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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   13468 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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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.

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.

I agree that's probably a factor. It seems like this suspect was smart enough to split his bomb-making purchases over multiple visits to different stores. Once you are down to a couple suspects, it's probably not too hard to look at all the various databases and confirm that you have your man. But as you say, it's a much bigger challenge to start with a universe of data and find the needle in a haystack and it seems like advanced computer systems would be very helpful in terms of finding that needle in the haystack.

That being said, there's nothing in the Affidavit which says how they identified that suspect in the first place. Possibly they just analyzed and cross-referenced the cell phone, credit card, and purchase records, but it's also possible some completely different method was used. Maybe he told his girlfriend who reported him a few years later after a bitter breakup and the FBI doesn't want to get the girlfriend into trouble. Maybe he came to the FBI's attention as a result of some investigative technique which is confidential or even illegal. It certainly wouldn't shock me to learn that the FBI has informants in anti-government chat servers; hacks into email systems; etc.

There's really know way to know. Obviously the FBI is smart enough to construct a plausible story about how the investigation was done and how it led to this person.

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