Putting on my tinfoil hat for this: It sounds like parallel construction to me. I wonder if the FBI doesn't want it to get out what kind of technology the US government can use to track citizens in real time. Something like 24/7 facial recognition running in major chains like McDonalds.
The police showing up for a random tip in the boonies in PA fast enough to actually catch the guy at McDonalds and he just happens to have method and motive on him 5 days later seems too convenient. I think they ultimately got the right guy, but I don't think the 'tip' was a phone call from a McDonald's employee.
The guy's face has been plastered over the news for several days and there's a $60,000 reward. Getting a tip from a fast food worker is very plausible.
More plausible in my opinion than the FBI having some kind of agreement with McDonald's to access their store surveillance network in real time.
People vastly overestimate the ability of giant bureaucracies to keep secrets. It only works if a few people are in on it (that's part of what compartmentalization is for). I'm always suspicious of claims that federal agencies are colluding with companies for the purposes of mass surveillance because while I trust those agencies to keep secrets, I absolutely do not trust the vast majority of companies to do so. There are narrow exceptions--defense industry, telecommunications, aerospace industry--but mostly secrets like that are hard to keep unless your org is built around keeping secrets. The orgs I've worked for are the opposite of compartmentalized. I doubt McDonalds' software engineering org is, but I'd be curious to be surprised!
Now I'm feeling really paranoid about finding a McDonald's ordering kiosk broken mid-software-update on Friday 6th: I bet that was when they were updating the facial recognition tech to spy and track everyone walking past. :p
It also seems like there might have been some "regular police work" going on at the beginning but when that didn't work fast enough, some bigger tools were called in.
Yeah I think it's very easy to forget we live in a surveillance state. Periodically something happens that lets us see it but we somehow, as a society, stop talking about it and next time something like this happens we're surprised.
We have the DEA and other three-letter agencies stashing cameras all over highways and even in residential areas.
We have mass surveillance of communications.
We have license plate readers everywhere.
We literally carry tracking devices everywhere we go.
Our cars also have their own tracking devices.
Facial recognition(and probably other recognition tech like gait) is widespread.
We have systems that can mass surveil entire cities from the sky.
And these are just the confirmed systems that we know about.
Parallel construction is frequently used and it's not even a secret at this point.
That said, don't underestimate the ability of a criminal, even a smart one, to screw up. As a group of smart engineers, we all know too well that even smart people make mistakes. They make even more mistakes when they're operating outside of their domain and under pressure/nervous. It shouldn't be surprising that the perp got caught.
No need for conspiracy here. I'd be surprised at this point if McDonald's wasn't running that type of software on all their cameras 24/7 and using to better profile their customers. Is there actually a law against it? There should be, but is there? It likely isn't hard and I am positive the data could be useful to them in many ways so if they aren't then it would only be because they thought it wasn't legal.
I don't think they should tell people exactly how much tech they have. Why give people intelligence briefs on your capabilities? The point is to catch criminals and terrorists. If those criminals and terrorists believe that Palantir or whatever is the most they need to worry about, then society has the advantage.
Right. Transparency is a really important aspect of a functioning democracy. Without it, there’s less and less separating democracy from authoritarianism
The point is to define who a "criminal" and a "terrorist" is and use that as justification for mass surveillance. Palantir is far worse for me as a US citizen than any "terrorist".
This has been my thought over and over as this. has been going on. So many people are murdered in this country and this one murder probably got 1000x the resources applied to it compared to the rest. Justice should be impartial so this case makes it look like some people's lives are more important than others.
With justice and healthcare, people are absolutely, explicitly, and intentionally treated differently based on their position in society. If you’re a CEO you get treated 1000x better.
> makes it look like some people's lives are more important than others.
Sorry but they are. That's not me saying that. That's pretty much the entirety of human civilization. It's nice to think otherwise, but we as a species have made it clear that people are far from being equally important.
If they solve every murder then they make it obvious. Maybe they just solve the ones involving millionaire victims and let the murders of the poors go unsolved.
The police showing up for a random tip in the boonies in PA fast enough to actually catch the guy at McDonalds and he just happens to have method and motive on him 5 days later seems too convenient. I think they ultimately got the right guy, but I don't think the 'tip' was a phone call from a McDonald's employee.