>The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides",
The article talks about 19 people. Given the size of those organizations that's statistically elevated but too small a number to descend into conspiracy theories. As the article points out they apparently had internal warnings and studies about lack of mental support for people in signals intelligence and cyber related roles.
Given that this cluster of deaths seems to have happened in June/July, the Iran war and how the American government has conducted itself I don't find it surprising there's elevated numbers of suicides. You don't need to be on the frontline, if you're in sigint and involved in that attack on the school that casually blew up 150 girls and probably the stuff we don't know about I wouldn't be surprised people off themselves.
> These deaths are most likely due to "housecleaning", as I said.
No, it’s not. It’s very obvious you have no idea of how US military personnel work and live, and the stresses that can be imposed on a person by the function of being in a military. Among those functions such as deployments which can come as a surprise and up root anything you having going on in your life. Or, having to live for several years in highly undesirable locations like Cannon AFB in the middle of no where. These can have a substantial effect on a service member’s mental health. Add in work conditions like working 12 hour shifts in a windowless room. Compounded even further by crappy leadership that you’re stuck with and continuously denies your leave.
No, housecleaning is not more likely. You’re just ignorant of the military life.
From what I see there are only 10 kilometers to a town which has a zoo, mall, church etc. It's not a walk in the park, but with given the zoning laws and car-centric culture of the US, it's not very much.
You might want to actually read the article, then you would see how your descriptions don't actually apply.
Part of the shitty work conditions (that remarkably persist despite incredible amounts of money vanishing in the DoD/W) is your employer being out to kill you should they get the idea of you being insufficiently free of morals or independent thought.
I would argue, that part should worry you far more than your other points.
I talked about the CIA very negatively after having a top secret clearance (never actually used it but it gives useful context). They then showed up in my commune and after a while of unusual behavior and psyops and pretending to be hippies (they couldn’t quite get that right) they resorted to drugging me to get answers they were convinced were true.
I never ordered off the dark web, I do believe my [usa] government can be terrorists, I have purpose and meaning to want to surface truth to find peace because that’s what I believe.
It was a scary time (in Jan - May 2023), and I fled back to parents in VA after which for a while they’d show up with similar personas of odd-people in open community gatherings attempting to get close to me.
I’ve never thought of suicide before and even today have not. When I started sharing about this last spring on hacker news I got a slew of “random” messages and downvotes and people claiming I was sick. I am not mentally ill, I do not need a therapist. It took me several years to process the traumatic experiences and feel the courage to share because I hope it might help someone else going through something similar. I’m thankful for the one person who validated my experience and didn’t gaslight me or attempt to ad hominem/discredit through attack. These suicides very much can occur and I hope can begin to happen less.
Here’s to a random stranger if you read this and are going through something similar, I hope you find peace and safety from these abusers!
That's insulting. And offensive. I think you should be the one asking the psychiatrist or psychologist to diagnose you whatever I deem fit - but, since I'm the one who shared something weird and you hide behind insulting others I don't have the speciality down for to recommend your psychologist.
edit: I can see through your comment history you make a lot of offensive bad faith remarks to people. This is a forum of showing good faith, have you demonstrated that? Maybe you should ask your psychiatrist why you frequent a forum where you can't follow the very clear ruleset of showing good faith.
So is murder and suicide by the CIA. That's very sad too. I hope you never have to experience knowing a family member, friend or a class of people that have been attacked by a group like that - lots of innocents get hurt in crossfire or outright malicious hostility and their experiences can invalidated not too unlike how you have demonstrated today.
Perhaps you can put yourself in someone else's shoes and grow the empathy to see what it's like. Have you ever considered what these innocent people actually experience? Or do you invalidate all of their experiences and say they are all crazy and "it's very sad"? Try saying that to a dead person or a family member who has tried to come forth with what they experienced in outright murder and see that a powerful government-organization just invalidates them.
I suggest you confront your abusive communication and frequent comment history of invalidating others, from your bad faith position where you violate the forum's rules that you frequent. It's hurtful and abusive. I can see that maybe it's easier for some to cope with the evil in the world by just denying it even exists and labeling everyone who experiences it is as just crazy. I can get that not everyone can accept these behaviors are possible in this world and still retain their own position of comfort with themselves and their position in the world. From you though I've experienced no open-mindedness, good faith or ability to acknowledge a perspective different from your own as being possible and I find that lack of empathy as very sad. Good luck.
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> nradov: Has a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist ever evaluated you for paranoid schizophrenia?
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> mannanj That's insulting. And offensive. I think you should be the one asking the psychiatrist or psychologist to diagnose you whatever I deem fit - but, since I'm the one who shared something weird and you hide behind insulting others I don't have the speciality down for to recommend your psychologist. edit: I can see through your comment history you make a lot of offensive bad faith remarks to people. This is a forum of showing good faith, have you demonstrated that? Maybe you should ask your psychiatrist why you frequent a forum where you can't follow the very clear ruleset of showing good faith.
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> nradov: Delusions of persecution by the CIA are a common symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. It's very sad.
I agree that this is an abnormal number of suicides- I don't think anyone is disputing that. I disagree with your suggestion of “housecleaning” though.
I would speculate that the answer is simplier:
DoD “Hacker stuff” kills people. And worse. At scale. The psychological stressors of intelligence work alone is real and extremely high; Cyber Command’s role is not just to know, but to act.
Cyber warfare is escalating faster than they can keep up, global consequences for their actions are high— and they understand the risks better than anyone [1](and can’t talk about it), but they are extremely under resourced, and because of leadership decisions or other factors outside their control, they feel unable to complete their work effectively [2], or are being told to do things they feel are immoral [3].
The most plausible cause of these suicides, and the takeaway I get from this story, is that under the surface of US global military operations, things are bad.
If things are even more stressful than normal under the surface at CYBERCOM and personnel are feeling hopeless enough about it to end their own lives, this should be a red flag for the rest of us.
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[1] maybe you can imagine having a hands on understanding of the real world impact of critical OT exploits, and being both unable to disclose specific details and also yelling into the void about it for years while no one listens. US water treatment cyber vulnerability is a great example of industry and government lagging so hard that it took an enormous volunteer effort and a decade to begin to address fixing issues which should have been a
“fix it yesterday” all hands on deck priority. https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/08/07/water-system...
As another example, the US and Israel hacked “nearly all” traffic cameras in Tehran and used them to target and kill Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Now think about the proliferation of internet connected doorbell and traffic cameras in the US… now imagine having an intimate understanding of how cameras can be used to kill people, while watching that risk grow exponentially over a decade, and being helpless to do anything about it because you aren’t allowed to talk about it and no one would believe you that doorbell cameras are a national security threat anyway.
https://www.wired.com/story/from-ukraine-to-iran-hacking-sec...https://www.safehome.org/resources/home-security-industry-an...
The US intelligence community engaging in murdering suspected "weak links" in order to "send a message", "clean the house" etc. is a regularly recurring phenomenon.
The fiction, that intelligence community (among many other places in US government) was some harbor of angelic superior morality, capable of restraining themselves in spite of total lack of effective oversight is certainly "simple". That doesn't make it true.
USCYBERCOM is not the IC, it’s DoD. The majority of CYBERCOM tasked units are cyber protection teams, primarily focused on securing the DoD’s own vast and bloated network infrastructure from attack by foreign adversaries. The rest are split between hunt forward teams, cyber support teams, and the combat mission teams, the latter of which are the only ones that conduct offensive cyberspace operations. This is all literally 101 stuff
"Housecleaning" isn't part of USCYBERCOM, obviously, it belongs to several arms of the (military) IC and is even partly sourced out to private contractors.
Obviously, it's not exactly official.
Did you expect them to announce those activities on their website?
You know, people would be more receptive to you if you wouldn't talk down on them. I mean, for gods' sakes, parent specifically partially agreed with you(!) and yet you *still* talked down to them.
"Partially agreeing" while baselessly denying the central point is what exactly in your book?
You fall for rhetoric tricks at your own expense here. This matter has a host of important consequences and implications. Treating it at the same level of effort as every other infotainment piece is a failure of judgement.
>"Partially agreeing" while baselessly denying the central point is what exactly in your book?
It means partially agreeing, and quite respectfully, I might add. You, however, were only *dis*respectful, downright rude in fact.
>Treating it at the same level of effort as every other infotainment piece is a failure of judgement.
I'm not treating anything as the same as any level of effort. All I'm saying is if you act like a dick, people will be much less likely to give you any attention, even if something you say is correct.
No, it doesn't: it means to mislead people like you into getting the appearance of agreeableness while actually still baselessly denying the salient point.
Denying without giving any rational reason is again a rhetoric trick to gaslight people not trained in applying formal logic into believing something in spite of contradicting evidence.
How do you act here? You attack me personally while adding nothing to the actual topic at hand.
You're right about people who appear more likeable getting more attention. Does that make their standpoint actually more valid or valuable?
>You attack me personally while adding nothing to the actual topic at hand.
My goal was never to contribute to the discussion but merely to explain that your attitude will not win any converts to your arguments.
People are having good discussions in good faith here and you're angry and contemptuous toward them.
Anyway...it seems you have no as much interest in hearing me than you have in admitting your self-sabotaging emotional state. I am done with this topic.
I’m not him, but I did see this post after his post was censored via [FLAGGED]
I have first hand experience being targeted by the CIA after negatively criticizing them and having a former clearance (Pakistani American also, we know how the brass feels about Muslims in terms of racism and the like).
Curious if you’ve heard of the documentary everything is a rich man’s trick and the author who published it spent a lot of effort investigating for it. There’s probably content you can read from him. Do you trust that sort of information?
Of course there is, but what difficulties can you possibly have finding it?
Part of the problem with events like these is people's "incredulity", which is fundamentally rooted in them not being force-fed with the topic by the media despite the importance.
The other way around, while people baselessly believe to be told everything of importance by their news-feed, in reality they are entirely being left in the dark about truly important matters simply by not "pushing" them in headlines.
The stories exist, you simply don't get them effortlessly.
That attitude of passive complacency has to change.
Look in this thread, the good links are usually those far down.
I ctrl-Fed for "http" in this post and looked through the 61 links, following several of them that seemed like they may be relevant. I didn't find anything that appeared talked about what you've mentioned in your posts. Some talked about deaths, but I didn't find anything that even insinuated that they were carried about by or on behalf of the intelligence community.
I also did a web search for "intelligence community housecleaning" and looked through the top 60 results. I didn't find much. Several references talked about people being fired, but I didn't find any about them being killed.
I'd like to think I'm reasonably intelligent and web-literate, but after 15-20 minutes I didn't find what I was looking for. Maybe I'm just going about it the wrong way? Given how much you've posted on the topic, it seems like you want to convince people; if so, could you post some sources directly?
If you dig there, you'll sooner or later hit upon the weird discrepancies from reality that Wikipedia article has. It mixes unrelated cases with genuinely disturbing ones like McCasland. Who wasn't demented at all.
"Housecleaning" refers to the practice of killing prospective leaks. It doesn't make much sense to kill them once they've talked.
Killing is a last resort, mundane leaks are retaliated against by revoking clearances and destroying careers that way.
Note that the Espionage Act of 1917(!) allows to treat whistleblowers like foreign spies and deprives them of arguing, their leak would serve the common interest.
Actual cases are usually ruled "suicides" or "accidents", but obviously aren't:
Danny Casolaro (1991): "The Octopus" Investigation
Gary Webb (2004): The "Dark Alliance" Expose
Dr. David Kelly (2003): Iraq War WMD Leaker
John P. Wheeler III (2010): Pentagon Insider
... there are many others. You only find what you look for.
I want to read your original claim but it was censored. I am aware of the IC community being active on these forums and using algorithm/actors to downvote and hide information.
> One of the dead was Technical Sergeant Kevin Stallings, a digital network intelligence analyst whose family told Bloomberg they wanted him to be identified to bring greater attention to the suicides. Stallings was stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, Cyber Command’s headquarters. He took his own life the month before he’d have turned 37.
These people aren't "drone operators", they worked for USCYBERCOM, which does "hacker stuff".
The narrative peddled here repeatedly, the statistics were "completely normal" is egregiously wrong.
The concentration of deaths is entirely implausibly described as "suicides", while the far more likely explanation is "housecleaning": murdering potential whistleblowers.
Yes. I saw that post, it was still up. I can see that being true.
Did you see my posts?
I was targeted by the CIA or an intel agency, as a pakistani-american US citizen who has committed no crimes and only spoke up against calling my own government's agency terrorists. I saw what I could describe as behavior online resembling deep state astroturfing and fake accounts, and later agents showed up to experiment on me. I have been wondering if the odd behavior is that resembling a group that wants to try to houseclean me. This isn't a made up instance and you can look through my comment history for examples of how accounts that seem odd show up and in lock-step discredit and attack me. I think this is more evidence for your perspective being possible and not to feel gaslight and made out to be crazy.
