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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   12893 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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As someone interested in true crime, this is fascinating:

FBI arrests man in Jan. 6 DC pipe bomber investigation, sources say

Jan 6th pipe bomber arrested

This concludes a five year investigation.

My biggest question, and the question on others' mind is, how was he caught when there is apparently so little evidence? A grainy video, a sneaker brand, and that was it pretty much it. The FBI has even outdone the 4chan geolocators, which describes a community of online sleuths who “dox” targets by analyzing geographic details such as weather patterns, cloud formations, and other environmental cues in photos, who were unable to identify him (of course, the FBI has much more resources, evidence and extralegal powers).

The affidavit is available here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.287327/gov.uscourts.dcd.287327.1.1.pdf

One thing to note is previously the FBI had stated that cellphone data was not available due to corruption (https://vinnews.com/2023/06/19/in-stunning-testimony-former-fbi-official-says-j6-pipe-bomber-could-not-be-located-due-to-corrupted-phone-data/). However, now in the affidavit cellphone data is able to place Cole at the scene of the crime. That seems to indicate that someone is either lied to congress or someone screwed up their job. Because its possible the FBI queried one cellular network for data and the network claimed the data was corrupted and then the FBI made no further queries to other providers and then went to congress and claimed the data was corrupted. This is probably not technically lying (its ok to be deliberately mislead your audience as long as you don't make a clear lie!) but this would be gross incompetence. The data was clearly available because now we know the government was able to access it and these were provider records (presumably, from the carrier) not information from Cole's own cellphone. I guess its possible in the affidavit the government is being misleading when they say 'provider' and they mean some kind of other third party location data ('google') but I feel like that would be misleading the court because they refer to Provider's 'cell site records'.

The congressional testimony also claimed the provider in question was aggressively deleting cell site records (presumably to protect the privacy of their customers and to save money). But now we find out that after 4 years the cell site records are available. I presume the FBI was able to collect cell site records from other providers at the time but for some reason was able to claim to congress because they were missing information from one provider that it was not possible to use the records to identify suspects. Of course its also possible that some providers are keeping cell site records for a 4 year period but that seems very unlikely due to the storage costs. The other possible explanation is the government has another crazy data collection program where they are thieving huge amounts of metadata from the cellular networks and storing this somewhere and this is classic government lying to the court to hide their data collection methods.

I presume any trial is going to be a complete shit show where the defence is going to ask how these cellphone records mysteriously appeared after law enforcement officials testified to congress that they were not available. I also now have a bit more empathy for congressional witnesses who claim they are unable to talk about ongoing investigations.

Also, I assume this is not the full evidence of the State's case against Cole. But it has Steve Baker gait analysis vibes. This guy bought some stuff related to bomb making and then his cellphone was in the area of where the pipe bombs were planted. Hopefully, there is some more solid evidence linking him to the crime. Though, the cellphone data would seem to be much stronger than the gait analysis since presumably there would not be that many people in that area at the time, whereas presumably there are many people would match the gait.

Of course its also possible that some providers are keeping cell site records for a 4 year period but that seems very unlikely due to the storage costs

I'm confused. How the hell are they storying cell site records? This should be dirt cheap. Unique identifier for cell tower plus unique identifier for cell phone, plus minute by minute records.

Or at least that is my intuition. I guess I'll do the math.

(128bits + 128bits) * 1440 (minutes per day) = 46.08 kilobytes for a daily record of cell phone locations for an individual. (Assuming no attempts to simplify the data, like only storing the location changes).

46.08 kilobytes * 365(days) * 5(years) * 400 million(customers) = 33.6096 petabytes (about 8 days of YouTube uploads)

Petabytes of storage cost in the range of a million dollars a year. I'll say 2 million to account for deflation in the costs of storage over time.

So at most about $66 million for a 5 year nationwide database of all cell phone location records. This is chump change for any organization with the ability to collect such records. And I was estimating on the high end wherever possible. There are absolutely going to be a bunch of optimizations that would cut this cost by orders of magnitude.

And companies don't delete data to save money. That's insane. They all hoard data like there might be some nugget of gold in there if only they can algorithm it hard enough. Data deletion happens mostly by accident or neglect. Some piece of data is too old or has been mined so many times and produced nothing. It gets put on a server somewhere, but the server goes down and there wasn't a good enough back up, and the IT guys that proposed triple backup data protocol were turned down this one time because no one could figure out the business value of this data. The process of data degradation takes a decade or more.

The other process of data deletion is a legal request from the EU.

A combination of non-public information like CCTV footage, plate tracking, cell tracking, physical and digital forensics (including, as the below reply suggests, credit card data which they can run models on to pull relevant and unusual patterns literally trained on previous cases) make the FBI far more powerful than 4chan. The timing is what’s more convenient. It could be this is someone the last administration didn’t want to arrest on the chance they lost the case.

It could be this is someone the last administration didn’t want to arrest on the chance they lost the case.

Yeah, I wonder. Credit card purchases, cell phone location, and a license plate reader hit all seems like evidence they should've had for years.

I suspect that the widespread advent of AI has (even if these aren’t transformer models, although they could be) significantly increased the utility and usage of things like transaction modelling tools over the past couple of years. Before you would maybe check transactions at local stores for specific ingredients or review the purchase history of suspects. Now you can do much more complex and computationally expensive ML on the whole national or regional body of credit card data that can actually find that needle in a haystack.

Here is the FBI agent affidavit in support of probable cause for his arrest. The evidence breaks down like:

1. Based on Cole's credit card transaction history he purchased all the parts that were themselves part of the bombs as well as other safety tools one might use to make a bomb across 2019/2020. Sample paragraph (not gonna quote all of them):

Both pipe bombs were manufactured using a 1” x 8” galvanized pipe with markings consistent with a particular manufacturer’s (the “Pipe Manufacturer”) product labeling. COLE purchased a total of six galvanized pipes of this size and shape on or about June 1, June 8, and November 16, 2020. The purchases were made at two different Home Depot location in northern Virginia. According to the Pipe Manufacturer, approximately 26,000 of these items from Pipe Manufacturer were sold in 2020, and over 22,000 of these items were sold to Home Depot.

(continue for the end caps, wiring, steel wool, kitchen timers, etc.)

2. Analysis of cellphone data shows that Cole's phone was connected to towers in the vicinity of where the bombs were placed at the same time surveillance footage shows the bomb planter in the area. Sample paragraph (5 or so of these, covering from 7:39 to 8:24):

At approximately 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 59323, which faces southeast (approximately 120˚) from its location at 103 G Street, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector A”). Also at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 126187, which faces east (approximately 90˚) from its location at 200 Independence Avenue, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector B”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:39:32 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked westbound on D Street, Southeast and then turned southbound on South Capitol Street, Southeast. These locations are consistent with the coverage areas of Sector A and B.

3. A license plate reader caught Cole's vehicle in the area shortly before the first security camera footage captures the bomb planter. Cole's cell phone also starts communicating with towers in the area shortly after.

COLE is the registered owner of a 2017 Nissan Sentra with a Virginia license plate. On January 5, 2021, at approximately 7:10 p.m., COLE’s Nissan Sentra was observed driving past a License Plate Reader at the South Capitol Street exit from Interstate 395 South, which is less than one-half mile from the location where the individual who placed the devices was first observed on foot near North Carolina and New Jersey Avenues, Southeast at 7:34 p.m. Approximately 5 minutes later, at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE began to interact with Provider towers in the area.

You'd have to be stupid to commit a serious federal crime and expect to get away. There feds have so many resources and so determined, and also it does not help that the vast majority of criminals are not masterminds and make in hindsight stupid mistakes.

I mean, agreed you have to stupid or mentally ill to do something like this since there is no upside, but maybe use cash and turn off your cell phone, bro? License plate alone wouldn’t be enough to build a case.

Who buys bomb equipment with credit cards?

Who brings their cell phone with them to commit crimes?

To be honest, lots of criminals. A lot of crimes are solved by police departments with a lot less resources than the FBI using some pretty hard to pin down evidence. Cell tower + LPR hits can often get you down to only a very small pool of individuals that need to be investigated further. One prosecutor friend of mine got a conviction for an armed robbery based on basically cell towers, LPRS, and a photo of underwear.

people who commit crimes and get caught make bad decisions. this is the simple explanation for everything. of course in this particular situation the timing is very weird because you have the grifter news site making bombshell accusations about capitol police being involved in the pipe bombing. but there is even a explanation for the timing which is grifter news site is making FBI look bad even if the grifter story is false so FBI now allocates resources on this particular case instead of whatever 'higher' priority the FBI would otherwise use their resources.

also, if this is an FBI coverup this confirms the republican party is the washington generals.

Criminals. I mean, if I were building and planting a bomb I'd make use of salvaged stuff as much as possible, anything I couldn't would be bought with cash (thought that didn't help here), the cell phone would stay at home, I'd try to note the location of CCTV cameras and such and at least try to make me and my car get lost in the noise if I couldn't avoid them, etc. I also would NOT do Google, Bing, or even DDG searches of bomb-making and stuff from devices that could be associated with me (including other people's phones at my house). But

a) I'm also not going to build or plant a bomb.

and

b) Blowing shit up is fun, but this would be a lot of work and who goes into crime to do a lot of work?

c) If you're going to bomb the Capitol as part of an attempt to overthrow the government, the least you expect afterward is the boogaloo, the most you expect is that your people get into power. You don't plan to evade the FBI because after the bombing the FBI either won't exist or won't have power over you.

If it's not confirmed I'm very confident DC is under wide-area persistent surveillance. You have to spend a lot of time figuring out CCTV locations to defeat it.

Who brings their cell phone with them to commit crimes?

From experience as a defense attorney, just about everyone. Obviously, selection bias since there might be hordes of people leaving their cell phones at home, committing crimes, and not getting arrested, and I would never see them.

Yeah and I'm glad for it, still, I'd think someone conscientious enough to make a delayed fuse bomb and have all 10 fingers would be conscious enough to not bring their cell phone while planting said bombs.

Well if that isn't proof we're living in a panopticon, nothing is. They were able to trace his month-old purchases of 9V battery connectors that he made with cash:

COLE purchased five of the Nine Volt Distributor’s nine-volt battery connectors from Micro Center in northern Virginia on or about November 12 and December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction.

December 28, 2019, including cash purchases made during the December transaction.

Isn't that a cash transaction that was over a year old that they tracked, not just months?

Also, is the "including" saying he made both credit and cash purchases at that same December transaction?

Ah, yes, right, over a year. If you're not tracking everything, how do you track that?

It sounds like he split the purchase, putting part of it on cash and part of it on a card. When I was a cashier in high school people would occasionally do this, though these days I don't know the motivation (back then it was people using food stamps and paying the balance in cash or using cash they had and charging the rest before charging was a thing rich people did to rack up points).

Card maxed out, maybe? Needed to break a $50 at the same time because the ATM sometimes gives those out instead of $20s and I hate that?

I mean, we’ve known this since Snowden haven’t we? I guess until now they were just sitting on all data in the universe and not doing anything with it.

Not the cash part.

I'm not really sure what this proves though - once they have his license plate, there are enough security cameras or automatic license plate readers in Northern Virginia that a sufficiently determined federal agency can look through footage to figure out where you were driving, and large companies have had video footage of the registers for ages. Court decisions on using license plate readers to track movements are a decade old at this point.

He bought 9V connectors at the end of 2019 and planted the bomb in the beginning of 2021. Are we to believe that microcenter retained CCTV footage of every cash register for over a year?

I mean they must have? The only way they'd know he paid cash was via security footage, or if he did the transaction 50% cash / 50% card so that the receipt info could be traced to him

I will lodge a prediction that this guy just happens to have a terminal illness which ensures his passing before ever seeing jail time, and that he also has suspicious lapses in his work history.

I’ll take that bet.

Maybe not the lapses. There are plenty of reasons a guy like this would fail to hold down a job. But I bet he makes it to sentencing and jail (prison?)

A few possibilities in no particular order:

  • This guy is a patsy, thrown against the wall by Kash Patel in a desperate attempt to keep his job.

  • The FBI has had this guy as a suspect for a long time, but they didn’t have the evidence they thought they needed for an obvious conviction in a politically-charged case.

  • Nome of their other January 6 leads ever tied-in to the attempted pipe-bombing. Because of this, they assumed that the incident was unrelated to the other more-important conspiracies that played out that day.

  • The FBI know early-on that the suspect was a leftist or otherwise clearly non-MAGA. It was politically unacceptable to give the impression that any part of January 6 was not the fault of Trump or Republicans, so the case was dropped.

  • The team originally assigned to the case was legitimately incompetent, and nobody ever checked their work.

  • The suspect is himself a fed (unlikely IMO, but the situation is strange enough that we have to keep the possibility open).

EDIT - One more idea after reading Gillirut’s breakdown of the evidence:

  • The FBI only recently got the go-ahead to use Palantir technology on the giant NSA databank of all internet activity to find the suspect.

The FBI only recently got the go-ahead to use Palantir technology on the giant NSA databank of all internet activity to find the suspect.

'they kept clicking "solve case" with every new release of the FBI crime database software and this time it finally worked' is the most reasonable guess

The gait analysis pegged a Capitol Police officer. No movement for years, then outsider media identifies a suspect independently, and within a month a different patsy is suddenly identified and arrested.

If you couldn't tell, I'm skeptical.

Looping in @netstack, @Quantumfreakonomics, and @greyenlightenment

I discussed this when the case first came out, and while I said at the time that I didn't need to get into the deep dive I did on gait analysis while at the DMV, it's apparent that I now do. First, to reiterate, when they say 94% match or whatever, what they're saying is that they measure certain features of gait like knee flexion angle and come up with a profile. If 6% of the population is expected to have a similar gait profile, then it would be a 94% match because it theoretically excludes 94% of the population. The reason I went through all the categories of description in my previous post was to demonstrate that anything below 90% isn't even really a match, and anything below 99% is of extremely limited utility. Identifying the suspect is a black female is a 94% match right there, because about 12% of the population is black and half of those are female. Given that the comment was well-received without much pushback and awarded an AAQC, I naively thought that I had made my case, evidently I was wrong. So let's get into why that 94% or 98% is bullshit in and of itself:

  • Forensic gait analysis relies on the assumption that every person has a unique or nearly unique gait. While this may be true, the extent to which we can determine that it is true is limited by the accuracy with which we can make the relevant measurements. There is currently no evidence to support this assertion.

  • In some cases, the level of accuracy is not good to begin with if relying on video. For instance, I read about one angle that we could accurately measure to within five degrees. But the total normal variation was seven degrees.

  • Most of the available research into gait was conducted in a clinical setting. Most of what we know about normal gait comes from studies where we were comparing broadly-defined normal gait to abnormal gait, not from studies where we were looking to categorize subtle differences among normal gaits. This second kind of research has been limited.

  • There is accordingly no credible database that allows us to assess the frequency of either normal or abnormal gait characteristics.

  • In the research that exists (which is again mostly clinical), the subjects are analyzed walking at a designated speed indoors, barefoot, wearing minimal clothing to facilitate measurement, are well lit, and are photographed from fixed angles. In other words, the process is standardized.

  • This standardization, however, is limited to the individual experiment. There is no industry-wide standardized methodology for analyzing, comparing, and reporting gait characteristics.

  • Gait characteristics are usually dependent, i.e. someone with Characteristic A may be more likely to have Characteristic B. For example, if statistics show that 1 in 17 people have their right knee pointing inwards and 1 in 17 have their right foot pointing inwards, it may be tempting to say that 1 in 238 have both pointing inwards. But in the study I pulled that number from, 1 in 27 had both pointing inwards. Unless we can determine the level of dependence for each gait characteristic, we have to treat any frequency estimates with caution.

  • Gait on an individual can change over time based on: Walking speed, evenness of surface, grade, footwear, whether the person is carrying something, whether the person is trying to avoid obstacles (as in a crowd), minor injuries/aches and pains, clothing, how tired the person is, and even whether they're talking on a cell phone.

  • The best available method to determine the reliability of gait analysis would be to conduct a study where various practitioners would view video footage similar to what is used in court proceedings. Some clips would be paired with the same individual and others would be paired with different individuals. The results would then be used to calculate false positive and false negative rates. No such study has ever been conducted.

  • The only similar study that was ever done asked seven "experienced analysts" to match one individual from five examples. The failure rate was 29%.

  • Ideally, sample data should be reviewed by three independent experts. Expert A reviews the reference sample, Expert B reviews the comparison sample, and Expert C performs the comparison. Ideally, the reference sample should be of the suspect walking in a standardized manner.

Take all that into consideration and further consider that we don't even have a reference sample here. We're talking about two different surveillance videos of varying quality, in one of which the suspect is intentionally wearing bulky clothing, is carrying a backpack, and is moseying at varying speed along a vacant sidewalk. In the other, the accused woman is in a police uniform with all the police accessories wearing different footwear and working in a crowded area. The Blaze hasn't posted the video they're using for comparison, only screenshots of it, and those look like they were taken at an entirely different angle than the surveillance video of the suspect. And they also apparently use video of her playing soccer to make the comparison. I checked my copy of the SEAK, Inc. Expert Witness Directory, and it doesn't have a heading for forensic gait analysts. It has a heading for gait, but most of those are the kind of person you hire if your gait has been affected by a car crash or medical malpractice. The few I could find all had backgrounds in podiatry, orthopedics, neurology, or some related medical field. I don't know what background the "veteran analyst" for The Blaze had because they don't tell us who he is. They don't produce an expert report. They don't even have him discuss the analysis other than mentioning that it's "closer to a 98 percent match". It's not clear who this bozo is or what he did.

And if you're still not convinced that all of this is complete bullshit, keep in mind that this story didn't disappear as soon as we turned over to a new Culture War Roundup. It turns out that Ms. Kerkhoff was already the object of far-right MAGA fringe ire, as she fired pepper balls into the crowd on January 6 and testified in related prosecutions, and has the distinction of being the first witness to testify in the first January 6 prosecution. Her name was not selected at random. In fact, someone had already submitted a tip to her employer and she was placed on administrative leave while the FBI investigated. The FBI had, in fact, cleared her, before the story even ran. She was quickly able to produce video of herself playing with her dogs the night the bombs were planted, and that was the end of it as far as the FBI was concerned. Beck himself, who hyped the story in advance as being among the biggest in his lifetime, was walking it back by Monday, refusing to name the woman on his podcast, reminding listeners that a match did not equal guilt, and saying that she was still a private citizen who was innocent until proven guilty. I think it's safe to say that this story is dead.

How often is someone convicted off “gait evidence”?

I read “The program struggles with certain visual cues, so I’d peg it as closer to 98%” with about as much skepticism as “the software says you’re 85% racist.” People can say whatever they want. Besides, why did Mr. Seraphin wait four years to blow the whistle?

What does “94% match” mean in this context?

Does it mean that the capitol officer matches the suspect’s gait more closely than 94% of people?

Does it mean that the capitol officer is 94% likely to be the suspect?

Does it mean that 94% of the abstract computer analysis indices are within the arbitrary “match” range for both of them?

How many people exist in the Washington DC Metro that would be at least a 94% match? Without knowing that this information is approximately useless. That is what we need in order to do a basic Bayesian analysis.

Oh, it’s much higher than that. The guy who ran the analysis thinks it’s closer to 98%.

What does that mean? It probably means he pulled the numbers out of his ass.

No movement for years, then outsider media identifies a suspect independently, and within a month a different patsy is suddenly identified and arrested.

This timing makes me skeptical as well.

Yeah , but even 94% is not enough to secure a conviction. They need it to be it airtight . I can understand the skepticism. Trust in agencies and government at historic lows.

Sure, not enough to convict, but plenty enough to become the default answer, and that's what can't be allowed. So, now that there's a culprit put forward, the spooks* needed an alternate to distract from the fact it was an inside job.

*
Kerkhoff, who was a Capitol Police officer for four and a half years, left the department in mid-2021 for a security detail at the Central Intelligence Agency, sources told Blaze News.

For me the strongest indicator will be whether or not Kerkhoff decides to sue Glenn Beck et al for defamation or not. A refusal to sue in what should be a slam dunk easy payday means they're afraid of what discovery will turn up.

Discovery is something the Plaintiff gets from the Defendant. It's also something you get from a company, not a private person. Those statements aren't technically 100% true all the time, but realistically, that's the way it works. I represent defendants and I do send out discovery requests to plaintiffs. These consist exclusively of interrogatories and requests for admission, and I send them out to protect the record and not because I expect them to contain any useful information. Half the time I don't get responses. Actually, I don't know how often they respond because when they do respond I seldom look at the responses. Private citizens simply don't have the kind of records that companies do. If Wal-Mart doesn't plow their parking lot and I slip on ice and get hurt I can request copies of relevant policies, the employee schedule for the day, a copy of their plow contract, and all kinds of other stuff. If I slip on some random guy's driveway, what do you think I'm requesting? If there really is some kind of government conspiracy here, do you seriously think that Shauni Kerkhoff has been keeping records of it in her possession for the past 5 years? The most discovery they'll get is the opportunity to depose her, which might not even be their deposition if her attorneys put her up first. They might even have to put her up first to avoid summary judgment. But there will be no lawsuit, because any attorney worth his retainer will have The Blaze on the horn immediately and tell them he has a release ready to go if the price is right. No lawsuit necessary.

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