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Comment by torstenvl | Hacker News Reader

"Self-inflicted wound"? Obviously the story is still developing but I'm immediately skeptical.

EDIT: Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound. archive.is has the original.

It was a breach of their guidelines to report a method of suicide, so it sounds like they were just fixing that. This is standard in the UK because of evidence showing that reporting methods can be followed by further suicides.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/guidelines/harm-an...

Suicide, Attempted Suicide, Self-Harm and Eating Disorders

5.3.45 Suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm should be portrayed with sensitivity, whether in drama or in factual content. Factual reporting and fictional portrayal of suicide, attempted suicide and self-harm have the potential to make such actions appear feasible and even reasonable to the vulnerable.

Methods of suicide and self-harm must not be included in output except where they are editorially justified and are also justified by the context. We should not include explicit details that would allow a method of suicide to be imitated.

All these guidelines are what is making BBC unreadable for me. The language they use is just so artificial. I understand why they do, and how they feel like they have a responsibility to "optimize" language for some metrics, but in my opinion what really matters is the objective reality, not the phrasing. Maybe they could report more on the NHS inability to cope with mental health patients rather than avoid using the word gunshot in a country where gun ownership is so scarce.

There's no definition of "responsible reporting" that involves hiding information from the public to support a policy goal.

>Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound.

Another source backs this up, and seems to have interviewed the man's attorney in the past. [0][1]

It's tempting to dismiss foul play on the basis that it's too brazen in the middle of a deposition. However, that's also the height of plausible deniability because cross examinations can get personal and thus emotional.

---

I can't help but be reminded of a film quote:

"But that's the way it works with corporate murder. Boss gets wind of something, calls in his head of security, who talks to someone, who talks to a friend of someone. Finishes up with an answering machine in a rented office, a couple of sensitive gentlemen in a blue pickup truck. They will never know who ordered the hit." [2]

[0] https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/boeing-whist...

[1] https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/brian-knowle...

[2] https://www.scripts.com/script/the_constant_gardener_702/17

Movies aren’t real dude.

In the real world, the security team just handles it directly. https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/six-former-ebay-employees...

Edit: In all seriousness, I don’t think the situation presented in the aforementioned movie quote is implausible, though I’m inclined to doubt foul play here unless there’s specific evidence to that effect. Depositions can be extraordinarily stressful; compound that with the anxiety of being a whistleblower, and I can see how someone could snap. At the same time, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that there was foul play.

Suppose you believed that a particular someone is responsible for, through incompetence or on purpose, deaths of 500 people and is making your life hell. Do you:

A - kill yourself

B - burn his house down first, at least

I think that when someone is experiencing extreme anxiety over an extended period of time, their actions aren’t necessarily going to be logical. Most people will recover once the stressor is removed. Some people will give up and choose option A. Still others will choose option B.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co.

Corrected link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinaltrainal_v._Coca-Cola_Co%2...

>Movies aren’t real dude.

If anything, the film quote is less realistic here insofar that it's not in context of a defense contractor with a large Rolodex.

Professionals tend to leave doubt rather than evidence. That said, even they make mistakes and therefore—to your point—it's unlikely it would be risked despite layers of intermediaries.

On the other hand, media cycles are short and PR is already in the trash can. This took place at the height of plausible deniability, and barring irrefutable evidence proving it wasn't foul play, it will be giving other potential whisleblowers pause.

The man's own attorney wrote:

"They found him in his truck dead from an ‘alleged’ self-inflicted gunshot."

Self inflicted wound in the middle of several days of scheduled depositions.

Just about as suspicious as could be.

Agreed. This has red flags all over it.

I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later. Corporations can be shielded from liability when this happens. One executive could end up charged with a crime but the company itself can always paint them as a rogue agent who acted independently.

IMO, this will keep getting worse. Commodification of scapegoats.

> I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later.

Always_has_been.gif

I mean, nestle still exists, as does the entire financial and energy industries.

> I've been predicting that companies would turn into criminal gangs sooner or later.

When have they not? This is literally the entire point of limited liability for hundreds of years. Goes back to the East India Company.

I've said before that any sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government. The East India company was a good example, they had their own army & fought wars of conquest.

Yes, there were very few such corporations before and they were not at the core of a nation's economy as they are today. The fact that they failed spectacularly should have been a lesson for us to avoid them! Instead, we've enshrined the concept of corporate personhood into law.

Kind of insane to think that we have a construct which at the same time claims that a corporation is a person but also that the corporation is not liable to legal prosecution for its crimes as a person is. I.e. a corporation itself cannot go to jail as a person can. The corporation can do whatever it wants and continue operating unimpeded so long as it can keep finding new people to serve as scapegoats.

Imagine if some people would have the same rights as corporations; the bosses of mafias could assassinate anyone, pay a fine, throw a scapegoat under the bus and continue 'business' as usual. Police couldn't even reach a plea deal with the scapegoats because no matter what information the scapegoats revealed about the big boss, it would be inadmissible because actually, in that very special case, the big mafia boss is not a person but, conveniently, an abstract entity and therefore it cannot physically go to jail. How about shutting down their operations for x amount of time? That should be the bare minimum... It could be applied to corporations, why is it not?

> I've said before that any sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government

Where do you think the "lobby money" comes from ? /s

There is no handy 24-hour surveilled jail cell for him to be in

I'm not convinced. Boeing doesn't want more attention, depositions are stressful, and whistleblowers are predisposed to martyrdom. If you're Boeing, this doesn't make the problem go away, it makes it worse.

if you are Boeing the company that would be stupid sure

but what about some specific arbitrary high level figure from Boeing?

One which if the person says certain things might lose their job because of this or which is afraid to lose more then their job (e.g. due to them knowingly acting in gross negligence for personal gains).

Which one is worse, lose your job or end up in prison?

You don't end up in prison if there isn't anyone to testify against you.

So, you kill all the people investigating this death as well? Spund logic, really, sound logic...

Reminds me a bit of Death Note.

It's keep your job and your freedom if you're not caught.

Sure. I guess this explains the size of the US prison population.

One thing I've been realising over the last few years is that that prison population is almost completely unrelated to actual crime rates.

My standard example is heroin, which is in the most severe rating category of illegal drug. In the UK, the number of users of just that drug on its own is close to triple the entire prison population.

Call me back when the US prison population is full of corporate executives.

This was a silly suggestion.

Did you not realize that almost all crimes that have ever been committed, very much including by smart accomplished people with a lot to lose, violated and belied this theory of rational behavior?

This is the calculus for every crime, and yet somehow crimes happen.

> this doesn't make the problem go away

what if they have bigger problems in the pipeline. It could estimated to be worth exacerbating this issue if it discourages the next.

What if they don't?

All that means is that the murder wouldn't be rational. Do you expect rationality from the executives that gutted one of America's best companies?

For the long game, Boeing has just increased the price of whistleblowing for any would be blowers.

> Boeing doesn't want more attention

The US also doesn't want Boeing carried through the mud.

You're talking about a company that shipped MCAS in its new planes without training pilots on what it was or how it worked, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of people.

So, an argument that this murder wouldn't be rational, gives me zero confidence that it didn't happen.

Pilots were trained in how to deal with runaway stab trim. There were three MCAS incidents. The first one you never hear about because the crew followed the runaway trim procedure and safely completed the flight. The second one did not and they crashed. The third received an Emergency Airworthiness Directive that reiterated the procedure, apparently forgot about it, and crashed.

Yes, the MCAS design was defective. The crews didn't follow their training, either.

Like it or not, it's the truth.

Boeing doesn't order assasinations. If he was assasinated, it might have been someone at Boeing, who still has a clean slate but knows that the whistleblower knows something he did, and has the right connections from working for a defense contractor.

I wouldn't be so sure. It's well documented that the CIA take a "keen interest" in Boeing (and indeed that European security services do so with Airbus), undertaking corporate espionage and sabotage on their behalf. They consider aerospace to be "strategic" or some such.

You shouldn't be convinced, no one has presented any evidence of anything happening or not happening. Being suspicious means the situation warrants investigation.

If there were foul play, the person who made the decision may not agree that this is worse for Boeing, or may not even care about what effect it has on Boeing at large. Being accused of something no one can prove might be greatly preferable to having specific evidence come to light, especially if the scrutiny will fall on a massive company instead of on you in particular.

Who says it was Boeing? They're a publicly traded company; many would stand to lose a great deal of money should they go under.

Then there are those that stand to gain from added chaos.

Time may never tell, but let's not pretend people aren't motivated to do worse for less.

Have you ever been deposed?

It's an incredibly stressful process, and he's already going through the hell of being a whistleblower.

I'm sure Boeing was ready to depose him more and more in order to try to get him to shift his story.

Have you ever shot yourself?

Certainly people have committed suicide in stressful situations, but there is no situation where it makes sense that someone would kill themselves, and countless people get deposed who don't.

Continuing to depose someone to get them to shift their story is a reasonable strategy if their story can't be backed up by evidence and you aren't worried about anything coming out in the testimony. It's a terrible strategy if the witness is about to reveal where the skeletons are buried.

Thank you. You put it far better than I could. And this man was in the right position to know exactly where they all were.

A Quality Manager's entire job is to investigate and track why everything bad happens, and when they aren't allowed to fix it, who is responsible for the decision to intentionally not fix, and the rationale provided to justify an overrule. Though I've heard in some strange foreign lands (safety critical industries), the Quality Department isn't hamstrung by being worked around by a member of the C-Suite.

>Also weird that BBC is already memory-holing that it was a gunshot wound.

A YT video speculated (wildly one would say) about someone's recent death simply because the cause was not announced by the family as it was under (UK) inquest. In some jurisdictions it is inappropriate (or even illegal) to state or speculate on a cause of death when it is under investigation as a suspected suicide, even just to limit the possibility of copycat or revenge cases: Only since 2016 is it legal (in NZ) to report, broadcast or even post on the internet that a death is a suspected suicide before the coroner releases their findings. AFAIK, posting any details about _the method_ is still not allowed in NZ.

This may sound antiquated (and frustrating) in an age of instant news, but jumping to conclusions can have real consequences, at least legally in some edge cases.

No. NZ law is completely irrelevant to a UK news source's reporting on a U.S. death.

And the source is the man's attorney. https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/boeing-whist...

It's a code of conduct of UK reporting even if it occurs outside the UK: "the UK press reporting standards discourage reporting suicide methods"

I mean, he could presumably have died from other causes, but a gunshot wound is a gunshot wound.

In the UK press reporting standards discourage reporting suicide methods https://www.ipso.co.uk/editors-code-of-practice/

It'll take a while to see if it has made any difference, as this version of the code was only adopted in 2021. Suicide rates in the UK appear to be fairly static over the last 20 years: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Yep, the timing of his death is just too on point.

I am not going to be skeptical until they tell me exactly how hey got to the "self-inflicted" wound. How can you tell it was self-inflicted? Any witness? Recording? C'mon!

Was it multiple shots?

Same. I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but that is very strange wording.

Imagine something similar happened in Russia :)

Russia => Poison

UK => Suicide (Remember the iran nuclear inspector and the guy from mi6 found in a suitecase)

Netherlands/Other => Disappearance (Arjen Kamphuis)

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