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!

>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.

Or maybe… Things are really fucked right now.

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...