Second Boeing Whistleblower Dies in Less Than Two Months | Hacker News Reader

Second Boeing Whistleblower Dies in Less Than Two Months

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220 pointssarimkx74 comments

Ongoing discussion [0] (367 points, 22 hours ago, 442 comments)

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40230790

If the intention is to convince whistleblowers #3 through #30 that they should find a healthier hobby? Then yeah, they don't really care if it's obvious to the peanut gallery, so long as it's obvious to any other witnesses.

Do you have any evidence whatsoever to suggest foul play here?

The question is would U need evidence to shut your mouth if you were a Boeing whistleblower?

That seems to presume the murder conspiracy theory. But if the conspiracy theory is effective in silencing whistleblowers then the murder is unnecessary. But if the murder didn’t happen the conspiracy theory is false then there was no reason for whistleblowers to be silent for fear of being killed. So this speculation in the absence of evidence serves the interest of corrupt corporations by undermining the confidence of whistleblowers.

The assumption here is that Boeing is responsible for these.

What exactly does Boeing gain from murdering whistleblowers after the fact? At this point Boeing's reputation is already tarnished and they're already going to be under a microscope, so what does murdering whistleblowers even achieve?

I mean… isn’t the obvious answer a “chilling effect”?

If you were to subscribe to the idea Boeing murders whistleblowers, how is the most obvious reason for why not to prevent more people from speaking out?

I think if Boeing care's about their reputation so badly, they'd get out of the defense contractor business. But there's too much money to be made there. Silencing whistleblowers could be very beneficial to their bottom line:

* Protects their existing IP, as well as any classified information the whistleblower may have had access to.

* Prevents further leaks from the whistleblower, which could impact existing/future contracts, or the company's ability to win them.

* Sends a chilling message to future would-be whistleblowers.

* Sends a reassuring message to the defense industry: "we have a zero-tolerance policy for leaking information and your business is safe with us."

>I think if Boeing care's about their reputation so badly, they'd get out of the defense contractor business.

Huh? Boeing's defense products are a separate division from commercial aviation. And those products are the best out there. Maybe expensive, I guess, and the usual criticism of scope creep and project management applies.

That may be the case, but I think many people will hear "Boeing" and immediately classify them along with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon etc.

I personally don't think there is a conspiracy, but consider if there others that this benefits. E.g. a union, etc?

A deterrent to prevent additional whistleblowers from coming forward? If the issues are as massively systemic as facts to date suggest, it seems like there might be a number of other shoes that could drop. Boeing's reputation (as well as that of its higher ups) could get a hell of a lot more tarnished and even breach further into legal culpability territory.

I'm not fully convinced that's what's happening here, but two whistleblowers on a massive US company that also happens to be a defense contractor dying in suspicious and unusual ways (especially that first one "killing himself" after he said if he died it wasn't suicide and also smack in the middle of his deposition days...) certainly warrants a non-trivial amount of concern and a deeper investigation.

This assumes the risk of getting caught offing whistleblowers is less than the risk of more whistle-blowers coming out. Does it really make sense that you'd risk exposing a whistle blower murder program as opposed to whatever corporate problems they have? Not to mention, it's a lot easier to smooth over corporate screw ups than getting caught hiring hit men.

If these are hits, i would think it's one or two rogue execs or stakeholder with a lot of personal money to blow doing this, OR they are leveraging US military contacts to get it done. It's probably impossible to keep an assassination program from leaking carried out in any other way.

1 whistleblower death is an outlier. Two is an eye raiser. Three will be a pattern and point to Boeing no?

I hope there is isn't a third! Pretty insane already...

Two out of how many though? Yeeeesh

Yeah, this may just indicate there are lots of whistleblowers.

If its Boeing, I'm not Blowing!

And to think I was almost ready to hire you for my branding needs

2 out of 30 maybe

Though this guy seemed really sick so him taking his own life doesn’t seem insane. Does boeing have the ability to infect people with MRSA?

>Does boeing have the ability to infect people with MRSA?

Reminds the old soviet ricin umbrella injector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_umbrella

MRSA has some benefits to consider alongside its detriments. It is capable of surviving on surfaces so you could apply it to a surface that your target interacts with and be relatively confident that it will be viable when the target contacts it. It's common, so it's not some sort of exotic bio-weapon that screams cloak-and-daggers: you can get MRSA in a hospital even. I think it's pretty resilient too so once your target has contacted the MRSA simple hygienic practices wouldn't neutralize it like taking a shower or bath.

But as far as I know it is very treatable by knowledgeable medical professionals if caught early so in that sense it's not a guaranteed attack-vector and a poor choice for an assassination. Depending on a target who doesn't visit the doctor until too late, maybe less of an issue.

>and a poor choice for an assassination

And yet, it worked.

Is there any evidence he was assassinated or are people just trying to meme it into being the truth?

I mean the guy died from MRSA. So, that thing is somewhat effective at killing people.

It’s also somewhat treatable if caught early.

It also colonizes a large fraction of hospital workers so unless you injected it into the victim or got them to inhale a large number of aerosolized bacteria, it won't be effective.

Assassination seems unlikely here to me. The presentation of sudden illness with multiple agents flu B, MRSA, and strep all at the same time is unusual. The presentation probably IS consistent with a sudden exposure to a very high number of infectious organisms into his lungs which could overwhelm the immune system and potentially lead to death. It wouldn't be impossible to orchestrate but it sounds difficult, finicky, unreliable, and tough to correctly execute without collateral damage. It would almost certainly require a state actor.

It's also plausible he contracted influenza B and suffered from an opportunistic infection of the lungs.

By Occam's razor I think the latter is quite a bit more likely.

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action"

― Ian Fleming, Goldfinger

It's... just barely probable with two people. Assuming 30 whistleblowers, and an actuarial likelihood of 1.2% death[1] in a given year at their ages, we can use binomial probability[2] to determine the chance of two dying in a given year.

The math works out to a 4.4% chance. That's a bit of an eye raiser, but still just believable. (Look, we all believe it can happen we roll a critical in D&D ;)

3 or more dying in a year, we're at 0.5% - I'd really assume that's deliberate.

[1] Actuarial tables: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

[2] Calculator if you want to play with probabilities: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=binomial+probability+ca...

Can we not make a reasonable assumption that whistleblowers against a powerful company have a much higher than average risk of dying? Knowing nothing about them personally we can reasonably conclude:

- They get regular death threats.

- The opposing law firms probably have PIs digging into their lives for dirt to discredit them.

- Their careers in their line of work are over and as far as I know, there's no whistle-blower retirement fund.

- Everyone they knew and worked with for many years and who still works there probably cut them off for fear of being associated with them.

- Because of all this their sleep is probably horrible, they're much more likely to have unhealthy alcohol habits, and to have financial problems.

Maybe. But these are all random assumptions, and we have no way of taking them into account without a lot of work on the modeling.

But the point I was trying to make (badly, based on where the discussion is going :) was that "two whistleblowers dying is still somewhat probable". Increased likelihood of death just makes it more probable.

Is there any kind of Bayesian modeling to calculate the probability of deaths in a subpopulation like employees of a company over a given period of time? I guess none of this would be public knowledge to know the background death rate of that population, but assuming it was all public where we knew how many deaths per employee was typical could something be calculated to show this pattern is a mathematical outlier of somekind?

I keep seeing headlines similar to the above ("Second Boeing Whistleblower").

The headline is simply a lie and misrepresentation. Josh Dean was not a Boeing Whistleblower. He is a Whistleblower against his employer, Spirit AeroSystems, not Boeing.

[dupe]

Discussion over last 24 hrs or so:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40230790

How many whistleblowers have there been and what’s the demographic? Not to be too much of a downer but if there are a good number of whistleblowers and they’re over-represented by retirement age men that have worked in production plants all their lives then there is some level of morbidity to be expected.

But also: yeah, when you look at it face on it’s absolutely wild that there have been two whistleblower deaths.

This one was 45 years old.

And what do they even mean by "sudden illness"??

Influenza and MRSA — allegedly the MRSA was contracted before hospitalization, which is odd. Though MRSA would also be an odd way to try to intentionally kill someone.

MRSA, the article mentions it.

The point still stands. There ought to be some level of statistical analysis to tell you how likely an event this is rather than immediately reaching for the conspiracy theory lever.

I was not alluding to any conspiracies.

In that "statistical analysis" the company and more importantly the time must be factored in.

Yes, I am sure out of all whistleblowers, all over the world, for all types of stories (war crimes, finance (insider trading), etc) there must many that do just die.

But...

1. The same 'set' of whistleblowers (exposing manufacturing faults in Boing aircrafts) 2. In less than two months..!

Not to mention not just at any time but during multiple ongoing investigations...?

I'm asking a question here that I don't know the answer to.

Has anyone weaponized MRSA? Not just weaponized it for mass casualties, but able to also only target a single individual with it?

I'm not sure, but I think in suspicious deaths like this folks should DNA sequence all viruses and other stuff found on the body of the poor individual. I've been curious about autopsies from a proactive angle. Can the family of the deceased, or even the person in their own will expressed before they died, can they force a municipality or county or whatever agency the coroner operates under to release the body for a private autopsy?

At some point the body has to be released back to the family -- once the forensic autopsy is done, so yes.

yah that's a good point, they can't kidnap and prevent a burial indefinitely.

I don't think we have the technical ability to make a real life FOXDIE yet.

I'd be very surprised if organizations such as the CIA or similar haven't at least put some resources toward researching the viability of weaponizing MRSA or similar.

Everything can be weaponised. Most things have been weaponised.

They got a hit on everyone these days

In America they allow oligarchs to just whack people left right and centre?

0 proof of that, but on the internet everyone is a detective.

Boeing is killing Americans who are trying to keep passengers safe and the feds brush it off

Informative article from The Economist about disinformation being on the rise...flagged (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40238314)

Conspiratorial nonsense...#1 spot.

Is anybody else concerned about the health of this forum?

Yeah that thread and these Boeing threads are fucking nuts.

You'd think they'd just put him on a plane, they're much better at killing people using planes.

How many people have died on boeing plane in the past year?

Last I checked they haven't killed any passengers in awhile.

Really not since: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302#... Which was due to MCAS malfunction and pilots responding poorly to it.

I'm all for holding Boeing's feet to the fire, but, lets not devolve into hyperbole here.

Good point, the statute of limitations for killing your customers should probably only be two years. That's, like, ancient history in tech years! GPT 4 wasn't even released at that point!

We can't keep holding them accountable for such negligence, after all they've been really really good in the two years since- they only let a door fall off of a plane once! And no one died from that! We don't need to mention that if the seat next to the door was filled and they were not wearing their seatbelt, it is highly likely they would have died.

EDIT: My bad, it was 5 years ago, not 2 years ago. I skimmed the Wikipedia page too fast, much like Boeing's engineers did while trying to bypass FAA regulations. I should be punished, but Boeing did nothing wrong.

This level of snark isn’t really productive to the conversation.

Additionally, 2019 was 5 years ago.

depends on the goal of the speaker

Oh that's fair, you're right, that accident happened 5 years ago. Even more reason to excuse them from doing engineering badly! That is basically the beginning of the universe!

Agreed.

Responding poorly maybe but all blame goes to Boeing. Pilots didn’t even know it existed and only got training and an override in 2021 from your link.

No. In the case of Ethiopian airlines they knew exactly what was going on when MCAS kicked in and almost immediately responded. MCAS pushed the plane down SO hard that something in the tail got stuck. Boeing spent a lot of time trying to blame this on pilots when 1.) they initially didn't even train them on it, and 2.) even if trained...once it happens...you have extremely little time to react.

5 years is "a while"?

>Which was due to MCAS malfunction and pilots responding poorly to it.

I think if they are the point where they are murdering whistleblowers than I wouldn't take Boeing gaslighting about who was to blame for that on face value.

Tricky as that would require some kind of quality control.

Fact: Everybody who drinks water will die.

No longer a coincidence.

Boeing kills you in so many ways

At least they aren't falling out of windows

Yet

Americans tend to prefer detached houses. A broken ankle is not going to silence a person.

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