Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dean-of-boeing-supplier-spirit-aerosystems-has-died/

by Freedom2 • 2 years ago

515 529 2 years ago

seattletimes.com

slater• 2 years ago

https://archive.is/zOqdj

twiddling• 2 years ago

Hmm. another Boeing-related whistleblower expired

trhway• 2 years ago

Just yesterday here were a bunch of comments and jokes about how it would look like if this guy dies too. And here we go … fast spreading infection in a 45 years old guy.

nxobject• 2 years ago

Spirit Aerosystems: the part Boeing spun off because even it did its own thing. Without the public profile of Boeing, it must have been an even more hostile place to be.

hnthrowaway03282• 2 years ago

How many are left?

boring-alterego• 2 years ago

I thought for a second what if the whistleblowers get into witness protection, then I looked up what planes the us Marshalls have ... It's not looking good for the whistleblowers.

carabiner3• 2 years ago

The author, Dominic Gates, long time Boeing coverage reporter for Seattle Times and Pulitzer winner, has this to say:

I've had enough
Because I knew Josh, I had to report this - and the coincidence with Mitch, whom I also knew
But if you really believe Boeing has adopted Putin-style assassination, unfollow me and go away
If you're joking, it's not even slightly funny to joke about this death

https://twitter.com/dominicgates/status/1785812827581849988

FYI 11,000 people die of MRSA every year.

ALittleLight3• 2 years ago

Actuarial table says death from all causes at 45 is ~0.4%. It's an unlikely death, paired with another unlikely death - the previous Boeing whistleblower.

I'm really confused by the reporter's attitude. It seems like the exact opposite attitude from what you'd want in a reporter. He seems to be dismissing the unusual coincidence based on... I guess nothing? Just "come on, you can't believe that - we aren't Russia."

How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? How many should we expect will die by chance this year? If another one dies is that the cutoff where it's reasonable to be suspicious?

I don't understand why I would extend any courtesy to Boeing. I was suspicious when the first whistleblower died. Why shouldn't I be? You may be a perfectly nice guy, but if the witnesses testifying against you start dying, I'm going to be suspicious. Why should I treat Boeing any differently?

tom_• 2 years ago

The reporter does not want his wife, children or other family members to commit suicide or fall ill and die.

shadowgovt6• 2 years ago

There are still a lot of unanswered questions around the first death.

In a post-COVID world, a 45-year-old dying of a respiratory infection isn't at all surprising. I concur with the reporter's assessment that more evidence of foul play before open accusations is warranted in this second case.

carabiner3• 2 years ago

Check your priors. What's your base rate likelihood for a person dying from:

* suicide (many documented cases)

* infectious diseases (ditto)

* corporate assassinations (zero cases in the US documented)

Everyone thinking Boeing is carrying out killings that have minimal potential upside and massive downside is succumbing to some cloak and dagger deus ex machina. After age 40 people die from all sorts of causes. This is not about "courtesy," but rational thinking that there would be almost no point in killing an employee when the company is already mired in bad news and that corporate assassinations just don't happen in the US.

XorNot6• 2 years ago

"It was definitely a murder to create a chilling effect on whistleblowers" says a guy on the internet, pushing a narrative that if you whistleblow on Boeing you'll definitely be murdered.

What effect do you imagine that might have?

mzs• 2 years ago

One in four people being treated for MRSA are dead within a month.

kube-system8• 2 years ago

FYI 11,000 people die of MRSA every year.

In the US alone.

halfer53• 2 years ago

Another one damn

quantified• 2 years ago

What's the survival rate of Boeing whistleblowers compared to non-whistleblowers?

nokeya3• 2 years ago

Right now it seems close to zero.

ithkuil• 2 years ago

Isn't the survival rate of us all technically zero anyway?

glandium• 2 years ago

Sam Salehpour is not dead yet, is he?

RachelF• 2 years ago

It appears that criticizing Boeing is even more dangerous than flying in one.

hulitu• 2 years ago

They had the right to remain silent. /s

penguin_booze• 2 years ago

At least we know that the survival rates of Boeing whistle blowers and passengers are comparable.

jmcgough2• 2 years ago

This'll definitely have a chilling effect for future witnesses, which is likely what they paid for.

nokeya3• 2 years ago

Shouldn’t it attract more attention from prosecution? It is clear who is behind all this (some of Boeing top managers), so they must interrogate them all about double kill.

RecycledEle2• 2 years ago

Look at how Frito Lay got away with murdering the Mexican Inn family.

There are many other cases.

protomolecule2• 2 years ago

That's how Kosovo leaders got away with war crimes and crimes against humanity[0]. Even Thaci almost did[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War_crimes_witness_inti...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashim_Tha%C3%A7i#Resignation_...

mandmandam2• 2 years ago

Shouldn’t it attract more attention from prosecution?

It 'should' - but it won't.

Look at how the legal system has treated whistleblowers who go against the MIC and fossil fuels - Assange, Snowden, Donziger, Winner, etc. High profile cases where the whole world was watching.

They're not handing out fines to fossil fuel companies for lying to the planet as they set it alight. Instead, they're handing out harsher and harsher sentences to the activists trying to bring attention to the issue. A lovely 54yo woman was sentenced to 4k in damages, a 3k fine, 60 days in jail and 24 months of supervised release for putting RINSABLE PAINT on the CASE of Degas' Little Dancer. Not even NPR would state that it was rinsable paint - how often do you hear oil companies advertising on them?

Why would you have any faith in that system to protect us from murderous corporations? The trend for these things is dramatically in the wrong direction, and it was bad when companies were allowed to fund and aid literal Nazis without repercussion.

Stranger43• 2 years ago

It should and the if it don't this is going to lead to "House Select Committee on Assassinations" levels of distrust with the entire sector.

Its still possible that this is a freak occurrence but any agency claiming that as a proven fact right now is going to look suspicious.

AndyMcConachie• 2 years ago

Boeing is currently 2-0 with whistleblowers.

I wonder if you could give someone MRSA intentionally. Is that even possible?

eqvinox2• 2 years ago

Not in the Aljazeera reporting, but Seattle Times says he initially was hospitalized for "trouble breathing": https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...

And "trouble breathing" could mean any of a whole bunch of things, a few of which you probably can give someone intentionally…

RecycledEle2• 2 years ago

MRSA (staph) can be transmitted by wiping a used bandage on someone.

kingspact3• 2 years ago

You could even mail it to somebody and when they open the mail, BAM. Or it could be included in the glue of business reply mail. Or wiped on your doorknob.

topspin• 2 years ago

2-0 with whistleblowers

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

How many are left, anyhow?

emayljames• 2 years ago

30 to go it seems https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...

XorNot6• 2 years ago

EDIT 3: God damn it - forget it. The rate is per 100,000 - the site I got it from was terrible [1].

So the numbers don't work at all - the death rate should be about ~0.8% in any given year for the full population going by [2] (798.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2022).

Just to elaborate: my thesis before I edited this post was that if you have a large number of whistleblowers, the chance of someone in the population dying of normal causes over a given time frame might become quite large.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.AMRT.MA

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/mortality-dashboard.htm

kangda123• 2 years ago

"That is, in any given recent year, if you take a sample of 1000 random males, within a year, almost 16% of them will have died."

Surely this can't be true.

XorNot6• 2 years ago

You'd be correct they're not - it's much lower - per 100,000[1]. Should've cross-checked with birth data.

The underlying point though is valid: whether the rate of people dying is particularly high depends on quite a few factors. The estimate for 2023 in Q2 is 944 / 100,000 = 0.9% or so. So within a population of 100, you'd still be unsurprised to find 1 person has randomly died of some cause. So if you take say, the 30 presumed people who have complained about Boeing over the last 3 years and tracked them as a quorum...

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/mortality-dashboard.htm

blackwateragent• 2 years ago

OP's original statement of "The death rate in the United States per 1000 male adults as of 2022 is 163." comes from [1]. That statistic is defined as, "Adult mortality rate, male, is the probability of dying between the ages of 15 and 60--that is, the probability of a 15-year-old male dying before reaching age 60, if subject to age-specific mortality rates of the specified year between those ages." [2]

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.AMRT.MA?end=2022...

[2] https://databank.worldbank.org/metadataglossary/health-nutri...

progval• 2 years ago

The death rate in the United States per 1000 male adults as of 2022 is 163.

Where did you get that number? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta... and https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm are an order of magnitude lower for the general population.

XorNot6• 2 years ago

Yeah I misread the graph - I've corrected the post, although the errors sort of cancelled towards the overall result anyway. With a CDC reported rate of ~0.8-1% per year, then in a group of 10 you'd expect 0.1 deaths if they were suitably random. In a group of 100 you'd expect at least 1.

They're not random, but it's also a group with one-way membership. John Barnett was a whistleblower from 2017 till his death in 2024. So for 7 years he was a Boeing whistleblower, but every year he is he's still in that 0.8-1% chance of all-cause mortality across the general population (likely more given specific non-murder related risk factors).

EDIT: I guess the reason I'm posting up a storm on this is not to defend Boeing, but that there's an actual, identifiable harm to the conspiracy theory narrative which is that it's all fun and games unless you work at Boeing and see evidence of wrongdoing. We the public want and need you to come forward, and a storm of commentary which says "lol Boeing just straight kills people" is all good hot-take fun till you're in an actual position where it might feel quite real. Even if the odds were much worse, going on the internet and saying "this was definitely murder to create a chilling effect* is helping create a chilling effect.

xcv1233• 2 years ago

Plug that into the fact that it doesn't work to kill someone after they have testified

This way deters future whistleblowers.

If they got rid of whistleblowers before they blew the whistle, no one would hear about it. It would not be widely reported. Just another random employee who died.

bandyaboot2• 2 years ago

Wouldn’t they want to carry out their whistleblower deterrence operation before there were already 30 other whistleblowers?

eurleif• 2 years ago

I agree that it doesn't make much sense to kill someone after they've testified, but that 1.6% figure (I think you inadvertently omitted a decimal point) doesn't account for age. Joshua Dean was 45 (0.4% chance of a 45 year old male dying in a given year). John Barnett was 62 (1.5% chance).

XorNot6• 2 years ago

Yeah I was way off on the death figure, but the point is relevant: the risk of a large population and a low probability event is that the low probability event can become a near certainty due to normal causes.

~30 whisteblowers[1] over 3 years is a fair number of people in your chance pool - not guaranteed, but there's confounding factors (i.e. stress, disruption to work and family life etc.)

My point was meant to be that saying "there's a chilling effect" is also creating the chilling effect by implying it's there, when in reality it can just be something more akin to the Birthday Paradox.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...

HekeHakkeri• 2 years ago

Surely the average age of the whistleblowers is quite a bit lower than the average male of the whole male pop, or did you take that into account?

eqvinox2• 2 years ago

I've seen some speculation [https://zeroes.ca/@maggiejk/112369197303623748] that this looks a whole bunch like COVID, and that sounds vaguely on point. Then again we're all armchair doctors now…

[Ed.] also note that https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea... says the initial hospitalization was for "trouble breathing"; this doesn't seem to be in the Aljazeera reporting.

2-3-7-43-18074• 2 years ago

then again this is why i would kill someone in a way that looks like covid if i would be such inclined. also i don't know anybody who ever died of covid, not even indirectly. so, yeah ...

drcongo• 2 years ago

To lose one whistleblower, Mr. Boeing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

sva_• 2 years ago

Qatari propaganda outlet Aljazeera on the frontpage. Perhaps it could be a replaced by a more credible one?

isr• 2 years ago

I reckon the vast majority of planet Earth would take Al Jazeera's word over the BBC, CNN, etc, most days of the week.

And twice on Sundays.

alan-crowe• 2 years ago

I think that you are missing how credibility and propaganda intertwine. The BBC gives you accurate reports on Indonesia and Chile to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Britain. Aljazeera give accurate reports on Boeing and Airbus to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of Qatar. NPR give accurate reports on Angola and Bangladesh to build credibility for when they want to lie to the benefit of the USA.

One navigates an adversarial information environment by harvesting the free truth provided by those seeking to build credibility. Then one tries to avoid the flames when the same organisations burn their credibility to boost their funders and owners.

xgi• 2 years ago

Encouraging conspiracy theories against one of the largest components of the US military industrial complex is precisely something Al Jazeera would be willing to risk losing credibility over. Not that they actually would, because there could never be sufficient evidence to disprove such a conspiracy.

kome2• 2 years ago

that's crazy. that's the second one... how can the authorities ignore the "coincidence"?

government is really weak with the strong and strong with the weak.

lambdaxyzw• 2 years ago

Do you have any proof it's not actually a coincidence? There were 30 whistleblowers, and it's over 3 years.

kome2• 2 years ago

i hope they won't be stupid enough to kill a third one

pshirshov• 2 years ago

What, again? Pure coincidence.

easywood• 2 years ago

Good that they have mentioned the actual illness, or people would assume it was acute lead poisoning.

vdfs• 2 years ago

"Sudden illness"

Tycho2• 2 years ago

There should be a huge investigation, but since the last death was self-inflicted, and this one was due to some mysterious illness, I’m not holding my breath. I wonder if the bank accounts of coroners ever get audited.

2OEH8eoCRo03• 2 years ago

Influenza B is mysterious?

alamortsubite2• 2 years ago

What's "mysterious" about the flu and MRSA?

Tycho2• 2 years ago

It’s mysterious for healthy people to suddenly die from flu in their mid 40s, yes.

greasegum• 2 years ago

The movie Michael Clayton springs to mind for some reason.

hnthrowaway03282• 2 years ago

Considering the sensitivity of their profiles, is there going to be at least a cursory investigation?

peteradio3• 2 years ago

It would seem to be pretty rare for this to occur for a man his age. Intubation is pretty serious, was that the cause of the MRSA?

datascienced• 2 years ago

Boeing getting “lucky” again

sharpshadow• 2 years ago

If Boeing would only manufacture airplanes they would struggle from these recent developments.

kingspact3• 2 years ago

Boeing's on military welfare, like many companies. It has no need to actually produce civilian planes or make profits any more. So why not bump off whistleblowers? Anyway the era of air travel for the masses is coming to a close if you look at all the different plans being hatched to roll up environmental fees into flying which are designed to be unaffordable for ordinary people.

bonzini2• 2 years ago

At some point, another one apparently found two missing lug nuts on a wheel of his car, and texted his lawyer "if I die I am not suicidal".

eli3• 2 years ago

I doubt that happened.

bovermyer• 2 years ago

Got a source for that?

jader201• 2 years ago

No reason to downvote someone for asking for a source (before one was given).

A source is helpful context for claims like this, and the person that responded with one may not otherwise have had it not been questioned.

sp332• 2 years ago

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-3...

Inside the whistleblower’s text was a photo of a wheel missing two lug nuts.... “If anything happens,” they told me, not for the first time, “I’m not suicidal.”

eli3• 2 years ago

According to a text from that unnamed (and not reported elsewhere?) whistleblower

lynndotpy• 2 years ago

I don't know why you're being downvoted and questioned. This was widely reported last month when John Barnett was found dead from a gunshot wound in the head. AFAIK, (and don't quote me on this), only one source had said this.

I don't think it's wildly conspiratorial to discuss this, even if the implication is "this might be a pattern of foul play".

Even if both of these deaths are coincidences and within statistical reason, I imagine the perceived pattern must have a chilling effect on other would-be whistleblowers.

bonzini2• 2 years ago

Agreed, hence my use of "apparently". Even if it's not substantiated further, the implications are much worse than those of someone dying of pneumonia (which may be bad luck).

lionkor• 2 years ago

Democratic republic and all its bodies working as intended

baq• 2 years ago

Boeing has some competent people, apparently. Sad and aggravating that it's this particular department.

boppo1• 2 years ago

C'mon man, haven't you seen Michael Clayton? They're independent contractors.

siva7• 2 years ago

Probably the chief of "special operations" dept. could take over the QA dept.

FrustratedMonky6• 2 years ago

More coincidence? 3rd's the charm, when it will be a trend to investigate?

paulryanrogers• 2 years ago

Clever idea, to infect someone with a nasty yet natural virus/bacteria. Still, if it doesn't work and unlucky things keep happening then authorities may start looking more closely.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

Nit: MRSA is a bacterium, not a virus.

FrustratedMonky6• 2 years ago

Nit picking.

Can't both virus and bacteria be injected?

Has MRSA been used in attacks before?

CyberDildonics• 2 years ago

MRSA means Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus

A bacterium is a single bacteria and to be resistant there needs to be a lot more than one (we all have some on us at any time, an infection is greater than or equal to 4 micrograms/mL).

MRSA is bacterial, not a single bacterium.

ActionHank2• 2 years ago

Once is by chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.

HideousKojima• 2 years ago

"Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action." - Ian Fleming

ActionHank2• 2 years ago

Thank you for the original.

MyFirstSass• 2 years ago

No conspiracies are true, i know that from my time in the business world, even in small companies i've never actually seen anyone conspire, create hidden alliances og plot something so surely in larger companies it's even less likely to happen. /s

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

“Trust no one! The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them! ” ― Col. Hunter Gathers, OSI

morkalork• 2 years ago

Look at the size of pool of whistleblowers and associated people that bad actors would want to harm, their demographic and what that demographic's mortality rate is like. Two deaths in a year is borderline acceptable, three would be extremely unlikely.

2-3-7-43-18074• 2 years ago

the question is where do you start to count. how about number 1 is one of those covered up incidents where dozens of people died instead of making sure it doesn't happen again?

0xbadcafebee3• 2 years ago

Four times is God having a vendetta against you. Five times is quantum physics wants you dead. Six...

free_bip• 2 years ago

Let me guess, we're chalking this one up to coincidence too, are we?

ceejayoz4• 2 years ago

I'm not saying it's impossible, but were I an assassin I'd probably want something a little more guaranteed than inducing pneumonia.

jodacola• 2 years ago

While the first death opened up many questions for me, this death was the result of a MRSA infection, stroke, and pneumonia.

This headline feels like it's trying to play on the conspiracy theorists among us, with the important bit way down in the article. Well, they got my view.

gjsman-10002• 2 years ago

As though MRSA isn't a great thing to inject into an enemy...

ceejayoz4• 2 years ago

2% of people are carrying it around; it's a pretty common hospital complication.

imglorp• 2 years ago

It's also possible that there were multiple, uncoordinated acts of malice and thus not a conspiracy. There are many parties that would like this to go away, from investors to unions to airlines.

jefftk• 2 years ago

How many people would, if they suddenly died, be reported as a "Boeing whistleblower"? The lower this number is, the more surprising the death.

silverquiet• 2 years ago

What if it's a giant company with a lot of problems? Couldn't there be a ton of whistleblowers? It's easy to suspect foul play, but I don't know how pneumonia subsequent to MRSA infection could be deployed as a weapon of assassination. And I'd imagine that every part of being a whistleblower is depressing; you are inevitably alienated from one of your main social groups when you do so.

ricardobeat• 2 years ago

Reports say there were seven whistleblowers in the original 737 Max hearing.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

It also ought to be pretty shocking, if things are so bad at Boeing that multiple whistleblowers dying is just an expected thing as a result of statistics.

I mean that’s probably the more likely story than MRSA corporate assassins. But it is still pretty nuts, right?

queuebert• 2 years ago

... he had contracted pneumonia in April and suffered a stroke following an MSRA infection.

That should be "MRSA", for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Terrible fact checking.

(But they did helpfully provide a hyperlink to Facebook-related stories.)

a3w2• 2 years ago

Bacterial infection, grammatical inflection, both natural causes of death [According to uncyclopedia Wiki probably? Don't ask me, I am not germ-anist here in germ-any]

binarymax• 2 years ago

I’m having a hard time seeing how pneumonia and stroke could be inflicted on a person as part of a cover up. Seems like this was just unfortunate illness.

outime• 2 years ago

I have no idea but if many decades ago they revealed this [1], at this point it's safe to assume there are much better things.

[1] https://www.military.com/video/guns/pistols/cias-secret-hear...

pazimzadeh2• 2 years ago

Do you know what the toxin was?

erikerikson• 2 years ago

I once worked with a researcher who was apparently the world's expert on giving mice strokes. Pneumonia seems more difficult.

2-3-7-43-18074• 2 years ago

certainly not out of reach for a determined and powerful adversary. infecting someone with a respiratory virus isn't exactly rocket science. just spraying a subperceptibly thin aerosol into someone's face should do it.

stusmall• 2 years ago

What a business card

echelon3• 2 years ago

MRSA [1], though? He could have been inoculated with it.

MRSA is awful, difficult or impossible to clear, and can certainly be fatal.

This could be a very diabolical way to assassinate someone.

How would you be able to trace it? It could have been laced in his food or drink. Or simply transfered by touch (got on his hands, then wiped on his face or nose). Or aerosolized as he walked by.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphylo...

cogman10• 2 years ago

MRSA is fairly common especially in hospital settings. After all, you have a setting where people are coming in sick with a disease that is hard to kill and resistant to antibiotics.

foxyv2• 2 years ago

It's also trivially easy to culture MRSA. A lot of university micro-bio classes induce anti-biotic resistance in e-coli as an experiment for under graduates.

kube-system8• 2 years ago

There are 3 million Americans unknowingly walking around with MRSA in their nose right now, all around us. It is so common I'm not sure it would be a good assassination weapon even if you tried.

chasil• 2 years ago

Up to 30 of us carry staph variants in our noses.

https://now.uiowa.edu/news/2013/06/be-gone-bacteria

peteradio3• 2 years ago

Guy comes in with routine influenza, transfer him to emergency, pacify him and forcibly intubate him with MRSA infected tube. The rest happens as if by mistake.

kodt3• 2 years ago

So now Boeing and the hospital staff are in on the conspiracy. This place is turning into reddit.

highcountess2• 2 years ago

Que the leaked pentagon briefing from … what was it, 12 years ago … about the use of “vaccines” to alter the brain chemistry of people with “extremist” views, so they too may benefit from approved values.

ceejayoz4• 2 years ago

There's a long history of zany ideas being looked at. I'm not inclined to conclude it's technologically feasible just from that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_bomb, for example.

2-3-7-43-18074• 2 years ago

both is very easy to achieve and also kind of medically obvious

ghusto• 2 years ago

I'm not at all inclined to believe this is anything more than a co-incidence, but those things can definitely be induced in a way that's difficult to detect.

RobotToaster• 2 years ago

The US military used to have a stockpile of Q-fever bioweapons, that they claim to have destroyed. Q-fever can cause pneumonia.

dralley3• 2 years ago

A fucking cold can also cause pneumonia. There are thousands of things that cause pneumonia. WTF are you talking about.

dudeinjapan2• 2 years ago

Doubt Boeing or its spook going to use a bioweapon to off a whistleblower. Too complex, too many parties involved, too much of a trail, too high consequences if caught (i.e. terrorism), too high survival % vs. the panoply of less exotic options. It’s a Wile E. Coyote-level plot.

smsm422• 2 years ago

Pneumonia is just a lung infection, so I imagine there's a number of ways you can make a person to unknowingly inhale something.

However, it looks way too complicated for a plot. There are many tried and proven methods of getting rid of people. Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works - we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done - shootings, stabbings, explosions, poisons, drownings, falling from heights, whatever - but I can't remember any case where a biological agent were used. And thinking about it - biological agents are hard to produce, hard to handle, unstable, unpredictable in use, can't be properly targeted, why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

So while it does look suspicious on its face, I'd have hard time believing it's an example of an assassination.

candiodari• 2 years ago

"Something?". Having them inhale oil or dirt will do it. Pneumonia is usually caused by a bacteria that's just everywhere (though usually on the skin), that's too simple. If it starts growing in your lungs, you can try antibiotics. If that doesn't work, well, nice knowing you.

We are surrounded by lethal bacteria. That humans survive depends on the immune system having a 100% success rate preventing bacteria from forming even a small colony in the lungs (and several other places, like the teeth, where infections can rapidly and surprisingly turn deadly)

This is why people cough so extremely hard when inhaling solid or liquid stuff in their windpipes.

Also this happens all the time. That someone dies from pneumonia is not uncommon (though for oil it's usually someone who manages to spray themselves with aerosolized oil at work). So even if an autopsy found a few specs of dirt in the lungs, and even if they actually trace that to be the cause, that's not extremely suspicious. (Plus why would they check? Obviously with a pneumonia patient you know the cause of death)

matsemann• 2 years ago

This sounds a bit like the toupee fallacy - you have never seen a good toupee, because the good ones you don't recognize as anything other than normal hair.

prmph• 2 years ago

why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

So that you will think it is not suspicious

generalizations2• 2 years ago

Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works

This is pretty similar to the old argument about why mass surveillance is unlikely to be happening - we're just not that good at keeping secrets. Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works.

we know about a lot of cases where people were assassinated (of course, we may also not know about many, but I think we have a good sample). Among those, we have a lot of ways it can be done

Let's not forget about survivorship bias. You only know about the assassinations you know about. You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret.

rising-sky• 2 years ago

why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

Like... head shot in an alley? suffocating them in their sleep? drowning them in a body of water?

I think you can probably answer your question yourself if you think about it

coldtea6• 2 years ago

Spooks aren't actually that good in hiding their works

That's because it's the failures we learn about. Which could be 90% or 5% of "their works".

But never mind the spooks. We are also told "there's no perfect crime". Yet, less than half the murders get solved in the US, for example:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...

ksherlock• 2 years ago

If you're a spook for an authoritarian government, it's probably better for your work to be somewhat visible to keep the serfs in line.

pazimzadeh2• 2 years ago

why would anyone use that instead of dozens of easier and more common methods?

Ask Suge Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxPTtFv4AkM

You can assume criminals have gotten better at this type of thing since 1995

ekianjo2• 2 years ago

ricin was used BY the Soviet Union and Russia also used radioactive agents to kill someone not super long ago. And a nerve agent was used to kill someone close to Kim too https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-na...

Aeolun• 2 years ago

Isn’t that kind of what they’d have developed COVID for?

RamiAwar• 2 years ago

kind of the point though

mattmaroon7• 2 years ago

I figure there's like a 99% chance it happened naturally, and a 1% chance it was the most brilliant assasination of all time specifically because any rational person would think it's unlikely to have been one.

ReptileMan• 2 years ago

I think there were some heavy metal poisons (not Alice Cooper or Bret Michaels) that had symptoms of pneumonia, and the treatment for pneumonia fucked up the patient a bit.

normalaccess• 2 years ago

Running someones immune system or poisoning them is a fantastic way to get plausible deniability. No smoking gun...

Plausible Deniability is when a person's involvement or culpability in an event might be denied, or at least mitigated, by creating a situation where they can claim ignorance or an inability to act.

jmcgough2• 2 years ago

There are a lot of easy ways to give someone pneumonia, like aspiration.

lubesGordi• 2 years ago

Agreed. Being a whistleblower is probably very stressful.

alex_lav• 2 years ago

Not to say that I believe it happened, but there is a difference between actual cause of death and reported cause of death. As in, just because it was written down that pneumonia and stroke were involved doesn't necessarily make it true.

Again, I do not believe this happened, but that's probably how you'd do it.

walterbell2• 2 years ago

In 2020 and 2021, there was endless online discussion of airborne pathogen distribution, measurement and defense.

dyauspitr2• 2 years ago

I don’t think too many spooks want to handle something as dangerous as MRSA. How do you even infect someone with that without infecting yourself in the process.

autoexec• 2 years ago

He had a sudden mysterious illness that caused him to have problems breathing. If this were a cover up, that illness would have been the cover up attempt, not the pneumonia. The breathing problems required the whistleblower to be intubated and he later developed pneumonia, and later still MRSA.

The pneumonia and MRSA were certainly just an unfortunate illness. The more conspiratorial can debate over if the original breathing difficulties that brought him into the hospital were the result of an assassination attempt or not. For all we know he just had Covid.

gitaarik9• 2 years ago

Just because you don't know how it's done or aren't aware of methods for it doesn't mean it isn't possible to do for other people.

swarnie2• 2 years ago

All in on Boeing.

Any company willing to murder two people to maintain the share price is an excellent investment in my books.

AnimalMuppet2• 2 years ago

You should re-think that. First, it's immoral. Second, it's highly unwise.

If the whistleblowers are right, then planes are going to keep breaking. If planes keep breaking, the share price is going to collapse.

greenavocado• 2 years ago

A defense contract will suddenly materialize

kergonath• 2 years ago

It sounded like sarcasm, to be honest.

b3lvedere4• 2 years ago

I don't know. Ford Motor Company and General Motors still exist after their inventive ways to circumvent repairs that could have saved lives. Yes, i know they are very sorry.

b3lvedere4• 2 years ago

Companies don't murder people. People murder people.

Zigurd• 2 years ago

Corporate personhood. Checkmate!

anderber• 2 years ago

Companies are people ʅ(°_°)ʃ

sidcool• 2 years ago

I thought this only happened in second and third world countries.

ethagnawl• 2 years ago

Yes

dagmx• 2 years ago

Isn’t that viewpoint just the result of nationalist propaganda in education/media in the US?

The US is infamous for extra judicial killings, both domestically and internationally.

lupire• 2 years ago

That's not what the world numbers mean.

nojs• 2 years ago

His mother wrote on Facebook that he had contracted pneumonia in April and suffered a stroke following an MSRA infection.

I love a good conspiracy theory but this sounds pretty far fetched, how do you cause someone to contract pneumonia?

chakintosh• 2 years ago

His mother wrote on Facebook that he had contracted pneumonia in April and suffered a stroke following an MSRA infection.

So which one is it? Suddenly or not?

lenerdenator2• 2 years ago

I mean, all death is sudden when you think about it.

(I say this with all of the seriousness of a 1980s British comedian who probably thought it before I did)

masfuerte• 2 years ago

It's like the Hemingway quote:

"How did you go bankrupt?"

"Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."

bryan_w• 2 years ago

I've learned recently that sometimes dying is just getting sick, and failing to get better.

deadbabe• 2 years ago

It’s trivial to make someone’s cause of death appear completely natural if you know how. Even better if you know they have some pre-existing condition you could leverage.

Brosper• 2 years ago

Whops...

treprinum• 2 years ago

Is there a must have course on executive voodoo and "dark rhetoric" for execs of large dysfunctional companies? Which MBA teaches sociopathic courses like these? I only know about one such college in Paris...

avnfish• 2 years ago

The Onion: "Boeing Promotes Mysterious Employee Known Only As ‘The Panther’": https://www.theonion.com/boeing-promotes-mysterious-employee...

hx8• 2 years ago

The thing about being suspected of one murder is that you tend to get blamed for other deaths.

hinkley2• 2 years ago

You’ll never make a good Dread Pirate Robert’s with that attitude.

Night_Thastus2• 2 years ago

People need to put down the spy thriller books.

Dude was sick. Really sick. Had been for awhile. Nothing nefarious here, just a shitty clickbait title to get people riled up as usual.

FrustratedMonky6• 2 years ago

""He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.""

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...

Night_Thastus2• 2 years ago

He had pneumonia and MRSA. As we just saw with covid, respiratory issues can be a death sentence easily.

brianjking• 2 years ago

Okay, this is just nuts at this point.

GartzenDeHaes• 2 years ago

This was before use of the internet was widespread, but I knew a women who worked at a regional airport. She repeatedly reported safety violations to the (politically connected) operator of the airport, but was ignored. Eventually, she reported them to the FAA who launched an investigation.

- She started receiving threatening phone calls

- Pictures of her kids walking home from school showed up in her mailbox

- Her house was shot up in the middle of the night

- The family dog was killed, disassembled, and the parts were strung up in the house

The police wouldn't do anything and she eventually had to quit her job and move out of the county.

lxgr• 2 years ago

Similar things happened to journalists and activist short sellers reporting on irregularities at Wirecard before it all blew up. (The German authorities reacted swiftly to the reports by... banning short sales of Wirecard shares and investigating the journalists for market manipulation.)

Occasionally, reality apparently is as crass as some classic corporate conspiracy thrillers suggest.

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

Do you have a source or reference for this? I'd be really surprised if some of your items (e.g. her house being shot up, her dog "disassembled") wouldn't result in some level of journalistic coverage.

My apologies, but my time on the Internet has definitely trained me to be skeptical of extreme reports that make me enraged, without additional evidence.

user_78323• 2 years ago

I suppose one would have to take OP's word. A 3 year old account doesn't seem to be the kind (hopefully) engaging in false rumors. And after all this I definitely wouldn't expect her to go forward lest her family gets harmed.

Sidenote, but coming from a country where it's "known" that speaking up against corruption can likely end up killing you, it's funny to see people being skeptical about it. It's maybe similar to racism/sexism - yes, don't believe anything without proof - but if someone claims it's happened and give details, it's certainly quite plausible.

jjtheblunt• 2 years ago

what county? sounds evil-crazy obviously

hinkley2• 2 years ago

This sounds like a movie plot where the mafia has taken over a major corporation.

0xbadcafebee3• 2 years ago

I know a lot more women who have had this kind of thing happen to them, and they didn't work in airlines. They were just women with stalkers.

HumblyTossed2• 2 years ago

Just call Liam Neeson.

Nextgrid• 2 years ago

The eBay stalking case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal) suggests this isn't as implausible as it sounds.

jjk16611• 2 years ago

Frankly tame compared to the Wolf Tree case.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdga/pr/two-sentenced-their-rol...

snowwrestler3• 2 years ago

I’m not surprised to read this, as it only takes 1-2 people to do these sorts of things, and some people are capable of it. They may not be totally mentally stable, or they feel desperate, or confident they can get away with it, or all of the above.

American history is full of these sorts of incidents of harassment, violence, and sometimes even murder. The history of the labor movement or civil rights movement is sobering.

It doesn’t take a CEO making a call to some assassin on the corporate payroll. Usually the reality is far more banal: a supervisor or coworker or neighbor who just takes matters into their own hands.

To be clear, I’m NOT claiming that that is what happened to Josh Dean; I’m speaking generally about people getting harassed for trying to do what they think is the right thing.

sagebird• 2 years ago

Perhaps the whistle itself is contaminated.

m00x• 2 years ago

Damn, what a crazy coincidence.

bicijay• 2 years ago

Shit, im gonna play the devils advocate... Unless they forged the cause of death, we are indeed having a surge in pneumonia cases around the globe...

andai• 2 years ago

Is deadly infection really a viable assassination method? Seems kind of like blowing a zero day exploit. Doesn't really seem worth it?

kube-system8• 2 years ago

MRSA was already killing 120,000+ people per year already. It is nasty shit.

whatamidoingyo• 2 years ago

Are there other whistleblowers?

If there are, I can't imagine how they feel.

josu• 2 years ago

According to this article there are 30[1]. Another whistleblower allegedly committed suicide two months ago [2].

[1] "Aside from Mr Barnett and Mr Dean, there are some 30 Boeing whistleblowers, including Mr Salehpour." https://theloadstar.com/im-scared-says-boeing-whistleblower-....

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barnett_(whistleblower)

foobarian• 2 years ago

Could be there are just a lot of Boeing whistleblowers.

hrdwdmrbl• 2 years ago

Yes, 2 out of how many? The denominator is important here.

hackerlight2• 2 years ago

And the denominator isn't just the number of Boeing whistleblowers but the number of similar cases where whistleblowers could have died and raised suspicions, but didn't. We can't just cherry pick the Boeing example after the fact.

DavidSJ• 2 years ago

Something something survivorship bias plane meme. But maybe that one's in poor taste under the circumstances.

dotnet00• 2 years ago

Would punch too many holes in the argument :)

dmbche• 2 years ago

I believe there were 7

Edit0: Nope - 32 whistleblower complaints in the last three years, but I imagine some of those could be from the same person - so up to 32. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/4/19/boeing-subject-o...

sophacles3• 2 years ago

Either way, boeing looks kinda suspect here...

Small number of whistle-blowers: boeing looks pretty suspect, because why do they keep dying?

Large number of whistle-blowers: boeing looks pretty suspect, because why so many?

causal• 2 years ago

Yeah, so perhaps there's no conspiracy of assassination. But if you're so shady that SO many people have come forward to blow the whistle that MULTIPLE are likely to die purely by chance in the course of investigation - you probably deserve whatever suspicion you're getting by that point.

FrustratedMonky6• 2 years ago

""He was 45, had been in good health and was noted for having a healthy lifestyle.""

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/whistleblower-josh-dea...

From Healthy to Dead in 2 weeks is still pretty extreme. It isn't like pneumonia and MRSA aren't known factors.

Perhaps a 'weaponized' MRSA?

eep_social• 2 years ago

Stress kills and he was under a lot of stress but I’m not sure how anyone would be able to produce enough evidence to be certain.

samdcbu• 2 years ago

Antibiotic resistant MRSA kills thousands of people a year in the US. The idea that he went to the hospital with pneumonia and then contracted antibiotic resistant MRSA from the hospital environment is very plausible.

marricks2• 2 years ago

Pretty sure the cause of death "seeming very plausible" is highly valued.

withinboredom• 2 years ago

then contracted antibiotic resistant MRSA from the hospital environment is very plausible.

Wouldn't other people in the hospital contract it as well?

shadowgovt6• 2 years ago

MRSA is already a weaponized MRSA.

I don't think people who don't spend a lot of time in hospitals have any idea how quickly a person's fortune can change. They're still the best place to care for the sick, but they're also hotbeds of disease because, hey, we keep all the sick people there.

One overlooked sanitization, one visit from a relative who touched the wrong thing on the way to your room, one spot of genetic bad luck that makes you particularly susceptible to infections you'd be likeliest to encounter in a hospital, one never-diagnosed allergic response... That's all she wrote. Doesn't matter over-much how healthy you were before because "on your back struggling to breathe for days on end in a strange environment" is a wildly different environment to "enjoying the fresh mountain air close to home."

FrustratedMonky6• 2 years ago

Boeing and Conspiracies aside, this is the scary thing.

Discussing 'conspiracies' is actually an entertainment so we don't have to think about the reality like anti-biotic resistant diseases that could cause another pandemic.

Easier to contemplate secret assassin organizations, hired by big Corps. Or a Boeing, Military Industrial complex, CIA connected death squad.

intunderflow2• 2 years ago

The only thing more dangerous than flying on Boeing appears to be criticising them

kube-system8• 2 years ago

The total number of deaths in all airplane crashes combined since 1970 is about as much as MRSA kills in 8 months of a typical year.

mjburgess• 2 years ago

I'm not sure what you think this shows.

If we had an organization responsible and capable of preventing MRSA deaths, and was failing to do so, they'd be in prison at 8 million deaths.

The issue here isn't how many deaths, it's whether boeing has a duty and capability to prevent them; whether it has failed to do so; and whether this failure has caused a systematic problem with its recent planes that could lead to more deaths.

On all accounts it seems: yes, they've gutted product quality and it has lead to severe accidents.

electric_mayhem• 2 years ago

So you’re saying there’s a tremendous allowance to be made for quality to diminish further before you feel like it’s a real problem?

atlas_hugged• 2 years ago

While your point is perfectly valid, I think it should include fairer comparisons than infectious diseases. Most people don’t willingly participate in something that would risk MRSA, whereas many do fly. Not sure what a better comparison would be though.

In this case, it would be something that includes: number of deaths or injury or near death (door flying off and potentially getting sucked out at 30000 ft) due to flying Boeing vs driving X number of miles in a car.

This would be a similarly rare occurrence but would be nice to see the comparison between plane types.

reactordev• 2 years ago

You don’t find it concerning and possibly suspicious that both whistleblowers have died? The first one said “if anything happens to me, it’s not suicide”. Now this…

Zenzero• 2 years ago

This is just juxtaposition of two completely unrelated things. The only relationship they have is an endpoint of death.

aaronbrethorst• 2 years ago

I dunno, I'd imagine that being on the receiving end of a Boeing Harpoon missile is probably a bit more dangerous.

phaedryx• 2 years ago

Could the explanation be that being a whistleblower is really stressful and hard on your health?

marricks2• 2 years ago

Sure, but I'm not sure why we have to invent excuses for companies. They create them themselves just fine.

shadowgovt6• 2 years ago

I wouldn't say "expecting horses and not zebra" is "creating excuses."

You can refrain from giving Boeing the benefit of the doubt here and still come to the conclusion "It's not weird that someone didn't recover from a respiratory infection during flu season."

shadowgovt6• 2 years ago

Given that he died of MRSA in a hospital two weeks after falling ill, yes.

sevagh• 2 years ago

That's how the thread dismissed the last one.

ComputerGuru• 2 years ago

The first Boeing whistleblower to “off himself” allegedly told his family shortly before he died that if anything happened to him, “it’s not suicide.”

https://www.newsweek.com/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblower-p...

sciolistse• 2 years ago

From what I've seen that's kind of overselling it, his own family hasn't claimed that he said that, an anonymous person who claimed to be a friend of his did.

But I may have missed any further developments to actually verify that his family had been told something similar.

zamadatix• 2 years ago

Yeah, his family said "He was suffering from PTSD and anxiety attacks as a result of being subjected to the hostile work environment at Boeing which we believe led to his death". As much as a conspiracy for fear of being next could come into it I'd have to believe it'd be more than a lone and anonymous friend of the family that would speak out if confided with this info.

Between that and the 30 some whistleblowers in the last 5 years that two died close to one another isn't all that damning.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-barnett-boeing-whistleblow...

dralley3• 2 years ago

But I may have missed any further developments to actually verify that his family had been told something similar.

You have not, his family thinks he killed himself, but blames Boeing for making his life awful for several years.

TylerE• 2 years ago

An unarmed “family friend” who hadn’t spoken to him in over a decade. Total hearsay at best.

FireBeyond• 2 years ago

Apropos of the context of this situation...

As a paramedic, I'd take this with a grain of salt: I have been on calls for a non-trivial number of patients who've sworn black and blue that they're "no longer suicidal", "no longer a threat", "if anything happens to me, it wasn't suicide" who, you guessed it, went on to attempt or commit suicide in very short order.

rakoo3• 2 years ago

If they were really killed because of their leaks, I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option. Do Boeing engineers work on stuff that secretive ? Are you given the nuclear codes on your first day ? I'm really curious

intunderflow2• 2 years ago

The effect on the value of the company and the strategic effect of letting Airbus (a European company) dominate aerospace manufacturing is a pretty big threat

dh2022• 2 years ago

well, whoever would make this type of "executive decision" should be prepared to go to jail for a really long time next to really violent bad people. Multinational execs did not show propensity for these types of decisions (the propensity at C-Suite is to pay a fine and move on....) So prior knowledge makes me think these are accidents.

It would be really good to get as much information about these deaths (and closure for the families)

PS. for arguments sake, if another Boeing whistleblower would get a sudden disease I would be more inclined to think that maybe there is some chemical/mechanical exposure in the Boeing / Spirit factories rather then some Michael Clayton-type action...

psunavy033• 2 years ago

And the (hypothetical) effect on the value of a company in the (hypothetical) event they are proven to assassinate critics is . . . what exactly?

Swenrekcah2• 2 years ago

Boeing will never fail financially or fall out of use because of their importance for US geopolitical status. I don’t think the USA cares much about the issue except insofar as the USA wants Boeing to deliver reliable high quality products.

However, Boeing executives can (and should) get in to trouble. They probably care very much about what comes to light in court.

slowmovintarget• 2 years ago

By turning out bad product, Boeing has let Airbus dominate commercial aerospace manufacturing all on their own.

hackerlight2• 2 years ago

But why would any executive organize that and risk life in prison for their 0.3 percent ownership stake? They could just retire rich and leave the problems to the shareholders. Is there criminal liability that the executives may face that could form a motive?

colechristensen• 2 years ago

This is the commercial arm of Boeing, but not even that bit a spun off bit of Boeing that just builds airframes called Spirit.

Boeing does do highly classified things in other branches of the company that have nothing to do with any of this, even then nobody would be assassinated for the most egregious espionage outside of some absurd movie plot scenario. Spies go to prison if they’re not recruited for counterintelligence.

Influenza and MRSA would be very odd assassination tools.

cm2187• 2 years ago

Any other industry I would have called bullshit, but defense companies are always a bit murky, with close links to intelligence services (who help in international negotiations and industrial spying) and current/former military. So lots of people who would know who to call to make things happen.

I have in mind for instance the Taiwan frigate scandal that has seen all sort of mysterious deaths, including Thiery Imbot (former DGSE, and son of former head of the DGSE), who died falling from a window in Paris. The official investigation blamed the wind which will make anyone who lived in Paris laugh.

So, I don't know, but not implausible.

rakoo3• 2 years ago

Oh you're right, I completely forgot their involvement in defense projects. Maybe something involving the level at which Boeing along wiah the US gov spied on Airbus to win contracts as well.

ClumsyPilot8• 2 years ago

I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option.

When Putin's regime punishes a critic or dissident, it is not done to stop this particular critic disclosing something sensitive. It is done as a warning to future critics. If you think this principle is never applied by western agencies, look at what happened to Julian Assange - after being prosecuted for 12 years the dude has lost it and Ecuador has kicked him out for smearing faeces on embassy walls.

Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.

And they used to do it in the USA, in 1920's.

https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/88n97g/3-union-leaders-were-...

rakoo3• 2 years ago

Yeah I have no doubt this serves as a message for future whistleblowers, but damn that is some level of prevention.

Additionally, western corporations were, multiple times, accused of being involved in assassinations of union leaders in developing countries.

Unions are the kryptonite of capitalists and threaten their very existence, so it isn't that out of field; if we are to make the parallel, it means there is something in what they know that threatens the very existence of Boeing and I fail to imagine what

bogwog• 2 years ago

I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories, but I do like crime thrillers so I'll add that one potential reason could be that one or more people at the company are worried about prison time for something they did. That kind of thing could lead someone to make desperate moves, like assassinating a whistleblower. Hell, it doesn't even need to be someone high up on the ladder, it could be one of the factory workers that worked on a plane that went down, and is panicking because he got bad legal advice from ChatGPT!

... but I'm like 99.9998% confident this is actually just a series of non-malicious, tragic coincidences rather than a conspiracy.

shepardrtc2• 2 years ago

I struggle to find what could be so sensitive that an assassination is ever an option

It's a warning to future whistleblowers.

bioneuralnet• 2 years ago

My first thought is "WTF!" But my second is this: every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually). With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues, it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.

Combine that with one headline-grabbing (apparent) suicide during a deposition, and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.

graywh• 2 years ago

32 whistleblowers in the last 3 years

throwup2382• 2 years ago

That’s a lot of assassinations! I bet Boeing gets a volume discount.

orblivion2• 2 years ago

Out of how many wistleblowers? How does that compare to other people with the same demographics?

tootie7• 2 years ago

Where did you get that number?

coliveira• 2 years ago

People should stop and do some very serious investigation about a company that has 32 whistleblowers just in the last 3 years....

dustfinger• 2 years ago

Where did you get that number from? Do you have links?

danielfoster2• 2 years ago

Not to mention how old some of them must be.

dingnuts• 2 years ago

well this guy was 45 and described as healthy in the article, but shows up to the hospital with a mysterious lung problem and then gets MRSA

it's not exactly a smoking gun but you can't blame the guy's age, either. 45 is just middle age, I hope

CrazyPyroLinux• 2 years ago

(apparent) suicide

The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...

mattmaroon7• 2 years ago

My ex killed herself not long after telling me she wasn't suicidal. This may surprise you, but suicidal people often lie about being suicidal. Or, they rapidly go from not being suicidal to being so. Or, due to mental illness, they've lost a grip on reality.

dralley3• 2 years ago

The one where he specifically told his family beforehand that he wasn't suicidal...

This game of telephone is absurd.

His family has said no such thing. A proclaimed "friend of the family" claimed he told her this.

ChrisRR3• 2 years ago

If only mental health were that simple. Many people aren't suicidal until it gets too much and then the thoughts take over

delfinom2• 2 years ago

OR, we are living in a simulation and this is just a joke.

I mean just the other day, the emergency slide fell off a Boeing aircraft and landed essentially, in the backyard of the lawyer suing Boeing. Lol

paul7986• 2 years ago

omg lol https://www.businessinsider.com/missing-delta-emergency-slid...

akira2501• 2 years ago

every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die (eventually)

That's extremely tautological.

it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.

It's surprising they have so many whistle blowers that more than one has died in a short span of time, in particular, before the investigations over their allegations have been satisfactorily and publicly completed.

and we're now all primed to notice these deaths and attribute intent.

That doesn't mean it's pointless to ask questions and to investigate further. There's a lot of people who seem very eager for this all to just "go away." That should make anyone, let alone a forum of hackers, somewhat suspicious.

sxg3• 2 years ago

I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.

With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues

So many? Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.

cbsmith12• 2 years ago

I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.

No. It happens every day. Yes, if you pick two random middle-aged people at random, it's exceedingly rare for both of them to die without warning. However, if you pick a large population of otherwise healthy middle-aged people, the probably that two of them might die without warning is actually quite high.

The question is, how large is the population? If the union is to be believed (and there's a lot of credibility there), Boeing whistleblowers are a pretty large population. Add in to that the stress & disruption of being a whistleblower, and then layer on the stress from any retaliation from Boeing (which allegedly is happening on a daily basis), and the probability of two of them dying around the same time isn't really that low.

e.g., if you assume a mortality rate of 1 in 1000/yr (which seems very low, considering their circumstance) and a population of 100, the odds of two of them dying over the course of a year is over 50% (1-0.999^100)^2 = 53.29%.

cbsmith12• 2 years ago

Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.

Yeah, out of a population of 32, it's unlikely to happen. It seems likely that this number is grossly underrepresenting the size of the population. Maybe whistleblowers are being targeted, maybe there are a lot more than 32, maybe both of those are true, but it seems unlikely that both of them are false.

dialup_sounds4• 2 years ago

I'm baffled by this comment. It's exceedingly rare for two middle-aged and otherwise healthy people to die without warning.

Suicide is the 7th leading cause of death for men 55-62. It's considerably more common than murder.

Both were whistleblowers of which there are allegedly no more than 32 in the last few years.

Barnett hadn't worked for Boeing since 2017, and was being deposed as part of his appeal of his original whistleblower complaint. It makes no sense to think that someone trying to silence him would wait until 7 years and one Netflix documentary have transpired.

dudeinjapan2• 2 years ago

2 down 30 to go.

genewitch• 2 years ago

I'd say it was exceedingly rare for people in that cohort to die suddenly without warning. Now, though?

and one died after ventilation?

cbsmith12• 2 years ago

With so many people in a position to notice and speak out about Boeing's issues, it isn't terribly surprising that a few deaths have occurred.

Also, let's not kid ourselves, even if Boeing doesn't retaliate (and there is a lot of reason to think they have), being a whistleblower adds a tremendous amount of stress & disruption to your life. Whatever your life expectancy was before you were a whistleblower was, it's going to be lower (likely MUCH lower) afterwards. It's a terrible price to pay, which is why they deserve as much protection & support as possible.

jen729w2• 2 years ago

Indeed. In my home town we had the ‘metric martyr’, a greengrocer who defied EU law and continued selling bananas in metric measures.

There was a whole court thing, he lost, and then he died aged 39 of a heart attack.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/metric-...

webninja• 2 years ago

That’s an awful lot of BS to swallow. I know the blue pill is nice and all. But just know, the day you finally doubt what you’ve typed, the red pill is there waiting for you when you’re ready to see fact over fiction. But I warn and caution you in hopes of deterring you: the Truth is usually more depressing than the fantasy.

coldtea6• 2 years ago

Everything is going to die eventually.

This is some very specific, public, whistleblowers, in the span of months. Not some pool of thousands, or even hundreds people with mere "potential to criticize".

arp2423• 2 years ago

Unlikely things happen. And there have been more than two (former) Boeing employees who have come forward, most of whom managed to survive.

behringer• 2 years ago

This one might be, but the first one is almost certainly no suicide.

tootie7• 2 years ago

This is not alleged as a suicide. It was acute bacterial infection.

constantcrying• 2 years ago

Sure, but how many people are whistleblowers about Boeing misbehavior. I would guess at most a hundred, the chances that two of them die in such a short time seems low. What are the odds that an apparently healthy person just drops dead in two weeks over the span of maybe two years. Certainly seems somewhat unlikely.

mulmen7• 2 years ago

In the absence of data everyone is apparently healthy. That’s the point. There are more mundane explanations than a Boeing assassination conspiracy.

squigz2• 2 years ago

How many would have to die under these circumstances for you to consider they're not natural deaths?

volkk• 2 years ago

at LEAST one more...then i'll raise an eyebrow!

mulmen7• 2 years ago

As many as it takes to leave even a shred of evidence.

tomca32• 2 years ago

well yeah but the previous whistleblower committed suicide after literally telling his family "If anything happens to me it's not suicide".

A month later another whistleblower who was in good health dies suddenly and unexpectedly.

I don't think it's surprising to think that this combination of events is extremely unlikely.

BobaFloutist• 2 years ago

well yeah but the previous whistleblower committed suicide after literally telling his family "If anything happens to me it's not suicide".

I mean if I had dedicated my life to taking Boeing down and was contemplating suicide, I'd consider saying that too.

janalsncm4• 2 years ago

I guess what’s missing is the denominator. How many Boeing whistleblowers are there? It’s a nice little math problem.

Let’s say both of the whistleblowers were age 50. The probability of a 50 year old man dying in a year is 0.6%. So the probability of 2 or more of them dying in a year is 1 - (the probability of exactly zero dying in a year + the probability of exactly one dying in a year). 1 - (A+B).

A is (1-0.006)^N. B is 0.006N(1-0.006)^(N-1). At 60 A is about 70% and B is about 25% making it statistically insignificant.

But they died in the same 2 month period, so that 0.006 should be 0.001. If you rerun the same calculation, it’s 356.

mulmen7• 2 years ago

You are ignoring literally every other variable, especially the ones that are likely common to whistleblowers in general, Boeing employees in general, and Boeing whistleblowers in particular.

Characteristics like having spent a career building airplanes surrounded by all kinds of mechanical and chemical hazards.

Whistleblowing itself is extremely stressful for the attention it draws, the personal and professional relationships it strains, the media attention and of course the rampant speculation of assassination.

Does personal health influence the psychology of a whistleblower? If you get a terminal diagnosis would you be more likely to spill the beans?

vicary2• 2 years ago

45 y/o and healthy though?

ChrisRR3• 2 years ago

No-one is truly healthy. Everything is a game of statistics

You may be totally healthy and the peak of physical fitness and a sudden stroke destroys you. Everyone can improve their chances, but no-one can guarantee they're indestructible.

michaelmrose• 2 years ago

The proper comparison is not the size of the employee pool over a human lifespan its the size of the list of people actively advocating or publicly known to be testifying against Boeing over the course of a month.

andreygrehov• 2 years ago

Not that I disagree with you, but since the is the most upvoted comment - had this happened in, say, Russia, people would say: "The bloody Putin's totalitarianism!". But in the US, well: "[...] every single person who's ever criticized Boeing is going to die". This is absolutely hilarious and deserves the best comment of the year award.

theGeatZhopa• 2 years ago

There is someone who has a interest not in losing money when one.. for sure! Some stock holders with access to Bakteria. It's easy and effective. Without suspects. Hmmm.. I see what you did last summer next year then...

/Irony

0xbadcafebee3• 2 years ago

Parsons said Dean became ill and went to the hospital because he was having trouble breathing just over two weeks ago. He was intubated and developed pneumonia and then a serious bacterial infection, MRSA.

Am I the only one who knows a half dozen people who have gone into hospitals for a sprained ankle and died of an infection?

Pigalowda• 2 years ago

Easy to get infected when you’re dying of radiation poisoning and have no immune system.

helix2782• 2 years ago

What happened to the other thread about this news item?

pvg2• 2 years ago

Freak milk frother accident.

helix2782• 2 years ago

What does that mean in normal english? I'm not a native speaker, and my question about the other thread was genuine.

HumblyTossed2• 2 years ago

As suspicious as this sounds, surely the amount of pressure he was under could lead to him to getting sick, then once in the hospital contracted the pneumonia and it all went downhill from there.

squarefoot• 2 years ago

According to cdc.gov, the MRSA bacteria which killed him can spread by simple contact with infected people or objects. I can't but recall the anthrax attacks happened shortly after 9/11. It's completely unrelated and 100% speculation, but an infection caught by something received by a intercepted and compromised package couldn't be completely ruled out.

m3kw9• 2 years ago

Vs what are the chances any 40 year olds can die from the same causes in the same geographic area?

walterbell2• 2 years ago

Are whistleblowers considered legal witnesses who qualify for protection programs? A Streisand-effect website could aggregate the claims of all dead whistleblowers, regardless of cause of death. This could increase incentives for protecting whistleblowers until their legal cases have been resolved.

ddp26• 2 years ago

I looked [1] at all the prominent whistleblowers in the last ~50 years, and while some people have been seriously harassed and felt their lives were in danger, there's only a single case where someone was plausibly murdered by a private company. (Governments murder whistleblowers all the time.)

Interestingly, it was in the 1970's and the woman blew the whistle for safety practices around the handling of plutonium!

[1] https://twitter.com/dschwarz26/status/1786133630474977785

sgt101• 2 years ago

There's a really good movie about it too.

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

cyounkins• 2 years ago

Do you mean that you did the research, or your AI product did the research? How are you assessing whether a death was plausibly murder? So strange that the one example you find is of a car crash (one of the most common ways people die!) and no citation that it was found to be murder.

squigz2• 2 years ago

Don't misrepresent this - you used your own AI-powered product to do "research"

So across the ~50 or so prominent whistleblower cases against big co's that I researched with futuresearch.ai, retaliation is common, harassment is rare but does happen, but murder is not. And given the details of Joshua Dean and John Barnett's death, it's simply much too plausible that this is a fluke of timing.

sdfhbdf• 2 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to tackle this research.

I think you should mention that „I looked” was done with help of your AI project. That does not spark much confidence given current state of LLMs and their „research”.

From your twitter article:

So across the ~50 or so prominent whistleblower cases against big co's that I researched with futuresearch.ai, retaliation is common, harassment is rare but does happen, but murder is not.

jjulius• 2 years ago

I looked [1]...

Your AI looked at it, you didn't. I also have the hunch that your research was limited to US whistleblowers only, can you confirm?

simple10• 2 years ago

Suspicious deaths of whistleblowers is terrible PR for Boeing. Seems unlikely anything nefarious would be going on as it only invites additional scrutiny. Unless maybe we buy into the conspiracy that Boeing needed to send a message to future whistleblowers.

The airline manufacturing industry has few employers. The threat of being blackballed for future employment is much more of an incentive to keep quite IMO. But maybe I'm being naive?

Or maybe there's some backhanded government connection that someone outside of Boeing wants to keep quite.

from-nibly• 2 years ago

I cant put my tin foil hat on any harder boeing.

avi_vallarapu• 2 years ago

Is this a coincidemnce ? Or a pattern leading to an outlier ?

tptacek2• 2 years ago

There's a whole mythology about John Barnett, the previous Boeing whistleblower who died. But Barnett's whistleblower case against Boeing had been wrapped up years prior, and his outstanding litigation, over defamation, was insignificant to Boeing's bottom line. Boeing simply didn't have a reasonable motive to be involved in his death; to argue that Boeing had a hand in it, you need to be arguing that Boeing is something more than ruthless.

Barnett's case sparked a lot of interest because it was a suicide. Here, Dean died of an illness, so to pursue a conspiracy-theoretic angle to this story, you again need to suggest that Boeing is more than ruthless (for Barnett, that "more" is "irrational"; for Dean, it's "Bond-villain theatrical").

srj• 2 years ago

If I were considering blowing the whistle on some behavior at Boeing I'd sure think twice now that two people have died. It may be that their testimony was complete but there's still a chilling effect on future whistleblowers.

tptacek2• 2 years ago

By that logic every large corporation in the world should be randomly killing people to deter prospective whistleblowers.

neilv• 2 years ago

It might be interesting to think about reasons a whistleblower assassination could happen. (I found #6 below kinda interesting, because I didn't think of it immediately, but only once I started thinking through possibilities.) Non-exhaustive:

1. Warlord-like show of power, signaling that they're so strong they can openly act with impunity. Such as gratuitously using a military weapon not publicly available and on another country's soil, or a straight-faced coroner's determination of suicide by two self-inflicted gunshots to the back of the head before throwing self through a skyscraper window. (I don't see this in the Boeing situation.)

2. Powerful person lashing out due to mental illness instability/pettiness. Where there's no gain to be had, but their ego or other trigger was stepped upon. In the news in recent years, we've seen at least a couple powerful high-profile personalities who might fit the profile. (I don't see a connection to the Boeing situation.)

3. Prevent the whistleblower from testifying further. (I guess probably the cat's already out of the bag on the Boeing situation.)

4. Warning to other whistleblowers by that same entity, if further testimony could do more harm than has already been done. (Again, I guess probably the cat's out of the bag on Boeing.)

5. Lower-ranking individual's self-interest. Let's say there's no advantage to an organization or higher-up persons in assassinating a whistleblower, but... some lower-ranking person doesn't want to be implicated personally by something this whistleblower knows, or there is some unrelated mini-scandal that could be exposed as the whistleblower is interviewed. In general, I suspect that lower-ranking butt-covering is the source of massive number of problems and misbehavior in organizations, including all sorts of "coverup is worse than the crime" outcomes. (But I'd guess unlikely there's a big enough motivation for any lower-ranking individual connected to the Boeing situation to murder anyone over it.)

6. Uninvolved party sending a message to all high-profile whistleblowers. Let's say you're a powerful person, and evil (or imagining yourself serving some worthy cause through evildoing), and you're sitting on top of what could be a massive scandal, and you're vulnerable to whistleblowers. So, on the occasion of whistleblowers being in the news on some other high-profile scandal -- unrelated to you -- and possibly planting whistleblowing ideas among people who are a threat to you, you take the occasion to shift public sentiment about the desirability of whistleblowing in general. (Farfetched.)

7. Foreign sabotage, sowing social disorder. Make it look to people of the target country like their country is so corrupt that whistleblowers are assassinated openly and with impunity. (Farfetched, especially since we have so much erosion of trust already, I'm not sure we need any more pushes.)

vicary2• 2 years ago

https://archive.md/hf8QE

ein0p• 2 years ago

After the government swept Epstein’s client list under the rug (which, let me remind you, is full of alleged child rapists), nothing surprises me anymore. <Grabs popcorn before someone chimes in to defend USG’s profound lack of interest towards investigating people on the list />

nikisweeting• 2 years ago

At this point Boeing should hire bodyguards and top-of-the-line doctors for all their past whistleblowers to make a big show of doing everything in their power to keep them alive.

The reputation problems of killing whistleblowers are much worse than the cost of a few bodyguards and doctors.

TrackerFF• 2 years ago

Bad luck, most likely.

Sounds like a first got flu, which then progressed into pneumonia. This is normal.

Then he was admitted to the hospital, and probably contracted MRSA - which is not unusual either. Or did he get it prior to that? Either way, it happens.

And from there it progressed into sepsis, which he might have been fighting for some time? Anyway, heart attacks, strokes, etc. can happen when you get sepsis. Sepsis can come out of nowhere.

Doesn't really sound suspicious or sudden.

rubatuga• 2 years ago

Having a chain of individually likely events still has low total probability i.e. (80%)^8 = 17% chance

jncfhnb• 2 years ago

The probability of these exact events occurring is not the relevant question though

sciencesama• 2 years ago

Blacklist is real !!

hwbunny• 2 years ago

This thread feels like is populated by assassins who argue about how assassinating someone cannot be done :DD.

Whistleblower Josh Dean of Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems has died

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