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!
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.
The relevant metric here is number of deaths per size of the specified group and per time.
You compare to completely different numbers and confabulate entirely unconnected "explanations".
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.
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 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...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/25/us-cybersecurity-agency-ci...
[3] e.g. disrupting Venezuelan or Iranian civilian infrastructure. Would you feel okay about developing the capability to cause a nuclear meltdown in Iran? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdrv0p37k8jo https://cybernews.com/cyber-war/us-confirms-cyber-role-carac... https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1163519987825...
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.
https://www.cybercom.mil/Media/News/Article/3206393/cyber-10...
"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 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.
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.
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?
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.
Would you share it again here or send it via DM?
Sorry you’ve had to face this.
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?