#Boeing is murdering whistleblowers and getting away with it

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

In the last few weeks Boeing whistleblower John Barnett "shot himself" just as he was meant to be giving his evidence deposition.

Additionally, Boeing whistleblower Joshua Dean, 45 years old, died suddenly from a mystery "fast acting infection".

Boeing is murdering whistleblowers and getting away with it. Please don’t forget this.

[piratesexmachine420]

Maybe I'm just crazy but I don't think U.S. defense contractors assassinate witnesses in lawsuits over safety standards. I don't think that happens. This is the company that can't even manage to make a refreshed 737 without bribes, safety shortcuts, or cost and schedule overruns. The idea that their executives could plan and execute a politically-motivated murder and expect to get away with it is laughable.

We know what defense contractors do when they want to influence liberal democracies, they bribe people. Maybe they stick to semi-legal lobbying, maybe they pull a Lockheed circa 1977. They do not commit murder. Are you serious!? When they do kill people, they ask the militaries and intelligence agencies they supply very nicely to do it for them. I also have a hard time believing the FBI is willing to kill a private citizen to... let Boeing get away with safety violations in their civilian airliners? (The CIA might, but they're only interested in foreign countries or nationals. The DoD, DIA, DHS, NSA, NRO, etc. are off the table for what I hope are obvious reasons.)

Y'know what I think? I think he was probably a little mentally ill, suffering from depression, feeling helpless after going through a questioning by Boeing lawyers, and, in a moment of weakness, committed suicide. Do I have any evidence to back this up? No. Does anyone who believes that Boeing executes whistleblowers have any evidence? I've not seen any. If there's a lawsuit (I doubt it, as I've already expressed I think it's unlikely there was foul play), I'll wait for their verdict.

Until then, I expect to see a lot of Elon Musk-tier "interesting", "hmmmm" and "🤔" quote tweet screenshots on my dashboard, and zero explanations for how you think Boeing shot a guy in his car in a hotel parking lot, in the middle of a lawsuit, hours before said guy was supposed to return for the third day of said lawsuit, in an era of quite possibly the most anti-Boeing sentiment in history; and how, in doing so, Boeing executives have somehow turned this situation around for themselves. Fucking hell.

[inoppositionflorien]

Did Boeing kill whistleblower(s)? Almost certainly not, because companies tend not to do that. There's only a few cases (read: like two) where private entities that aren't money laundering fronts for organized crime (allegedly they did this of course, because nothing was proven but it was stuff like "this whistleblower was run off the road and murdered and several documents relating to the whistleblowing case were stolen from the car" levels of obvious, not dumb shit like "oh the suicide was staged, a thing that totally happens all the time I assume") killed a whistleblower.

This is because it's very easy to legally ruin a whistleblower's life to both punish them for stepping out of line and very easy to advertise that you can do that by repeatedly filing removal requests to friendlier courts and SLAPPs until your opposition runs out of money or you manage to get them found in contempt of court thus potentially subjecting them to prison time, fines, disbarment if they're a lawyer, or some combination of those, while stalking and harassing them constantly through legal methods, and also blacklisting them from the industry in such a way that it's not technically illegal retaliation but also effectively forbids them from getting new jobs in the field or being put near sensitive documents ever again.

The best part (if you're a company of course, if you're a whistleblower it might get miserable) is that nearly all of that is legal or essentially unprovable in many jurisdictions so you don't get put in prison if caught, a thing that does actually happen to wealthy people when they do most murders. (It doesn't happen to wealthy people who don't do anything technically illegal, or who do it for very specific corporate reasons that don't pierce the corporate veil. This is not saying the system is fair or particularly good at handling wealthy people, it is saying that the system on occasion does put fairly wealthy people in prison. If it didn't, you'd expect a lot more organized crime court successes than you see in real life, because they have a lot of money and often make extralegal threats in addition to the other things.)

The myth that companies do assassinate whistleblowers is quite possibly encouraged by those same companies (in addition to conspiracy theorists), because the idea that fatal retaliation is particularly likely, even common, is an excellent barrier to whistleblowing. (Though realistically the myth is mostly fueled by a particular conspiratorial culture that wants murder to be a realistic concern for people to have. In most cases it isn't.)

The kind of whistleblowers that do get killed tend to be ones who whistleblow police and national-level governments, and even then their violent death rate, while high (arguably whistleblowing is about twice or thrice as dangerous as being a lumberjack from some quick math I did, though that could be way off in any given direction. That's dangerous, but also eminently survivable, otherwise lumberjacking would not be a job), is such that the vast majority of whistleblowers will ultimately be fine. So whistleblow away (once you've contacted a lawyer about it, gotten advice from them, and gathered your evidence of course), you're almost certainly not going to be killed by your whistleblowing target.

[mystybelle]

I shared this once because I didn't think about it too hard, but this isn't super wise in its current form. Thor makes the point better than me, it's his point I'm agreeing with, but I've been too busy to think about it long enough to suggest a better solution.

Maybe an initiative that makes it possible to buy a copy of the actual game at point of sale could work, but we just saw Boeing literally murder a whistleblower (allegedly) a little while ago, and wotc JUST sicced the pinkertons on someone.

Big corporations that don't like a significant competitor could straight up just ddoss them, take the IP and run it themselves, and bury courts in bullshit to get away with lawsuits over it.

We have to think about what happens if capital gets involved with things like this, and I don't think the current form of the initiative has considered all the bases. Can the initiative be reworked a little more thoughtfully please?

There's an EU initiative going on right now that essentially boils down to wanting to force videogame publishers with paid games and/or games with paid elements such as DLC, expansions and microtransactions to leave said games in a playable state after they end support, or in simpler terms, make them stop killing games.

A "playable state" would be something like an offline mode for previously always online titles, or the ability for people to host their own servers where reasonably possible just to name some examples.

I don't think I need to tell anyone that having something you paid for being taken from you is bad, which is a thing that routinely happens with live service and other always online games with a notable recent example being The Crew which is now permanently unplayable.

Any EU citizen is eligible to sign the initiative, but only once and if you mess up that's it. You can find it here. (https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en)

Even if you're not European or you signed it already, you can share this initiative with anyone who is, even if they don't care about videogames specifically because this needs a million signatures and there is different thresholds that need to be met for each EU country for their votes to even count and could also be a precedent for other similar practices like when Sony removed a bunch of Discovery TV content people paid for.

[timaeuslover001]

If people would have been ACTUVELY protesting , the CEO of Boeing would be behind bars on multiple counts of murder, reckless endangerment and felony charges of failure safety code violations, conspiracy to murder and Murder.

Possible even the airlines for not meeting up with theirs as well. He has earnestly airlines are responsible to code the planes as well.

But yall still booked flights, went on your trips, vacations ect…..

Had this happened even 10 years ago all flights would have been cancelled, Airline shut down, refunds would have been made and those poor families of those whistleblowers would be repaid for their grief and suffering💔😔😢

Mabey if they said the planes were going to Palestine yall would care more since they seems to be the ONLY personality people have these days.

So you just showed the government and corporations that They can MURDER you and have you KNOW ABOUT IT and then get away with it. 🤷‍♀️

Enjoy your Orwell World we live in

Sick.

Moral convience strikes again.

[jarmes]

Boeing is legally required to maximize shareholder value. The only way to do that is through murdering hundreds. Thus, they inevitably put people willing to murder hundreds in charge, because the system is designed to put murderers in power. There isn’t a company out there that wouldn’t murder a whistleblower, if they thought they could get away with it. Capitalism demands murder

Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

John “Swampy” Barnett, a 26-year quality manager at Boeing, tried unsuccessfully to stop management from destroying the company for the benefit of vulture investors. He died of apparent suicide recently, but his former colleagues don’t believe his death was self-inflicted. By Maureen Tkacik. [prospect.org]

Cory Doctorow notes that whether or not Boeing assassinated Barnett, company CEO Jim McNerny and its leadership killed hundreds of people on crashed 737s through willful incompetence. McNerney was proudly contemptuous of competence, publicy calling senior engineers “phenomenally talented assholes" and rewarding managers who forced them out of the company. [pluralistic.net]