Because whatever he says in a trial becomes public record and widely reported on.

Edward Snowden has published a book, appeared on every podcast and talked to every media outlet since the 2013 revelations. He's still alive (granted, in Russia, where he'll probably be stuck forever).

I seriously doubt a drugged-up 75yo who lived outside the US for much of the past 20 years somehow had a hotter scoop on the US government's doings.

Epstein has to be a suicide too then, because Snowden is still alive?

Lots of bigshots did shit they shouldn't have been doing on Epstein's yacht. Is there any credible report that any such figure did any such thing on McAfee's?

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the theory most likely to be true remains the null hypothesis: He didn't have diddly-squat on anybody.

Did you ever get the impression from him that he was "holding back"?

To my knowledge he never posted something like "I really did kill that guy." He may have still had secrets even though his online life was so loud.

Perhaps, but I doubt those secrets were secrets that "they don't want you to hear". He's never been in a position to get any governmental secrets and, AFAIK, he's not really known to have connections with anyone really important in government (ala Epstein).

It also makes little sense that the US government would kill him before extradition and not after when they have a lot more control over narrative and investigations. Killing him on foreign soil makes everything needlessly harder for the US.

>He's never been in a position to get any governmental secrets and, AFAIK,

Part of his career was at Booz Allen Hamilton, though not for too long. Also he was in a position where corporate or personal secrets may have been accessible, which could also explain why an extradition would lead to action.

You're talking Snowden, right?

I think the GP you replied to meant McAfee. (Snowden was never supposed to have killed anyone, was he?)

No, McAfee worked at Booz Allen Hamilton in the 80's.

Aha... So Snowden only found the clues McAfee planted way back when; McAfee was actually the real whistle-blower all along!

...or not.

TIL; thanks.

I wasn't saying he was, just providing a possible response to the question in the comment I replied to.

It seems like HN is becoming more like Reddit and downvotes now indicate disagreement instead of being used to hide things that don't add to the discussion.

> Because whatever he says in a trial becomes public record and widely reported on.

I don't think John had any credibility left for that to happen. We will never be 100% sure but I lean %99.99 that he committed suicide. He was not the kind to spent time in jails. Boredom killed this man

Maybe I'm out of the loop, but who cares what he says? He is just a crazy person who dodged taxes.

He's also a liar and a con artist. And he's always been obsessed with being the object of others' obsessions. Like when he would claim to be the zenith of hacking targets, nevermind the fact that he'd been irrelevant for decades.

Unfortunately like Shkreli, Trump, etc., he has amassed an army of angry young extremely online men who hung on his every word, and will now descend on the comments section.

Extremely online men?

I think the HN community has little overlap with the #FreeMcAfee club.

I mean, they're posting in this thread right now. Maybe it's not a lot of them by percentage, but they're certainly vocal right now.

I guess it depends on how you define "little." You can peruse the comments here before they're flagged; it's a lot bigger overlap than any other community I'm in, including some of the worse ones like miniature wargaming or Emacs users.

A lot of down voting of perfectly reasonable comments in this thread...

That's perhaps because so many of them, are like virtually all of yours, persisting in pushing "he was killed by the government!" based, as far as I can tell, solely on him saying "I would never commit suicide so if it looks like I did, the government must have done it." Why are we all dismissing that, right? We're dismissing it because we're looking at McAfee's history. The man loved to make grand, conspiratorial statements with absolutely nothing to back them up. Take a walk through his Wikipedia page, and don't go "pfft, Wikipedia" -- I'm talking about the parts with extensive supporting links here. In a very real way, McAfee loved being a troll. No judgement on him (at least for that), but I honestly don't see how anyone can deny it was a huge facet of his later life.

I don't doubt that at the time he said he wouldn't commit suicide, he meant it, but based on other tweets quoted among these comments, he was very clearly in a state of depression brought on by his incarceration -- and, for god's sake, he'd spent most of the last decade as a fugitive. This is a man who went to extreme lengths to avoid being in prison. So when you keep asking, over and over, "What makes you think he would possibly commit suicide to avoid spending the rest of his life in prison," the answer is "literally everything the man had been doing before he was caught."

Or perhaps it's a bunch of people with preconceived notions and reactionary clicking like yourself. I challenge you to find a comment by myself that insists he was murdered. And the comment I was referring to that I said was reasonable was not pushing any particular narrative, but positing a reason why someone might want to murder him. That's not the same as saying he was murdered.

There is so much reactionary outrage online that people accuse you of supporting a belief for simply discussing it even if you didn't push it and haven't committed to it.

HN used to be somewhere where this didn't happen, seems like even HN has succumbed to the eternal september.

That might just be me, I seem to have attracted the ire of some people on HN recently.