not working with them personally. I never got to the point where I was anywhere near personal crisis from my classified work. These folks sound like they were associated with some kind of wet ops or drone programs. Not fun to deal with.
I know cleared psychologists are a thing. I never tried to speak with one but I’m told demand is high, and the ones out there are typically very oversubscribed.
I may be a bad counter example to this article. I never had to cope with super severe depression or crisis, or conops that would bring me a ton of personal crisis.
I just see a commonality in struggling with not being able to talk about it. Work is too big a part of my life to not be able to discuss it freely. That did cost me something, personally. I’m glad it didn’t cost me anything as dear as what it cost the people in the original article.
In all of my years messing with computers, I have met very few people who are as fluent with the technology and the terminology. There is virtually no one I know that I can talk to about the things I do. I do not work in IT. I do not know people in IT. I also do not go out of my way to find IT folks. For a while this bothered me a little.
On pondering this, I suppose everyone with a hobby has this same lacking. For that matter, anyone with a mind that contains unique thoughts has the the same lacking. A desire for comradery seems pretty universal.
That said, not being able to talk about it and not being allowed to talk about it is quite different!
There are chaplains and in-agency psychologists, both can have classified conversations with you. The problem is that you cannot change the underlying causes of any illness/sickness
What can you say, if anything, without going into detail?
It was, on a technical level, the most interesting work I’ve ever done. What people say about the US government being ahead of the commercially available technology curve is certainly true.
The work I did absolutely had positive impact on the world.
People rush to criticize and write off working in the defense sector, but it can be a very rewarding place to work. There are absolutely problems in that sector - bad management and regulatory capture being primary among them. (Ultimately, those are why I left.)
It’s hard to judge accurately from the outside. That’s the nature of classified work: by definition, you can’t know what you’re getting yourself into until you’ve jumped with both feet.
Thanks
> There are absolutely problems in that sector - bad management and regulatory capture being primary among them. (Ultimately, those are why I left.)
Where does 'murder' rank in your list of problems with 'the defense' sector?
Is it above or below the number of vacation days?
Is the implication here that we should take the moral high ground and let our adversaries murder us first?
No. Any other 80 IQ strawmen you would like me to address for you?
Well that would be fine if it was defence. But it's now the department of war, led by a person who has attacked two countries this year alone.
I'm against the U.S.'s broken leadership as much as any sensible person. But even in normal times with sane leadership, national defense is often a matter of "kill or be killed." This is certainly an uncomfortable truth, but that's the way of the world.
I mean it's not like we know those "adversaries" ever wanted to murder us. For example, the US has a long record of assassinating labor leaders in South America to protect our Banana Republics on behalf of Chiquita. I think it's absolutely fair to bring in skepticism towards the secrets our military keeps from us
Do you believe that "death to America" chants should not be taken seriously?
I'm saying it is foolish and historically uninformed to hold a blind faith that everyone that the US labels an "adversary" is evil.
Would you like to engage with the comment I left?
I agree that blindly assuming that all "adversaries" of the U.S. (per labeling by the U.S. government) want to kill us. But it does seem that some indeed do. It would further seem that proportionate countermeasures would be appropriate for those cases.
A bit of an unconstructive, unwarranted jab, if I may say so.
Ah. Cool story bro. Meanwhile private equity doctors let their private corp owners kill people over insurance denials. But complain only when their malpractice copay rises.
Tech workers for Silicon Valley daily enable and positively contribute to the pervasive surveillance and exploitation of the majority of the world. To the point the poors cant even open the app or walk into the store without an algorithm raises prices to the mathematical max this person can afford. But they only complain when free bananas are removed from the snacks.
Maybe everything you listed and nation state murders are all bad?
Everybody here is all so small minded.
The government has spent centuries doing spycraft and has a budget in the billions.
When you know you can't kill the message, kill the messenger.
This is the tactic used when journalist Gary Webb started reporting on the USA involvement with selling crack to Americans so they could fund Contra insurgents in Nicaragua.
They did this so well that other news organizations turned on the journalist.
I could easily imagine the USA not wanting to patch holes so they have access to the systems and these experts know this.
The US agency that we entrust with evaluating and recommending our encryption standards is the same one (albeit a different branch) that focuses on breaking encryption. There is an obvious conflict of interest with this arrangement.
Many examples of deliberate weakening are documented, especially with the "export approved" stuff that we sell to our allies.
This problem goes beyond just encryption, and also involves deliberate data leaking (with plausible deniability).
So yes, you don't need to imagine it at all -- the NSA works to create and maintain access to "everything everywhere."
If they worked there recently, they probably grappled with this in some capacity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Typhoon
/r/thathappened
Wow crazy, what’s it like having a job with absolutely zero ethical consideration?
I think most people think the ethical values are far higher in those jobs than most random startup bs just wasting resources.
I definitely do, I would rather work in the military than Meta/Amazon/Microsoft/Any online gambling/and loads of other shit companies.
Thou shalt not kill is pretty straightforward.
Plenty of people work at Meta.
If you speak to the correct people about illegal activities and unlawful orders you will not.
… you might not.
Have you noticed the current executive administration in the US?
Cool things are not necessarily illegal. You ever done anything cool in your life?
It’s wild to, in a thread about an unusual number of suicides among a branch of government doing secret stuff, say that folks talking about that secret stuff would be a good idea.
I am absolutely not saying that is what’s happening here, suicide of folks put in stressful situations is to be taken seriously. But like… c’mon guy, surely this exact premise has been a direct-to-Amazon-Video release.
Way to pull a Tokyo Rose; the GP was alluding to "cool" and "impactful" things they had done to keep us all safe from malicious actors and you try to twist it into "illegal activities" and "unlawful orders".
Do not think we aren't catching on to this kind of nonsense.
If the activities were truly cool and impactful, and not illegal or unlawful as you suggest, wouldn’t it be possible that the suicide could be due to a culture of not speaking out and then left to deal with the after effect of guilt? A slanderous retort vs a different lens to review the events isn’t helpful
I seriously doubt the GP (who was proud of their work) was one of the suicides. If they were, the mere fact that they are able to post here after taking their own life would be the far bigger story.
So we're to trust an anon supposed ex officer saying they're doing good things there despite all the clear evidence to the contrary?
It's possible that they think they are doing good things according to their moral framework. There are hundreds of millions of people with truly insane moral frameworks.
It's possible that their particular job was, as far as they know, doing good things according to most moral frameworks.
I have strong doubts that everyone who kills people by clicking on them on a computer screen thinks that what they are doing is wholly compatible with their personal moral framework. Presumably, some of those people feel very guilty about what they do.
Kills people by clicking on them? WTF?
This is about network security, defending against cyber attacks. You may or may not agree that we should have people doing that, but conflating it with imagined nonsense like this is counterproductive.
What do you think drone operators and their support staff do?
You’d likely get Snowdened in.
I don't see anywhere that OP mentioned illegal activities or unlawful orders. Sounds like they're quite proud of what the accomplished.
Counterpoint, industry cyber security is so generally weak, if there were actually a secret "huge cold cyber war" on-going, we'd see real world impact.
Since we don't, it probably isn't happening.
I mean, isn't that all counter-intelligence? They wouldn't want to be seen?
This thing probably never stops and doesn’t have holidays. I read about Operation Gladio back in the day, which was not a cyber operation, but a preparation of guerrilla operations in case the WP occupied EU. But I got the feeling that the war in darkness (cyber is part of it) is non-stop.
WP = Warsaw Pact. Took me a while to decipher, but I get that bytes are expensive these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
How about that they do bad stuff and feel bad about it? You make it sound like they are taking a bullet or something. Desillusion is probably way worse.
There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
Starts with simple stuff like package rerouting, then goes on to gathering intel about places, people, putting in USB flash drives to their laptops, theft, death threats, arsony, and actual murder. Each step of the way the kids get deeper into trouble because they have to prove that they have done it for the payout, making photos of themselves... which gives the other end increasingly more doxxing material on them.
It's a real problem, and they use the luckystrike branch also to go after witnesses in big lawsuit cases, which then fall off due to all witnesses accidentally dying under seemingly random causes.
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 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".
> "is very real"
Except it's not.
can you prove it? and if you can, you being still alive kinda contradicts...
> The recent cluster of weird deaths and disappearances of scientists linked to secret military research has a similar pattern to it
The pattern being that the deaths and disappearances among people with top secret clearances is lower than the national average would suggest.
> According to science writer Mick West, more than 700,000 people work in top-secret-cleared positions in the U.S. aerospace and nuclear sectors. When viewed against existing mortality rates and causes, this would suggest around 250 persons in the industry would normally succumb to homicides and suicides over the time-period during which the 10 or 11 alleged "missing scientists" had died or disappeared, with thousands more dying of natural causes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_scientists_conspiracy_...
Just think how many ordinary people they have to randomly kill to keep it that way.
If so, then the family members of the president are in danger!
You have absolutely no information on whether this is probable or likely, and the recent news on scientists was a conspiracy theory powered as usual by a cherry picking facts and exaggerating biographies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_scientists_conspiracy_...
The US doesn't even kill foreign leaders. Our intelligence service doesn't have the skills or appetite, let alone citizens. The resulting scandal would make the Church commission look like nothing, not to mention the impact on recruitment.
Surely you've reached the conclusion by now that "resulting scandal" no longer steers policy, or even any noteworthy degree of public outrage.
Yes, they only kill random fishermen in the Caribbean, foreign leaders get kidnapped and tried in kangaroo courts. Except Iranian leaders, those do get killed. But that's just the last 6 months.
Those were military not CIA. The distinction really matters!
>The distinction really matters!
to whom?
to recruiters explaining: we are the good guys!
> There's lots of people working for NATO and federal agencies in Europe that have been assassinated by the luckystrike branch of the FSB. The name comes from the Telegram account with underscores in between, and they're essentially recruiting kids or former inmates for GTA style missions.
Iran too
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyqggvyp1do
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/29/norwegian-te...
Haven't found a lot about it online, other than https://www.polskieradio.pl/395/7786/artykul/3438674,russian...
Do you have any references about it?
This is very reminiscent of Iranian intelligence modus operandi in Israel and world wide lately, currently with not a lot to show for
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/06/how-iran-sough...
> Do you have any references about it?
Before someone from the US claims some leftist bullshit about this (as this is what Russian bots typically do), here's a mix of newspapers including more right/conservative ones:
- https://www.blick.ch/schweiz/polizei-warnt-eltern-teenies-we...
- https://www.mdr.de/ratgeber/finanzen/telegram-gruppe-jobange...
- https://www.sicher-im-netz.de/europol-warnt-kriminelle-rekru...
- https://www.fr.ch/de/sjsd/pol/news/die-kantonspolizei-freibu...
- https://www.bild.de/politik/ausland-und-internationales/euro...
- https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/euro...
- https://www.dutchnews.nl/2026/04/teenagers-being-recruited-b...
- https://nltimes.nl/2026/04/29/europol-children-recruited-vio...
Also check netzpolitik and other CCC-related media outlets, there's been extensive research about this topic from us. (Didn't want to post articles where I've personally been involved, but you can find them easily with similar search keywords.)
This is essentially one article about criminals recruiting young people. Is Russia FSB (or even Russia)even mentioned?
I also believe the premise is true (why would it not, it's the logical thing for every nation state to do), but your research could be a bit deeper.
(Replying to my own post). Also, it’s gotta be mentally draining to be told by the president they have to win but also always let Russian attacks though.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/defens...
Presidents come and go and, hopefully, this one will be held accountable.
I'm an agnostic, but when I read about what he does, it makes me devoutly wish that hell exists. He has made countless people's lives hell on earth, and he doesn't care at all. No one is holding him accountable in this life: it's inconvenient for those in power.
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.
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.
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.
There are long standing systemic issues, and then there's also one man making things dramatically worse in new, stupider ways.
So have many others before him.
The only difference is, is that before him we had "Iraq has weapons for mass destruction! we must attack them, before they attack us, we're in danger!", and now there's "we're going in and we're taking the oil!".
So from "we can do whatever we want if we lie" turned into "we can do whatever we want", not really relevant to all the people killed.
But hey, some americans would say that "It's worth it" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP_VnVlFhXU
Nobody is holding up those other guys as shining paragons of virtue either.
“Other people did it too” is not an excuse for immoral behavior.
I think the parent and I basically agree.
Not every nation survives a tyrant by the virtue of patience.
Especially in Russia...
Yeah, January 2021 says no.
This was wasn't after January 2021, and hasn't been during his second term. There are methods to hold presidents accountable, there are institutions to prevent the harm from happening.
These have failed.
You’re kidding right?
Just as important, the US will need to figure out exactly what strings Putin's managed to attach to Trump - kompromat? threats? bribes? elaborate man management? something else? - or this vulnerability could be exploited again.
None. No vulnerability. The population and the RNC just voted for a known Russian asset for some reason.
Our vulnerability is an open internet that includes Russia, leaving our populace completely open to Russian influence campaigns of micro targeted propaganda, recruitment, and incitement.
I like how the “Chinese propaganda” against datacenters was found to be mostly a collection of facts.
While Russian propaganda is more clumsy and emotional, we’ve produced such an unequal society with such low regular education and outright corruption that people fall for it. That says something negative about US, not them.
If we admit our system cant even survive an open internet, it should be dismantled or reformed rather than free exchange closed.
Education would blunt, but not eliminate the threat of nation-state funded micro targeted influence campaigns. Moreover, it would take years, and we have the problem now.
In terms of data center propaganda and fact. Both are true. China is funding anti data center sentiment for geopolitical power, while at the same time, there are legitimate reasons for people to not like/ or fear AI. The problem is we (the U.S.) have to solve both. We cannot let China have significantly better AI models than we have because that is a real national security threat, while AI also threatens potential mass destruction dangers and an avenue of utter concentration of wealth, etc
This.
I lived in a communistic country, where BBC/Voice of America/Radio free Europe were banned/jammed, under the pretext of 'your feeble minds will not be able to resist the insidious allure of western burgeois propaganda'.
Seeing the same argumentation from the west's side is disheartening. We are now in the west, but (almost) full circle back where were before.
I like how the “Chinese propaganda” against datacenters was found to be mostly a collection of facts.
That's not my understanding. Got any credible links that back up this point?
Propaganda and bribery. Things like the Hungarian funding of CPAC and the NRA holding a July 4 celebration in Russia some years ago.
The weak spot was the conservative prediction to fascism - worship of force and masculinity - which was easily retargeted against other Americans.
It's almost certainly just that Trump is a fundamentally fragile, insecure man. He has proven over and over that he will happily fellate (proverbially speaking) any man who says nice things about him, and at least refrain from assaulting most women who say nice things too.
Putin (and everyone else) knows this.
Idk maybe there is something nefarious but afaik Putin's always been cordial with Trump as well as let him do various investments in Russia. I'm not sure there's much reason for Trump to alienate his friend; if you've ever see Trump's staff meetings you'll know how much cordiality is important to him.
All of the above, plus death threats.
Trump isn't the weakness. The weakness is the almost complete collapse of the checks and balances around the president. If those were in place Trump would have been in prison by the end of 2021 at the very latest.
The DOJ, the military, both houses, the AIPAC wing of the Democrats, and corporate media are all fully captured. So are "independent" organisations like the NRA.
The Supreme Court is mostly captured. The lower levels of the judiciary are still holding out, but have limited enforcement ability without the DOJ.
It's why I don't see the US making the course correction it actually needs - realistically the "best" feasible outcome is that a presidential election is held and a business as usual democrat is elected who will immediately not address any of the problems for whatever reason (part of the system/paid by the same people pick one).
Candidates come and go but the system endures and it is the system that is rotten at every level all the way down to the core.
Then 4-8 years later the GOP candidate wins subservient to the same interests as Trump and the US Gov is back there again.
Not really sure what the outcome is for the US at this point, things will have to get a great deal worse before enough Americans decide this is unacceptable but that state can last years/decades before the dam breaks.
The winning Presidential campaign message would be this: I promise to work to reduce the power of the Presidency via supporting and campaigning for legislation and Constitutional amendments. It is time for Congress to once again be ascendent like it was in the first century of our great Republic.
We need a G. Washington, who refused more power than he was offered, setting precedents and expectations.
No, that is your wishful thinking.
Based on recent years and the power of personalized AI influence campaigns, the winning Presidential campaign message (after 4 years of 'change nothing substantial Democrat' would most likely be 'I need real, full (silently: fascist) power, to finally drain the swamp'.
I think Trump is just that naturally that stupid and always has been.
Epstein files?
> always let Russian attacks though
The article doesn't say anything of the sort. Literally just said to put a halt on OFFENSIVE operations.
If I were to guess I'd say it was an overly ambitious negotiation tactic.
Also, that was a year and a half ago. The current status quo is that Ukraine is producing more drones than Russia can deal with, bombing Russian targets daily and the US-Ukraine relationship is much closer, with Ukraine sharing drone technology and intel with the US.
The US and Russia are allies.
No, despite what the conservatives and Fox News say, we are not
Does US know it ? Coz it certainly acts like one for most part of the war
The new US policy under Trump is giving up trying to win the world and instead focusing on internal market and dominance over the American continent. Causing and sustaining friction everywhere is aligned with this policy.
This is the result of a shift of power in the US politics, from the global financial capital of the last decades back to the military and industrial sector.
The new US policy under Trump is to burn everything down while extracting as much wealth for himself and his cronies as possible.
And creating so much chaos afterwards that it becomes impossible to recover any of it
> The new US policy under Trump is giving up trying to win the world and instead focusing on internal market and dominance over the American continent.
Is that why he bombed Iran and single-handedly caused a global energy crisis? A shift of focus to “dominance of the American continent”?
Well yeah, probably -- during this self made crisis oil prices in the US are some of the most well controlled.
Destabilizing everywhere else is a potential step taken toward achieving continental superiority in certain regards.
( not a GOOD step, mind you)
He's just doing his best to make everybody switch to renewables!
Unfortunately this slows down adoption of renewables even more, China produces most of world’s renewables and batteries but bootstraps this industry with oil.
Blocking foreign-made solar power inverters must be part of that master plan:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-423682A1.pdf
That's just deliberate damage to the US, his actions have increased move to energy sovereignty globally and done more for net zero than any president before him.
> Is that why he bombed Iran and single-handedly caused a global energy crisis?
Yes. Oil price hurts China industrial capacity more than the US economy. Oil companies made a $93 billion profit amid the war [1]. The US is a net oil exporter, while China halved their oil imports [2].
ExxonMobil and Chevron are US-incorporated. TotalEnergies (French) BP (UK), Shell (UK) also have significant US-based ownership (~50%, ~25% and ~25% respectively), including BlackRock, Vanguard, mutual funds, and US pension funds.
> A shift of focus to “dominance of the American continent”?
1. Venezuela was under embargo and selling oil to China. The Nicolas Maduro hijack and the country's political realignment with US will have the double effect of negating oil to China and securing large nearby reserves.
2. Argentina has a Trump-aligned president, who is vocal about undermining the Mercosul agreement and is currently in diplomatic attrition with Brazil. Recently signed a $20 billion loan from FMI.
3. Paraguay signed a treaty for a US forward operation base in their territory. The Paraguay border is home to a large hydroelectric, a major power source for 3 countries: Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil.
4. Colombia has a new Trump aligned president. It's a young president with no political background. The US State Department announced a $1 billion assistance upon his election for military investment.
5. Peru’s new president Keiko Fujimori is Trump-aligned.
6. Chile’s new president Jose Antonio Kast is Trump-aligned.
7. US retaliated against the prosecution of former Trump-aligned Brazil president for attempted coup by announcing an 50% emergency tariff (which didn't hold legally), then crafting a Section 301 investigation to justify a 25% tariff in July 2026.
8. US is giving asylum to the former president's son, who is vocal on social media about defending the US tariffs as retaliation, defends military intervention of the US in Brazil, as well as stating (but without proof) that Brazilian polls are rigged – not the one his father ran and won, apparently.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2026/aug...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1uxdx8p/chin...
> The US is a net oil exporter, while China halved their oil imports [2].
This seems to be the opposite point you want.
Everybody is going to have increased expenses for everything due to their oil dependency _except_ China. Which will raise the price of Chinese exports to the market price but giving China a lot of producer surplus.
Or China can keep doing it's Belt & Road plans and grant other countries money to help with their oil problems in exchange for territory. Or also keep prices lower to continue hollowing out other countries manufacturing capabilities.
--
The leaders of South America claiming to be "Trump aligned" is good for Trump. Trump is not the average american citizen. And boy will those leaders flip the second he's out of the presidency.
It's believed China managed to halve oil imports due to large (undisclosed) reserves, emergency public policies and overdriving coal use, but this can't last. China is also extremely dependent on Russian oil, which is a country at conflict and having its key infrastructure destroyed. China is building their renewable energy capacity fast, but this has to be quick started on oil.
Increasing oil prices have the double effect of slowing China expansion and energetic transition long-term while increasing dollar demand in the short term - just look what happened to gold prices once Iran war started.
The new Trump-aligned leaders of South America are puppets to secure cheap, nearby materials and food in a future world in conflict, where the US has to re-industrialize rapidly. The US navy would be spread too thin, and the US currently doesn't even have capacity to build its navy - the US recently sought the help of South Korea in this matter.
Please note none of this my opinion, the current US foreign policy strategy is a public fact. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donroe_Doctrine
> Please note none of this my opinion, the current US foreign policy strategy is a public fact.
This is beyond arrogant and makes discussion impossible. Your opinion is not automatically a 100% accurate reflection reality because you have citations.
that’s a lot of words about South America in order to paper over what we are all currently feeling at the pump and in the economy at large. Between his incoherent tariff policies and the paltry job numbers we are seeing, I think you’re going to have a hard time convincing me he’s doing things that are good for us domestically. I’m not even touching the heated social issues he’s been pouring gas all over.
Unjust wars and enabling genocide is probably the more likely factor here, realizing there is no honor in defending these things overseas.
This has been an issue for decades: overseas, not knowing 'why' Americans are dying for nothing, and, the veterans being treated as refuse when they return.
Edit: that may have come across too callous.
The crushing of ones consciesness for unjust foreign wars, protecting a global network of the worst crimes (Epstn files and the international group within it, operating under the umbrella protection network of the US vis a vis NATO).
The most immoral army in the world, the IDF, also has a very high suicide rate - ones conscience cannot be destroyed, it can only be atrophied and dulled, and then depression hunts you.
"Between early June and early July, as many as five individuals who worked in or closely with US Cyber Command died by suicide, based on internal communications, public records and sources. The deaths have raised concern among lawmakers and military leaders within the highly secretive command, which is responsible for defending US networks and conducting offensive cyber operations."
According to https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107121.pdf there are ~17,000 authorized positions
Assuming a predominantly male population, the suicide rate should be around 20 per 100000 per year. 5 people in a month gives 18x higher rate. Too short period to draw any statistical conclusions but it’s a large blip.
Suicides are not independent statistical events and sadly often come in "clusters"
I think you’d have some statistical complications around stress: beyond the inherent pressure of the job itself, it’s highly likely that they were understaffed even before losing a lot of support when the DOGE chainsaws were in “cut first, measure later” mode — I know multiple people in the military who are still running at like half productivity because telework was cancelled so everyone’s day is a couple hours longer commuting into an office where they’re sitting on the floor because there aren’t enough desks — and if they were married to another federal employee they might be dealing with loss of income or childcare (DOGE closed the GSA office which handled that, apparently to pressure parents into resigning) at the same time.
The suicide rate isn't uniformly distributed given gender. There are likely screenings (previous mental health history) and rejection of the most affected age group (70+) that should lead the baseline to be even lower. Meaning 18x is probably on the low end.
Definitely a rough estimate! I recon base rate is also higher amongst military personnel & it’s not uniformly distributed there either.
I think that it would be necessary to correct for things like income and education level since engineers in cyber command are likely not representative of the general public.
i'm pretty sure that segment has lower than average suicide rate. well paid, well educated.
I agree with you generally but a lot of professions that are well-paid and educated still have high rates. Dentists, for example, are 2x the general population
most medical professions have higher rate. it's usually attributed to being constantly subjected to pain and suffering plus physicians can source pharmaceuticals to exit softly. never heard that it professionals are particularly prone to suicide.
Stress, PTSD, and overwork can and do aggravate mental health issues. All of these are probably hitting these people - probably at the same time.
This particular population is highly selected because of the work they do and the types of clearances they hold. I would expect the suicide rate to differ significantly from the general population.
> In some cases, they suffer from insomnia, memory loss, rumination and physical illness,
So, like most middle-aged desk jockeys then?
> “There’s always a crisis and everything’s always a priority,” said Schoka. “We would burn people out faster than we could produce them.”
Sounds a lot like my job...
Ah yes- your old job where your boss could put you on twelve hour shiftwork indefinitely while making you pt while denying you adequate housing or food all under the threat of military justice and telling you if you tell anyone anything you're breaking a dozen national security laws.
> > In some cases, they suffer from insomnia, memory loss, rumination and physical illness,
> So, like most middle-aged desk jockeys then?
Is this really so common? I'm 38 and had some medical issues this past year, but one of the big things I've been grappling with is severe brain fog and memory loss. I could not tell you any of the projects I worked on in my previous three years, honestly. Maybe longer. It's been pretty demoralizing
I like to think the brain is doing its work and just trashing info it doesnt need and making space for new info when i forget stuff... I guess if it was truly important i'd be worried, but work stuff usually isnt important once its done, emotional/personal stuff would be more worrisome, like alzheimer and others, but work stuff? Im happy to forget it if its done lol
Well, I'm only 38 so alzheimers is unlikely. It does run in the family though
But no, my real worry is I'm going to wind up having to interview and talk about stuff I've done and I can't seem to remember any of it. That's a real problem and probably not good
I wonder whether any American civilians are losing sleep over how the current administration and its supporters' robust "race realist" rhetoric and worldview might be used by adversaries for some very cruel and effective psychological warfare on military and bureaucratic personnel from minority groups in the US.
Glad to see this brought up! My entire Air Force experience is blocked to comment on besides basic training...Tech school and forward is NDA'd, read in, etc
You don't really get to sneak a glimpse of operations and write a book like the SEALs seem get to (jk!)
Your tech school is not nda'd.
I’ve worked with folks from The Citadel who had parts of their studies they were not allowed to talk about. When doing a hiring reference check that was confirmed by school staff. I don’t know if it was an NDA in the traditional sense; I was just a tech interviewer.
So just suffer in silence because you signed some papers when you were too young to understand what they really meant?
That's horrible.
I almost signed up for the Canadian Military back in the early 2000s and I think my lucky stars every day that I skipped that last recruitment meeting.
There is a tv show about in-the-know government employees dying by suicide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_%28miniseries%29
I'm curious if LLMs have a role here. They're phenomenally capable at cyber stuff, and the military is without doubt taking full advantage of this. For people who's sole identity is tied into something that LLMs become better than them at, it seems easy to imagine that zooming straight on over to existential crisis territory.
Absolutely not. The problem is solely op tempo since the Iran war started. Leadership in cyber is famous for "surging" It's quite normal. But cyber specifically refuses to allow the surge to end. It becomes "the new normal." This was already straining the force before the Iran war but the civilian leadership now demand constant cyber effects and that pressure cascades down. It's hard to emphasize how effective cyber is, bc of course you want proof. But the proof is in the optempo and you can see that leadership is literally killing their Soldiers to get more and more of it.
The LLMs play a part, but it’s the tempo; the pace.
Fully autonomous w/LLM isn’t true. Leadership wants it true. The technological capabilities and acceptance of scapegoating a machine got rejected by society, so that leaves perfectly capable individuals as the gatekeepers of decision making, completely overloaded by the amount of information they need to deal with.
If you as a human can’t keep up, but the onslaught continues, and you’ll be held responsible for the outcome regardless… yeah. People will punch their ticket out. It’s not unique to LLMs, but LLMs have certainly automated the process of reaching the worst possible conclusion.
Don’t for a second try to hold the computers accountable or blame them for this outcome. This is a leadership issue and always will be. Believing otherwise is just allowing suicides to be scapegoated as a computer’s doing.
It's sad how many people are commenting on this with insane conspiracy theories and that people are actually responding in support of them. Really shows how falling into echo chambers online and buying into conspiracy theories can cause significant harm to ones ability to think rationally.
it's pretty much impossible to engage with people in a sane way in threads like this. hide and move on.
Its only a conspiracy theory if people on the other side of politics believe it
Nothing like politics to make people miss the beam in their own eye
Wasn't there something similar with scientists recently? I wonder how much of that is just statistical noise.
That turned out to be false. Normal attrition / vacation time.
That's gross disinformation and patently untrue.
Yes, there was a lot of statistical noised amplified by the conspiracy theorist media.
yep, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyw9rpdl4po
> "The US Top Secret-cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is ~700,000 people," science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick West wrote on 16 April on his Substack.
> "Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts ~4,000 deaths, ~70 homicides, and ~180 suicides. The list has 10 … The deaths are real. The families' grief is real. The pattern is not."
> Louise Grillmair, similarly, says that - while her husband "would laugh" at speculation that the deaths might be connected - he would also "probably talk statistically" to squelch conspiracies.
I'm not sure how much value there is in comparing it with ordinary mortality considering the fairly strict selectivity on handing out TS clearances. You're definitely not going to give one to anyone who looks like an alcoholic or habitual drug user. You'll be less likely to give one out to people who struggle with cravings like heavy smokers or the morbidly obese. Gambling and financial instability are are also exclusionary factors. You would prioritize people who are highly disciplined and exhibit a preference for fitness and a survival mindset in general. So before you get into psychological issues at all, your population will be significantly healthier than the median, less likely to fall victim to homicide, and have fewer life problems than the general population.
A useful comparator is military suicides, which are a growing problem; among enlisted ranks (E1-E4) the rate is about 26/100k. Enlisted personnel tend to be younger, less well educated, have less personal autonomy, and earn less money etc. Among commissioned officers (with command authority) and warrant officers (occupational specialists) the rate falls to ~14/100k, nearly half. Non-combat morbidity exhibits similar disparities. I would guess that the selectivity for TS clearance is more rigorous that the occupational qualification alone.
> fairly strict selectivity on handing out TS clearances
I have known two people with clearance(not TS). One was an EOD in the army, whom was one of the last people I would have trusted with explosives back then. The other did IT work for a defense contractor in the middle east. The latter did lots of drugs of all kinds and stole close to $5k of my gun and ammo. He's now in the military repairing helicopters.
End anecdote.
AI wrote the second quote
Probably, more importantly: it's a lie.
Were any of these suicides by falling out of a window? That might imply involvement of certain foreign actors.
no, which obviously implies involvement from US government
Whenever I hear some big AI CEO say that AGI/ASI might end humanity, I imagine it doing so by conditioning people to commit suicide or some kind of massive-scale manipulation. Probably setting people up into complicated bad situations and then blackmailing them.
I don't know if this is it here. These sorts of jobs can have tough moral implications. But it seems like a hierarchy of blackmail has been set up in our society and it seems like a dangerous vulnerability.
For what it’s worth suicide prevention was probably the number one initiative during my 17 years in the USAF from 2002 to 2020
I think the flu vaccine and sexual assault prevention were about equally as focused on
To the point where it was at least a weekly conversation between commanders and staff officers
All those issues usually were prioritized over readiness (Ready to go to war) or PT which were also huge pushes.
It wouldn't surprise me if they found out something they shouldn't about Israel's infiltration in US military and politics, and were dealt with.
But most probably they couldn't bear the atrocities they had a first row view at.
Once you know about the NSA backdoors you become a walking security risk. Forget about that vacation in beautiful China, you will be held on a short leash for life.
Russia’s ok though. As Tucker Carlson pointed out they have bread and shopping carts.
It seems to me that if you end up adjacent to an operation that exposes you to certain technologies, you will be harassed and attacked with covert directed-energy weapons until you are suicided or institutionalized and discredited.
Yeah, this most certainly isn't happening.
If they downvote merely speculating about that, imagine their methods regarding those in the know.
Anyone have a non-paywalled source?
https://archive.ph/W2tpE
Thanks! Link added to top text.
I think a lot of people are misunderstanding the significance of "cluster" here. It's not just a statistical anomaly where a disproportionate number of deaths happen in a short space of time. Clusters also happen because suicide by one member of a group can influence other people in the group to do the same thing. This is also why details of how people went about it are scarce in reporting. It's also a big reason why the infamous scene from 13 Reasons Why got removed later on.
It's hard to determine what the expected rate should be. The military as a whole skews younger and more male. But people with mental health issues tend to leave or wash out eventually. So you see a disproprotionate rate of suicide among veterans. It's where the "22 veterans a day" [1] number comes from (although later research seems to indicate the real figure is now lower).
The US military is a difficult psychological environment. Arguably, this is completely unnecessary. There are many jokes about this like having to come in on the weekend because somebody wore the wrong color socks or having to show up at 3am for a 10am formation ("hurry up and wait"). Also, the US military constantly moves servicemembers around (ie PCS). Other militaries don't necessarily work that way. It's conformity taken to an extreme level.
One author (Daniella Mestyanek Young, a former Army intelligence officer herself) has written two books claiming the US military is essentially a cult.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2015/10/01/444999996/the-number-22-is-th...
If one wants a conspiracy theory in USSR a First Deputy Chairman of the KGB offed himself when an investigation he was coordinating led to the daughter of General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid Brezhnev.
This isn't Russian assassins. They kill specific notable people, not functionaries. Nor is this about not being able to talk about work. Working in these fields becomes your life. You talk about it all day. They don't want to talk about it more, certainly not at home.
This is about over-qualification in a narrow field. These are people for whom there is only the one job. Then ... something happens that threatens that existence. Think of a young airline pilot being diagnosed with an eye problem. His flying days are over. His entire experience is meaningless to any other jobs and he must start from scratch: a 40yo with no qualification beyond highschool.
Dig into these people and I think you will find something related to their security clearances. Something bad, or something totally innocent, that threatened their clearance. They are faced with a professional reset, something that will impact them and their family in a negative and permanent way.
From the article: Sergeant Kevin Stallings ... He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37. ... grew up in a military family ... enlisted in the Air Force right out of a Virginia high school ... earned a degree in intelligence analysis
So he had no qualifications outside of intelligence. He had little to no perception of any life outside his field. So anything threatening that job, real or imagined, would be instantly existential.
I see your point but I think you're overstating it. To be sure, if a pilot is suddenly cut off from the thrill of flying, that's a big psychological blow. OTOH if you're a pilot at 40 it's probably because of diligence and reliability, not the pursuit of thrills - such a pilot would already be mindful of the risk of ocular degeneration with age and have a plan in place to move over to training or operational management in case of having to retire early from flying. There are a lot of transferable skills and career professionals to asist with transitions like that, even individual employer doesn't maintain those support structures.
So he had no qualifications outside of intelligence.
Again, working in the civilian sector certainly means fewer pure thrills than working in military intelligence, but the professional skills are massively transferable to other contexts absent a dishonorable discharge. I find it much easier to imagine some issue that didn't comport with his whole-life military ethos - a personal failing, grossly anti-meritocratic discrimination, repeated subjection/exposure to unconscionable command decisions or somesuch.
Only one job ? Worked with a ton of ex NSA and CIA people in a large cybersec company.
Cybersec is not intelligence. The people suiciding in the article seem to be from intelligence rather than cyber. The fields are often conflated but they are different communities. One feeds data to the other.
Clearances are under more scrutiny for intelligence operators than cyber because, generally, the cyber people should not have access to finalized intelligence, the assessments and recommendations passed to decision makers. Cyber people also only work in cyber and know nothing about other sensor areas (ie human spy programs).
there was pretty large intelligence side that did attribution and investigative type work into orgs money movements etc. some of those people def came from non tech backgrounds.
Interesting to consider foreign intelligence services surfacing - what might seem to these people - as embarrassing information.
The degree clustering requires deep scrutiny and if it is in Bloomberg it's already at the emergency stage.
You could alternately infer things about dni, secdef, or cinc.
That's an interesting theory and I am not saying you are entirely incorrect, but I'd imagine that the vast personnel of cyber-adjacent roles in the US Military have better civilian prospects in tech than a Air Force pilot with an eye problem.
Well, I did say airline pilot. An AirForce pilot is still a military officer and can find work inside or outside the military as a team leader. A modern airline pilot is an infamously hyper-specialized job where all they do is operate the aircraft. They don't even do real flight planning anymore as that is a separate airline trade.
I have always wondered how the Ukrainian FPV drone operators cope - some of footage is pretty gruesome - esp when the drone chases some hapless Russian running away before zeroing in and then blowing him up.
Some even shows double tap mortar rounds being dropped on Russians and then gravely wounded they drop another one to finish them off.
The operators know they are in danger themselves, most notably from gliding bombs on their bunkers, so it's a clear him-or-me, makes things simpler. Also: Bucha.
ps. do you to watch all these videos? how is it affecting you?
go read about what they are doing to people in the Navy over in Iran
* https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/04/16/iran...
their families had to throw a huge protest
now imagine they aren't even allowed to talk about it and/or being given illegal orders
but the thing about military bases around Iran, all their defense missiles are being taken away and given to Saudis etc. which is why deaths are happening and massive number of wounded not reported
I doubt that was more than a blip due to a logistics failure, and was henceforth used by a bunch of foreign propagandists.
Please, a reminder that OPM shredded/chainsawed longstanding Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, which monitors federal workers satisfaction & requires public reporting. https://ourpublicservice.org/know-the-facts/resource-library... This doesn't impact military personnel directly, but it does impact a ton of civilian DoD and DoD adjacent people who work alongside military personnel every day, making them good reliable signals. And these people have been sending up distress flare after distress flare after distress flare, at meltdown levels of dissatisfaction. Workers and enlisted care, and our government now is anti caring, is vice signalling, through and through. The tension is real. There are consequences. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/03...
IMO the state has become a reckless lawless force. One that knows nothing it's doing is any good, and which is concealing itself to keep doing bad anyways.
Cyber in particular has been absolutely gutted, by what naively to an outsider here looks like treasonous acts designed to destroy our ability to monitor and handle cyber issues. Gabbard disbanded Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC), all but destroyed Foreign Malign Influence Center (FMIC)'s role, and cut 40% of Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI, the directorate for intelligence!). Our nation has been flying part way blidnfolded, and it can't be anything but deliberate. And I expect people in the vicinity, people who've taken this job seriously, to have incredible woe at seeing the chainsaw fall so, for what they know to be fairly vital functions.
> We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. -Russel Vought
IMO again, it's even worse than that. I think we are giving quarter to enormously bad forces, because they are friends to the ultra wealthy right wing wackos who have seized power in the United States. That these moves propel the grift and propaganda and malign forces that some in this administration feel great affinity for and have mutual benefits with.
I fully expect many of these Cyber people have been told to target patriotic Americans at home (and other leftist forces) too, who want nothing more than life liberty pursuit of happiness and brotherhood. I'm speculating deeply here, but of all "abuse of power comes as no surprise" times, a treasonous-to-democracy mis-use of otherwise crucial Cyber systems to go after ICE protestors, having them using Palantir or whatever to track them would be all too likely an outcome for this administration by insurgents. I truly feel it extremely likely that many of the cyber and mil people have been made to face impossible situations, which will likely never be reconcileable. (Worse even than the pointless other wars we have started, the lawless murder of boats.) Ordered by this nation to violate their oaths to the constitution, and to betray their loyalty to actual America, by wicked sinister evil forces. There is no escape from the torment placed upon them by having to follow a malign domestic command.
There's a lot of conspiracy brained posts here already, and I apologize for the glonzo. But we have conspiracy level bad people doing multiple conspiracies a week right now, and they are our leaders. It must be hell to be so torn, to have to work under such nepharious lawless psychopaths who have such a warped injurous to America views and machinations. Cyber probably sees a lot, is probably asked a lot, and to be torn, between such a clear mission and these domestic hounds of hell is a forever nightmare that will torment good men and women, who deserve to serve a military that has not been warped to being a force for din and bedlam on earth.
Suicide or closing the loop?
The sad part is no matter how good they do their job whatever they do is only as good as the head at the top of the pyramid in the executive office…