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Comment by Fnoord | Hacker News Reader

What if you'd die from a genuine accident?

Then there's no more point to keeping that leverage, is there? Might as well make it freely available.

I'd love to see a statistical analysis of whistleblower deaths on the US over the last 15 years. I'd be extremely susprised if it wasn't enormously anomalous.

It’d be hard to draw any conclusion. A whistleblower must be under extreme stress and pressure which in itself in some way or other will increase the risk of death — so that has to be taken account before saying the plausible cause for the excess deaths is assassination.

Let's start with keeping the whistleblowers alive and we have more time to figure out the cause and effect later.

Point.-

Are you suggesting we put them all under suicide watch? How would we keep these people from killing themselves otherwise?

This guy had plenty of money for a therapist to help with his mental health issues.

What more do you think we could we do for them?

How? do we lock them up?

If whistleblowers are committing suicide at abnormal rates, then maybe we should provide them with more mental health support as a public good.

Publicly making claims and being named as a potential witness in a court case seems a clear line.

F.ex. the resources listed on the US House's Whistleblower Ombuds page: https://whistleblower.house.gov/whistleblower-support-organi...

I was intending to release the information, so releasing it when I'm dead seems fine.

So why didn't I immediately publish it all while alive? Perhaps I preferred to control the flow of information, redact certain parts, or extort the organisation I was blowing the whistle on. None of those seem all that important to me compared to deterring people from assassinating me in the first place.

Right. There's no reason to let your opponent see the cards you're holding.

You still release it?

That's the whole point, otherwise it's not safe against "make it look like an accident."

Crash-only peopleware

Creates a feedback loop to make any death of a whistleblower statistically look like a conspiracy.

That's the second best incentive you have, after "making sure they don't die".

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