An Artist Who Obsessed the FBI | Hacker News Reader

An Artist Who Obsessed the FBI

thedailybeast.com

75 pointsasselinpaul12 comments

> "Nonetheless, after a perfunctory investigation lasting two days that consisted of brief interviews with Lombardi’s girlfriend, Hilary Maslon, and Lombardi’s parents, the Williamsburg police declared the death a suicide. The studio door, securely locked from the inside, showed no signs of forced entry except for the transom the police had opened themselves. Lombardi’s body was not marked by struggle, and the hasty autopsy determined that his injuries were consonant with having hanged himself."

While it's easy to cry "conspiracy theory, everybody was in on it!" I generally believe the majority of these types of deaths, if they are actually shady, do not involve local law enforcement as co-conspirators whatsoever, regardless of the people who want to believe.

It seems that the upsides for actually following rabbit holes in these types of circumstances are little to none for local law enforcement. If you're a local law enforcement agency with little resources, what's a better outcome for the image of your agency? Take Occam's razor, even under suspicious circumstances, send the body to the morgue, and call it done, or send one of your detectives into the labyrinth?

Sending the detective into the labyrinth has two risks, both of which are bad. You'll either end up blowing a bunch of time on a conspiracy where one does not exist, or, in the case that there is, you will probably just end up sending a detective into a world of classified disaster and end up collateral damage of a much more powerful, much more insidious organization. Either way, probing further means you'll lose face. Most will choose the path of least resistance.

If you are ever doing anything political for which there might be retaliation, put yourself under constant surveillance... these days this can be done for a few bucks maybe $50/month and multiple camera all around you can watch your every move and send everything to the cloud. Make it much more difficult to get you without leaving behind plenty of evidence.

If anyone else knows it's there or to even look for it. Never underestimate your local law enforcement's ability to go 'yup, it's a suicide' right off the bat and not look any further. Because any cloud based accounts are apt to be secured with strong encryption and passwords your friends may not be able to gain access to your accounts.

I imagine anybody who would go through the trouble to stream everything to the cloud would also bother to setup a dead man's switch.

If I told a friend to please share this .onion URL and AES key with the police should anything happen to me because I think I might be assassinated by the Bush campaign, I'm pretty sure said friend would have me committed.

Don't do that. Upload to an S3 bucket or GDrive with revisioning turned on,. Perhaps make a job via Lamda to copy that data somewhere else as well that's not deletable. Share the access of that with any other technical person you know and trust. That's about it. If you hit the can, they can get the info or you can use an online service to automate life checks, etc.

Like get Twilio to call you and if you don't respond, send out the read-only s3 bcuket credentials after a couple of days... with all video recordings, etc.

Death that looks like suicide, the feeling that one has made a monumentally important discovery, and the perception that one is being persecuted by secret agents might occur together for several reasons. Having upset the intelligence community is probably one, but so is mental illness, and schizophrenics are a lot more common than Edward Snowden figures.

Further, suicide and automobile accidents are leading causes of death among healthy people. It would be strange if they didn't happen sometimes to people who claimed to be persecuted by shadowy conspiracies, real or imagined.

Looking for someone with knowledge on what happened regarding BCCI's involvement with Saudi Arabian money.

Throwaway account, email throwaway70399@hmamail.com.

>..if he had indeed been dead for more than 24 hours, the active ingredients in both Tylenol and alcohol would have metabolized out of his body

This doesn't sound right. Wouldn't metabolism cease at death?

That title makes as much sense as "An Artist Who Addicting the FBI".

It's fine. "Obsess" has a transitive meaning. "1. to dominate or preoccupy the thoughts, feelings, or desires of (a person); beset, trouble, or haunt persistently or abnormally: Suspicion obsessed him." [0]

[0] http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/obsess

I think it's the inclusion of the word "who" that throws me, making it sound like the act of obsession was directly effected by the artist.

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