> Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works. But that's not true - actually, we learned about the mass surveilla

> Seems like a pretty safe bet that there's good spooks who are good at hiding their works. But that's not true - actually, we learned about the mass surveillance reasonably soon after it started. They aren't actually good at hiding. True, there was a period that somebody could say "we haven't learned about it yet so it probably doesn't exist" - which would be fallacious - but within a reasonable period of time, that option had disappeared. Now, with assassinations, the biological weapons option has been existing for almost 100 years. If that were so common that even corporate machinators don't hesitate to use it to silence a witness of fairly low importance - we'd have heard at least a couple of cases, at least some rumors or defector reports. Just as we did with all other means of getting rid of witnesses. Since we didn't, I attribute very low probability to the possibility that this is how we learn about this being common. > You don't know about the assassinations that were successfully kept secret. Yes, I mentioned that in my comment. However, as I also mentioned, we have, over the years, pretty generous sample out of the mass of all assassinations. It would be rather weird if assassinations specifically using biological agents were somehow so special that while we have leaks about pretty much every other kind, we don't have any indications specifically about those. One could assume that is because this method is used only by the very best operatives going for very high-value target - but then we'd need to explain why suddenly Boeing corporates have access to it to deal with a pretty low-grade issue (and frankly I don't even see how it helps them by now - they are so deep in doo-doo anyway that one less witness is not going to save them). Such assumptions do not form a coherent picture if you look at the likelihood of the events involved.