US Military's cyber command unit grapples with cluster of deaths by suicide
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Imagine knowing this and not being able to get emotional support from your friends and family.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/defens...
Putin (and everyone else) knows this.
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.
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 see the crazed AI investment as worthless financial gambling, a house of cards that will eventually crumble, and the argument that “we need to fund AI” really is “your tax dollars should bail out our financial mistake, because security”.
It’s nonsense all the way down. Covid showed we didn’t even manufacture basic drugs in the country anymore, and were openly threatening our biggest/best/longest allies (Canada, Mexico, NATO). AI is so far down the security list as to make it noise, compared to our recent missteps.
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.
That's not my understanding. Got any credible links that back up this point?
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/10/nx-s1-5844328/us-china-data-c...
—- quote section below
Linvill said he can't rule out that the Chinese are quietly paying influencers or others to oppose data centers, but he pointed out there's no need.
"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."
In Utah, those people appear to have forced Kevin O'Leary to scale back his plans. After the president of the Utah Senate raised concerns, he agreed to shrink his data center project to a quarter of its original size.
—— End NPR article quote
So yeah, no need to produce Chinese anti-datacenter propaganda - people have valid reasons, and they hate it. It’s already blocking and scaling back projects.
You want to save water? Protest golf courses. You want to save energy? Progress in AI is the best way to do that.
Subscription AI isn't going to pay for itself - it's pretty clear that they'll want a bailout in the name of "security"; which is why it's so great the Chinese are releasing models as-good-or-better for free: ironically because it drives an even bigger stake into the heart of US AI companies.
The sooner these AI companies are destroyed, the better.
The weak spot was the conservative prediction to fascism - worship of force and masculinity - which was easily retargeted against other Americans.
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.
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.
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'.
Please, enlighten me what was the point of your post, I really, genuinely, missed it. To me, it reeks of toxic optimism and wishful thinking, nothing else. There is no justification whatsoever why it should be true.
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.
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.
But hey, some americans would say that "It's worth it" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP_VnVlFhXU
“Other people did it too” is not an excuse for immoral behavior.
I think the parent and I basically agree.
Trump attacked quite a few countries in his first term, even killed the Iranian general (Soleimani), and you guys reelected him after all that. You guys clearly weren't bothered by that enough to vote for someone else.
If nothing else, Iran has learned that they really need those nukes, because you guys will never leave them at peace otherwise.
These have failed.
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.
Is that why he bombed Iran and single-handedly caused a global energy crisis? A shift of focus to “dominance of the American continent”?
Destabilizing everywhere else is a potential step taken toward achieving continental superiority in certain regards.
( not a GOOD step, mind you)
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...
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.
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]
This is beyond arrogant and makes discussion impossible. Your opinion is not automatically a 100% accurate reflection reality because you have citations.
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.
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.
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".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_scientists_conspiracy_...
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_...
to whom?
Is the US military somehow not "the US"? Do you not have any shame just blatantly lying like this?
I'm not sure why the distinction matters, the Navy and Coast Guard also need to recruit. I could imagine at least an occasional sailor is troubled by shooting drowning seamen, even if they are suspected smugglers.
Perhaps even a few civilians are troubled by the lack of regard for human life of the psychos running the show, eliminating any moral standing the world pretended the US had.
Did Pinochet knew that?
Some people really have the memory of a goldfish. Between 1982 and 2019, US has been involved in 350 coup attempts, of which 150 were successful. Some foreign leaders where killed by US proxies later.
And the cherry on top is the "petrol company" (of course, linked with Trump) that started to accumulate people and logistics to operate without license in Greenland, just yesterday.
Attempting the "Little Green Men take Crimea" trick twice.
And this is how NATO is backstabbed and killed, in the most 'Game of Thrones' style possible. Putin has educated Trump really well.
US does not seem to understand still how in danger is their former hegemonic position by the acts of this government. And those acts look more and more deliberated (even carefully designed) to hit USA in every possible vital organ.
Except it's not.
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...
Iran too
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyqggvyp1do
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/29/norwegian-te...
>The Swedish Security Service has established that the Iranian regime uses criminal networks in Sweden to carry out violent acts against other states, groups, or individuals in Sweden that Iran regards as threats.
https://sakerhetspolisen.se/ovriga-sidor/other-languages/eng...
And Russia is constantly attacking europe (EU and non-EU), in addition to its invasion of a European country.
Of the three adversaries you mention, and the additional one being the US technocratic administration, China is the least threatening to Europe.
China has sinister intentions.
AND actively helps Russia.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-ap...
I understand that you are a commie, but do not apologize for China.
There are of course people like this, recruited on the internet in the many criminal networks that exist, but I don't think they've had any notable successes.
Man this stuff sucks to be so out in the public and out of darkness. I mean we knew these things were happening but they’ve accelerated so much now and what are we going to do about it?
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.
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.
The government has spent centuries doing spycraft and has a budget in the billions.
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.
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."
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.
Is that what they say?
And that isn't even the half of it.
People tend to forget that the US government will pay out the wazoo to achieve things that are one-time successes.
Consider things like Operation IVY BELLS, or Project Azorian.
Now consider that same mindset applied to a long term investment. The possibilities are pretty limitless.
Have you noticed the current executive administration in the US?
Do not think we aren't catching on to this kind of nonsense.
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.
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.
For all the same reasons - Don't Talk to HR
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.
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!
I was a part of the world's largest illegal operation in history and again I promise you no one gives a s**.
Facts.
Source: me - TS/SCI, several interesting SAPs, contractually bound to not say a word about the details til death.
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'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".
However, I think people are generally too cynical towards a very real belief system. There are multiple examples of US pushing for democracy against its own interest. Bush with the Hamas Gaza elections, Obama with the Egypt Muslim Brotherhood government and Carter with pre-revolution Iran are such examples
Similarly, Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood because he did; in Ukraine for instance the same admin supported a coup against the elected government (this is not to say that Russia's actions in Ukraine are "justified", it's just a fact.) Democracy has nothing to do with any of this
I doubt this is backed by US intentions and actions historically
> Similarly, Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood because he did
That seems like a tautology to me, care to expand? I vividly remember Obama throwing his autocrat ally under the bus
> in Ukraine for instance the same admin supported a coup
The protests in Ukraine hardly seem like a US coup and were organic according to my understanding, but maybe you can point exactly to the US involvement
Most coups are organic. The US involvement in the Iran coup of 1953 was not very much, but the signal of support was meaningful. Ditto Chile in 1973. Ukraine's overthrow was not like those coups. It relied on popular support from the region near the capital. However, this support was not uniform across the country, and support for the protests hovered around 50% and never reached 60%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan#Public_opinion_abou...
>According to a January poll, 45% of Ukrainians supported the protests, and 48% of Ukrainians disapproved of Euromaidan.
>In a March poll, 57% of Ukrainians said they supported the Euromaidan protests.
The polling variation was large. The government was overthrown in February. But the western regions were massively in favor, and surrounded the capital, while the southeast was mostly opposed. Well-functioning states rely on political processes instead of simply overturning the government whenever a majority of citizens opposes it.
Given the polling data and the division of public opinion, I don't support what happened in February 2014. But that doesn't make it a coup -- a coup is a transfer of power that originates specifically within the government, and Ukraine's protests weren't like that. Nor does it justify Russia's invasion. What happened was more like a feudal power struggle. It doesn't help that before new elections could be held, the interim government banned several political parties. Maybe they were "pro-Russian", but democracy means voters deserve a say in a country's geopolitical alignment, so that doesn't seem like a valid reason to ban a political party to me.
>but maybe you can point exactly to the US involvement
Now this sounds like a joke. US politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden and several senators, attended the protests. This makes American support pretty obvious. US media at the time also tended to minimize domestic opposition to the protests, even though this was a significant position within Ukraine.
OP alluded to the Euromaiden protests being an orchestrated Obama-led coup. I still don't see how this is the case. There's some difference between diplomatic reactions to proactive overthrow
The events I am describing are a decade to two before the ones you are describing. Back in the early 2000s Qatar was already financing Hamas as well as Al Qaeda (including involvement in 9/11 financing) and Hezbollah in some extent.
Saying Qatar needed Israel's request to start financing ideologically close Islamist terror organizations is certainly the Qatar government line for their involvement, but it's a very shallow analysis of what happened
I chose to "go into war zones" many times and none of it was to "enjoy killing people".
True, not everyone has such a choice, but I volunteered for the organization I wanted to work for and then I volunteered for multiple deployments I didn't have to go on. Many of us have that choice and make that choice.
Brett Devereaux has talked about it multiple times on his blog in various different contexts (most recently two weeks ago)[1][2][3]:
[1] https://acoup.blog/2026/07/24/collections-pre-modern-armies-...
[2] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/01/collections-total-generalship-...
So the war crimes are bipartisan.
And I write this as someone who likes Obama.
Yeah, I don't see a problem here. Due process, slippery slope sure... but this was a cut and dry case. I've got better things to do with my time than be concerned with this.
You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.
I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.
[1] https://airwars.org/tens-of-thousands-of-civilians-likely-ki...
Lot easier to steal land if there aren't any people living there (because the infrastructure to support modern life was destroyed).
Most recent example (out of at least 100,000 examples in just these last 3 years alone) would be their "defence" (hah!) minister delightedly boasting how they have Gaza'fied South Lebanon and destroyed over 15,000 structures.
"An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting."
If a nation is conducting drone strikes on another nation's territory, the alternative is usually conventional forces at scale on the ground*.
As the Iraq occupation showed, conventional ground forces at scale cause an even larger number of civilian deaths.
So drone strikes, if kinetic intervention is pre-decided, are a less-bad option from a civilian casualty perspective.
* Granted, there might be a decision not to deploy conventional forces because of the risk / cost, but if there are regular drone strikes, it feels like the aggressor country is past that Rubicon.
Conventional forces aren't deployed in many instances where regular drone strikes are used, thus the country didn't feel it was the right risk/cost to deploy conventional forces.
At the very least, it's a statement that deserves more debate, and I'd point to the many examples of how reducing cost and risk tends to increase the rate of an activity.
It's monstrous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
And on the same day, they attacked a SPORTS STADIUM, completely vapourising a women's volleyball team who were in the midst of a game.
And that was just ... DAY ONE.
By now, we should be asking - if you're a member of the US military on active duty in an active war - prove that YOU DIDN'T kill a child, mother, handicapped person in a wheelchair, or a grandpa.
Truth hurts, doesn't it?
- Built as part of an IRGCN base (that base was closed in 2013)
- Within 100 yards of the perimeter of an active IRGCN base at the time of the strike
- Targeted as a result of extensive use of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Claude by the US military to pre-identify targets
Given all of that, I think the most accurate takeaway would be that the US military is deficient in their target approval process. (Arguably grossly so, though that's an international law legal question)
There's been less investigation into the background behind the Lamerd sports hall attack, but it's fairly certainly an intended US strike, likely for the same reason that the Azadi stadium was hit: assumption that it would be used as a muster point for an Iranian military response.
My takeaway from the atrocities is that there need to be substantial updates to international laws of war around (a) automated target approval (even worse excesses by the Israelis in the initial Gaza strikes) and ultimate human responsibility and (b) more strongly defining what constitutes due diligence in intelligence and classification of military targets.
Currently, both are far too nebulous and will likely lead to both incidents being classified as war as usual. Whereas there was a plausible route to both being removed as targets with even non-manual open source intelligence scraping (substantial patterns of school activity over years and the volleyball game schedule, respectively).
An addition, again from Afghanistan, only 2% of drone strikes were against identified targets. The rest were targets of opportunity. So you make most of the male population of a country killable through the use of appropriate language, and then hit 98% of them because you think they might be thinking about doing something bad in the future.
I can see why this would mess with people's mental health when what they're doing to random civilians sinks in.
I promise you that you didn't kill 3,000+ IRGC members.
(Lets be clear: a big source of the ransomware epidemic stems from folks not respecting the vulnerabilities equities process.)
They never said anything remotely like that in their comment. You're actively lying about their words in addition to badly breaking the HN guidelines. You should re-read them:
It's Offut AFB, home of StratCom. Eppely is the municipal airport. And Offut doesn't have any drone units, nor do they manage any. They due process reconnaissance for sure, but actual drone strikes aren't conducted from there.
Creech AFB is where most of the drone units operating Reaper/Avenger etc are based.
My Google-fu is failing me right now, but when we lived in Nebraska, there was a long article in the Omaha World-Herald (I'm fairly sure) talking about the mental health problems of the local drone pilots. This would've been at least 15 years ago or so, and things have very likely moved around since then.
For the majority of men, most of the time.
If it did, shouldn’t we see mental health improving by now?
As the saying goes, recognizing that you have a problem is the first step to being able to solve it.
> News just in: talking about your mental health, especially for men, does not improve your mental health.
> For the majority of men, most of the time.
There are no measurable benefits better than placebo.
Can you please provide some sources?
If someone says “taking medicine is bad”, and I say “that’s silly”, then “smoking crack can be harmful” doesn’t weaken my position.
Which of these triggered for one of those people by one of the things you listed (like diet incompatible with genotype)?
sometimes mental conditions are temporary and resolvable. sometimes mental conditions are permanent and symptom alleviation is the best option. both are true. we are assessing the interface to the entire body here, all traffic flows through this node to a certain degree. problematic traffic can be caused by an issue local to the central node, but this possibility does not exclude the potential for data to be problematic on arrival.
For example, consider you have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Some food causes you pain, discomfort, and stress. Over time, eating the wrong diet can worsen your anxiety. You might fear going out and having fun, because you have to use the bathroom too much. Then, in that sense, a diet incompatible with your genotype triggers your anxiety disorder.
Or consider a stressful job, like being in the military. That might trigger or cause PTSD. Then, later down the line, another stressful job might trigger that PTSD.
I think this is an extremely dangerous position to take.
We’re all flawed, the human condition and all that, but I don’t believe that necessarily translates to ’minor mental health problems’.
There is such a thing as the “Mental Health Industrial Complex”.
How did humans evolve and survive for hundreds of thousands of years without “mental health issues” and suddenly 23% of children in public schools have a diagnosis.
What a stupid argument.
Personal perspective, but I'd argue there are an entire class of mental health problems that are perspective-based.
I.e. I am acting in a way that is harmful to myself and/or others because I see the situation in a maladaptive way.
Talk therapy (with a sufficiently intelligent and skilled therapist, of which there is a great lack vs demand) can be effective at changing perspectives, which can ultimately allow changing the behaviors they create.
Some mental health problems are biochemical, but there are a lot that are just "The way you see the world is making you an asshole. Don't want to be an asshole? Try seeing it a different way."
What most people cannot comprehend, for some very bizarre reason, is that many chronic problems do not have one-time solutions. They require chronic solutions.
Take alcoholism. The "cure" for alcoholism is never drinking. You never stop being an alcoholic, you can only manage it by not drinking.
Take obesity. Obesity has no "cure" either in that sense. The "cure" for obesity is diet and exercise management, forever, until the day you die. It's like taking a pill, every day, forever, until you die. If you one day decide to stop taking the pill of diet and exercise, you will be obese again. In that sense, the obesity never left you, merely it's symptoms left you temporarily while you managed it.
Mental health is the same way. There is no magic "oh now I'll never be sad or anxious again!". No. You manage it every day, forever, until the day you die. You manage it via therapy, behavior modification, and medication. If you stop doing that, it will come back, because it never left you. It's a chronic condition, like being a brunette.
As for obesity, there is GLP-1 that is a likely cure and will perhaps eventually lead to an in-body cure.
Although, and this is controversial, I view GLP-1s as a more "root cause" solution for obesity than diet and exercise. The "root cause" of obesity is not overconsumption, that's the symptom. The root cause is a propensity to over-consume, which GLP-1s address, whereas diet and exercise alone do not. We do not fully understand why some people have a greater propensity to over-consume.
But, if I had to speculate a little, I would say overconsumption has had an evolutionary advantage for humans for all of our existence, until right now. And, indeed, I would say the evolutionary advantage extends to almost all organisms, so it might be baked in at very "low levels" of our anatomy.
Sudden blindness on one or both eyes. No warning, no symptoms, wake up with damaged eyesight up to and including blindness.
For most people who are overweight or obese it’s been something they’ve been able to live with.
Waking up blind would be catastrophic.
These drugs should be taken off the market.
His life isn’t a double-blind randomised placebo controlled study.
There is no second instance of him to falsify your claim.
As to the rest of your comment, everyone who signs up chooses their MOS, and those lacking the choice they want are totally allowed to not enlist in the first place in the U.S.; if there ever is a draft, this likely would not be one of the things those people would be drafted for first, either. If I recall, there is even a rather high signon "bonus" for this MOS, compared to most of the others (that may have changed in the years and years since I last looked though).
In short, noone should enter a military contract thinking you should "feel good" with the idea of killing, though let's be real, noone should be suggesting you should think you won't be expected to; anything but.
My point was, the U.S. and a number of other countries have gamified killing. Adding distance adds dehumanization. That is partly why it is done.
Avoiding any current affairs talk because I am disgusted by how crazy people sound; this stuff has been true though for decades.
The whole cyber thing in the post isn't even about drone careers it is about exploitation careers. But it is related, in a roundabout way. And both "careers" aim to put a remove between real life and the "job". Of course, I could make the argument that they have more in common than people think, but that would be a book not a comment on a thread.
If you haven't checked out Sisela Bok's book on violence and gaming it is a good read, incidentally.
Since we don't, it probably isn't happening.
Given that it's not happening, then it's probably just not a thing.
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories?f%...
Don’t mistake prepositioning for “not happening.” As you said: “cyber cold war” means there are a lot of incentives not to reveal capabilities or trigger escalation from your adversaries. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...
Although, that is changing as we continue to escalate. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/cisa-fbi-epa-and-us-go...
If you’re not convinced the threat is real and the cyber warfare is happening, I highly recommend checking out Nocole Perleoth’s To Catch a Thief. S1E7 is especially relevent: Everything Everywhere All at Once. https://www.rubrik.com/lp/to-catch-a-thief-podcast
But we do: ransomware stories are in the news all the time; while they likely aren’t being directly executed by the Russian or Chinese governments they are being allowed to happen because they aid state interests: for example, https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...
…or more insidiously: political influence campaigns, which are very much a cyber concern, and even easier to deny.
Example: https://texasstandard.org/stories/russian-hackers-muleshoe-t...
So there is no need for a highly visible active cyber war. We have tons of cyber professionals working on this stuff day in and day out to help keep up prepared.
1. There's a new hot war with Iran, a country that has put a large amount of resources into its cyberwarfare capabilities after previous U.S. cyberstrikes (e.g. stuxnet). Iran is likely a lot tougher target than it was ten years ago and that means pressure for members of the U.S.'s cyber command to perform.
2. Computer nerds probably struggle with getting respect from the rest of the military even at the best of times. That just got a lot harder with Hegseth as secretary.
3. The U.S. is likely not targeting just Iran right now. Imagine being called upon to go to work against countries you consider to be allies, like Denmark, Greenland, Canada, Spain, etc..
According to https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-25-107121.pdf there are ~17,000 authorized positions
Yes, it does skew male, but you're probably looking at 10x the standard population density of Autistics, and 20x the density of trans women.
I'm sure there are other "sociologically valid" ways you can measure this too, but there is absolutely a correlation between having the type of brain that is able to perform offensive cybersecurity operations and mental illness/social rejection/isolation.
The expected event count from 17,000 people exposed to a month of constant uniform event risk with an annual hazard rate of 20 per 100,000 per year is 0.28. The p-value for observing a count of 5 from a (Poissonian) mean of 0.28 is 1 in 100,000. So it's pretty unlikely by perfect random chance.
The other thing you see in a life spent in count statistics is a lot of statistically extreme events that turn out to have no deep or predictive significance.
There's many slices of ~10-20k people you can divide the US (military) in, many of them overlapping.
What is the chance that in some year at least one of the slices will say "Hey, we had excess suicides!" - much higher.
It's a multiple comparison problem that you don't know is a multiple comparison problem because you yourself didn't do the comparisons. You just got the result of them.
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...
> 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
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 too can't remember jack and get brain fog during work, yet it's odd because I can remember very specific things in some experiences before I started working. For example I can recall some contents from my analysis class despite not using any of it for basically all of my career. But I can't recall what my boss said yesterday if I don't write it down. I guess it comes to a personal idea of "importance" too, I can generally remember things I'm interested in. I can remember which port number my home lab server and router is plugged into my switch but I can't remember my work intranet URL and rely on bookmarks.
But it wasn't military so I just quit..
You don't really get to sneak a glimpse of operations and write a book like the SEALs seem get to (jk!)
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.
Great clarification!
As a disclaimer I'm not making the claim that all seals, special forces, or military members are mentally ill. I'm just saying that the arch from being able to take the toughest training on earth and going into active combat to influencer sprinkled with some lies and fabrications is not a healthy psyche. There are plenty of seals that have retired and gone on as normal functioning members of society.
My understanding is their books are reviewed by the pentagon and don’t reveal the real secret operational details and that’s how they get away with it. Presumably someone like yourself could also write a book and have the pentagon redact it in a similar manner?
For every 1 million cybers, three books are written lol
Every manned operation gets a book mention, eventually.
Decades later I found out he felt like nobody cared about him because we stopped asking about his work.
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...
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.
* 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 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.
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.
I don't see how you can say this is a leadership issue because the tech itself is creating a scenario that's going to leave plenty of people in crisis. The same will happen in programming. People are clinging onto the hope that it won't matter that much because 80% of a programmer's job, at a large company, doesn't involve coding anyhow, but even there the reason for the high comp is that 20%, as that's where the barrier to entry is. As that barrier falls, skill relevance plummets, and expectations rise.
> "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.
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.
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.
Nothing like politics to make people miss the beam in their own eye
or maybe you’re just not fully familiar with the rules of engagement Continuity of Government sets for itself.
[0] https://abcnews.com/Blotter/anwar-al-awlaki-killed-officials...
He wasn't working at US Cyber Command in the US.
I'm assuming you understand the vast difference here. And that waging war against the US puts you on a different playing field.
I was specifically replying to
> People who believe nonsense about the government assassinating our own citizens
ensuring the reader knows the US definitely kills US citizens (without / in absence of trial) depending on the circumstances.
Brings me no joy to report, but many falsely believe otherwise.
> come from all across the political spectrum
My point is that people are far more likely to call something a conspiracy theory if it comes from the other side to their own
If that wasn't the case, I apologize for my misunderstanding.
> Being that this is the internet
True and funny and depressing at the same time.
That, and all the undecided lurkers reading pages of unchallenged conspiracy.
in my experience; speculation fuels distrust, which fuels more speculation, which leads to a spiral.
similar thing as gossip. why would i trust you when you’ve been gossiping with me about our mutual friend? then i go off and gossip about you gossiping to my other friend etc.
loose lips sink ships — the things we say have consequences.
there's enough bullshit for people to deal with in the world. why add to it?
Some even shows double tap mortar rounds being dropped on Russians and then gravely wounded they drop another one to finish them off.
ps. do you to watch all these videos? how is it affecting you?
It's a bit of an overton window thing really. For reference: Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals talk about logistics. Talking about "double tap" is same level as talking about "lethality"...
I saw one with an aftermath of a HIMARS strike with anti-personal warheads (ball bearings) on a Russian drone training camp in a forest, the heaps of bodies did not bother me at all - was more wondering about the trees and how above a certain height there were no branches or leaves.
On a visceral level I understand the why of the killing from the Ukrainian side - it is morally just.
Ukrainian drone pilots have few doubts about what future they're working towards and what one they're preventing when they kill Russian soldiers.
US soldiers coming home from Iraq 2 (or Vietnam) don't have anywhere near that ideological buffer.
I wonder if these deaths are linked to... I'm struggling for a word here. Extortion doesn't really capture it.
I've heard discussion of "hurtcore" sites[1] in public venues.
The reporting in the above cited case (and several others adjacent) seems to focus on the CSAM angle, rather than the meta level issue of extortionists running roughshod over the internet.
There are a LOT of rules about security clearances. I never had one, but I knew people who did, and it used to really enrage me in my early 20s how folks would gatekeep access to stable, well paying jobs while yeeting out into cyberspace how much they love snorting coke, smoking weed, and purchasing the services of sex workers.
(Fun fact: prostitution is also illegal at the federal level, but for some reason the feds hyperfocus on weed. It's almost like they don't actually care about protecting victims, just propping up an abusive world order... but this isn't a political discussion site, so I'll stop myself from going on yet another vent session.)
Anyways... maybe I'm the cyberspace equivalent of Charlie from Always Sunny in front of his "big board", but at least I said my piece. But there are other cases, less reported on. (One involved a German army officer for example) where folks gathered not just to trade abuse imagery, but to gather together to torment folks.
There's been some more recent reporting on 764[2], but in that liminal period in between those two articles lies so many untold stories... multiple darknet communities that deserve longreads that were never written, possibly because so few people with technical acumen can also write prose, and the ones with that very particular set of skills often are very, very busy and very very very sleep deprived.
[1] "Inside the Repulsive World of ‘Hurtcore’, the Worst Crimes Imaginable" https://www.vice.com/en/article/59kye3/the-repulsive-world-o...
[2] "The recruiting process usually starts with The Com members starting a relationship with the victim, sending them kind and romantic messages. Once the victim trusts the member, they gradually start to coerce the victim to share private information. After the victim shares the material, The Com starts to blackmail them into sending violent material, for example videos of the victim hurting strangers, their family, or themselves." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Com#Notable_activities
> The next day, the command held an all-staff safety meeting where leaders encouraged personnel to support each other and seek help if they needed it, the official and two people said. Yet another man took his own life two weeks later, records show
Feels like any tech company, especially FB's recent attempt to improve morale using snacks, pizza, and hackatons.
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.
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).
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.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/deaths-disappearances-scien...
Good luck.
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.
Is this a secret or something? It's 100% what people voted for. Disgruntled people wanted to see it all burned down.
"A number of cyber command unit personnel found the secret files and had to be dealt with"