I’m timid about this and might be late to a party where others already had this idea, so please, no haters.
I can’t get over how facile and stupid the identification of LM was at a McDoballs. This is someone who fell off the entire grid for three months??
Just asking… but couldn’t an organization trying to conceal its reach and inevitability track a fella… and then… force an identification?
I do not have any idea about details… it’s broad strokes. Could it be? How many other privacy lovers heard about these three months completely off the grid somehow and also wondered… how?
Please pardon if this isn’t the appropriate place but the real theme is privacy. What if the watchers are always watching even when a person might believe they have made themself completely digitally invisible?
I don’t buy the conspiracy theories and “the Man sees everything and needed a plausible excuse” theories (although I’ll admit the Man does see a lot more than he should…)
But I will say this: I find it extremely odd that a random McD employee in Fucktown, Nowhere, 275 miles from NYC, recognized a hooded dude wanted for murder in NYC, for the following reasons:
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McD employees don’t look at patrons. They’re bored shitless and they’re not paid well enough to care. You could show up at any McD joint disguised as Elton John with a feather up your ass and the employee behind the counter would still tell you “Would you like fries with that” while looking right through you.
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Do you follow the local news in a city 275 miles from where you live? I don’t. And even assuming it’s NYC and it’s a big enough city that people in Altoona pay attention, there’s a murder every 12 hours in NYC. Why would that one in particular enter the consciousness of a bored employee in a burger joint in Altoona.
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Can you recognize a hooded guy you saw on a still photograph? I can’t. I might have suspicions, but I’m almost certain I wouldn’t be positive enough to call the cops. And again, I work at McD and all I really want is go home after my shift. So I might just forget I saw someone I might have vaguely recognized.
I think you’re already forgetting just how prevalent the story of the murder was. It wasn’t just local news. It was unavoidable.
Luigi is innocent until proven guilty. I think it’s weird that cops found a backpack in central park with no real evidence, but found a gun, a suppressor, and a written confession that started off with praising the cops on this guy who decided to get McDonalds in the middle of the day. I’m not saying that the cops planted evidence to have somebody to finger, but it seems convenient.
It was all over national news, and some international news, for days.
You might not be sure, but you don’t have to be sure. I would expect they got a very large number of tips, most which did not pan out, of course.
But I also don’t think it’s ever been confirmed that it was an employee. My suspicion is there happened to be some law enforcement officer and they called it in. That would explain the rapid response, and the caginess about the tipoff.
I also don’t think it’s ever been confirmed that it was an employee
Oh yeah that’s another thing: would you rat out the guy who killed a disgusting CEO if you flipped burgers for a living? Whatever you think of murder, you might well look the other way in this instance.
For a $50k reward? Yeah, I don’t know what McDonald’s employees make at that location, but it’s probably low enough to make that very tempting.
Do you follow the local news in a city 275 miles from where you live? I don’t.
You mean to tell me you live in NYC? Otherwise you’re breaking your own rule being aware of the shooting (which has been pushed hard on every news outlet be it TV, internet, radio, or print since 1h after it happened, and would be hard not to know about.)
The rest, yeah, but c’mon the entire world basically watched this in real time. I was showing the video around work literally at 8am and it happened at 6am, not much delay.
And that the police took the report seriously, to dedicate enough resources and shoot no one. They suspected he’d have a weapon, and no bullets flew from a group known for weak trigger discipline.
How many shitty fake reports from the poor sighted and easily convinced did they need to sift through to jump up for this one.
The most likely story I have heard is that these automated kiosks at McDonalds have built in face-recognition, but there is no officially legal agreement between law-enforcement and McDonalds to share this data, so they hushed it up with the unlikely story that an employee recognized Luigi.
This is someone who fell off the entire grid for three months??
Its very easy to hide when nobody is looking for you.
I heard he left zero digital traces. That would be hard for me even if I was trying.
Even with location off, couldn’t the cell provider track him using his phone connections by triangulating the latency between at least three cell towers? They may not get a location as precise as GPS, but they’d be close enough. I guess there could be an app that creates false latency in order to throw off cell providers, but that seems extreme and possibly illegal. Unless configured, it would also give odd locations to the cell provider which may trigger further investigation. “John Doe was in Long Island 3 minutes ago, and now they’re in Newark. That’s unusual.” To go completely off of the grid, a person would have to not log into anything and also have no cell phone. They’d have to go back in time to the early 90s using maps, notebooks, and public phones.
