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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

Please do not make comments about conspiracy theories. This event is not suspicious.

Until there is a cause of death from a thorough autopsy, I think it's too early to say whether this is suspicious or not. I can't believe you are being upvoted for saying this.

Russia Today certainly knows how to state it for maximum effect:

"Hacker dies days before he was to reveal how to remotely kill pacemaker patients"

http://rt.com/usa/hacker-pacemaker-barnaby-jack-639/

Edit: It seems very relevant to keep in mind that this is not the first time someone (or even Jack in particular) had demoed remote kill switch functionality for human beings. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-29/mcafee-hacker-says-...

The kind of thing they're referring to is commonplace in Russia, unfortunately, so you can't exactly blame them for thinking that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_R...

> I can't believe you are being upvoted for saying this.

Perhaps consider that many posters and readers here knew him in person.

For those of you who knew him, do you think he personally would have wanted a day without people being suspicious of their world or comments about conspiracy theories on the internet?

Because he sounds to me like a guy who really loved busting people's assumptions, in your face, and without apology.

Death was not suspicious. Confirmed by family. I'd rather not say anything more than that.

One family member expressed concern to me about his death.

(Note: concern, I am not claiming there was some conspiracy theory)

> Until there is a cause of death from a thorough autopsy

Even with that in mind: technology is probably sufficiently advanced today to be able to not leave any traces, if the budget is there.

Plus, don't forget that Hastings [1] was cremated without his family asking for it (there is always one way or another to make traces disappear).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_%28journalist%...

Actually without knowing the autopsy results it is the opposite - very suspicious. 35 years old people don't just die at home. Let's hope the results will not be that he died of some kind of drug "overdose".

If you hear hoof-beats, you'd expect a horse, not a zebra (unless you are on a Safari).

It's not that uncommon that 35 year old people die at home. Common causes are suicide, unintentional overdose, aneurysm (brain, AAA), arrhythmia, a fall.

My friend died last year at age 38. If the cause of death is not released it's usually drug or alcohol related.

Or the code word for something bad "suddenly".

My brother died, unexpectedly, at 36. He'd had an apparently long running problem with prescription pills that nobody knew about. I had an aunt (sort of, she died before I was born) who was 25 and went to lie down in the bedroom because she felt unwell; she had an undetected congenital defect in her aorta and bled to death internally. My father in law died of a heart attack at 27 because he had congenital familial hypercholesterolimia. His elder brother died a year later by electrocution.

Young people do just die for unobvious reasons, both to the (comparatively) famous and the obscure.

35 year-olds most certainly do die at home. The mechanism of death could have been something highly personal and highly embarrassing, nothing to do with drugs or conspiracies.

I once learned more than I bargained for when I asked too many questions at a friend's funeral. If his close family members don't want to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding his death, it is probably best not to press them.

Whenever people won't talk about how someone died, I (like most people) immediately assume auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Have some respect, please.

R.I.P. a great hacker who left this planet before his time.

PS: Also since it's not suspicious we can rule out your theory as anything like that would most certainly be suspicious.

To be clear, I wasn't making a comment about Barnaby Jack's death specifically. I have no idea what happened and if the family would like to keep it to themselves, I fully respect their wishes. I was just making an honest observation that whenever someone dies and people won't talk about it, that's always the first thing that pops into my head, particularly when there is a suggestion of embarrassment involved (which pertains to the person I was responding to, but not Barnaby Jack).

One of the most noxious effects of the recent NSA revelations is that puts whole of Internet Security Land in the realm of conspiracy theory. Our leaders have admitted that they have given us "unknown unknowns" for our benefit.

XYZ event may indeed be just a sad coincidence but circumstances certainly require us to now look at these critically.

And yes, this makes harder to filter out the ravings of the honest-to-god crazies, which is unfortunate.

OK, but I WOULD like to point people to this interesting link:

>"The Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) seeks Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) Partners that possess the expertise, capabilities, facilities, and experience in the field of manufacturing, testing, and distribution of cardiac pacemakers.

https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=409766e...

So?

What?

More from the RFP: seeking information from companies capable of providing cardiac pacemakers for government testing, pacemaker programming hardware (loan OK), data and methodology for testing of electromagnetic vulnerability, and data on the demographic distribution of pacemaker devices domestically and internationally

From the 'Dahlgren' website http://www.navsea.navy.mil/nswc/dahlgren/ET/DEWO/default.asp... we see they are researching directed energy weapons of many types.

Directed energy (aka "EMP") weapons are said to be useful for disabling computers and electronic devices. Humans are by-and-large highly INsensitive to long electromagnetic waves (radio) until the waves become short enough to heat burn your skin (infrared, lasers) or your retinas. There's evidence of cancer at high exposures to short wavelengths, but causing cancer is not viable as a combat tactic.

But if you're going to deploy a directed energy weapon, you're going to want to have a reasonable idea of the effect on both electronics and the humans in the target area. They have a test range built for this. So it sounds to me like they need some help studying the effect of EMP weapons on people with pacemakers who might just happen to be in the target area. In other words:

Are these non-lethal weapons systems? If not, just how lethal are they?

Should we let an experienced officer continue to serve on a surface ship after he needs a pacemaker? Would he need any special precautions?

If someone dropped one on us, how many civilian casualties would we sustain? ("data on the demographic distribution of pacemaker devices domestically")

If we dropped one on country X, how many? ("and internationally")

I don't think this RFP gives any evidence to suggest that the US Navy is interested in doing the sort of medical device hacking that Barnaby Jack pioneered.

Citation?

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