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Comment by whycome | Hacker News Reader

I'm still convinced that Luigi's capture happened via similar parallel construction. I suspect they knew where he was as soon as the crime occurred (or shortly thereafter).

It also reminds me of the fact that the Titanic was only discovered because Robert Ballard funded the submersible robots via the US Navy looking for specific wrecks.

https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-...

> "The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity," Ballard told National Geographic. "But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/titanic-w...

> Ballard met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic.

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Wondering what capability you think their might have been that caught Luigi? And do you think the fast food workers and local cops were in the know, or just that he was being tracked waiting on an organic tip?

Advanced facial recognition for one. College students recently did an experiment where they could scan a face and find a lot of publicly available information about people. Imagine the stores of data the gov has they don’t talk about.

This my own conspiracy theory, but I theorize the anti-mask movement was started specifically to prevent masking from ever becoming normalized.

No need to scrap the internet for photos

Just get a large chunk of your population to take part in a "two pictures ten years apart" meme every couple of years, they can provide their own evidence.

Maybe Facebook could be convinced to front such a program?

Yes and in general I think it's a good thing. It's a shame and a moral obscenity (and moral injury for the people staffing those systems) when they can see crimes or abuses but are unable to do anything due to "national security" (when such withholding seems to undermine it!).

Good connecting of the dots with the Titanic! Interesting. Did not know that :)

One might think that “moral obscenity” happens when “people staffing those systems” get their jobs and pretend that their responsibility is now delegated to some imaginary authority from the contemporary tales (which is not carved from wood or stone in our enlightened times).

In other words, such dramas are fake, and smokescreen the unclean consciousness. Remember the story about digital spying clerks from US complaining about being lent to Saudi Arabia, not because it was against their principles or laws, but because they were not paid “well enough”?

I don't think these issues can be easily resolved. Intelligence isn't just about what you know, but also about the other side knowing what you know. What if exposing that capability to public will allow enemies to circumvent it, thus leading more lives lost? This isn't something confined to questions of military intelligence.

That being said. There was series, Person of Interest, exactly about this problem.

> but also about the other side knowing what you know

The israelis used the Spike missile for DECADES (they even had mock tanks launching it) and kept it quiet.

The ukrainians immediately uploaded videos of them using FPVs, I was sure at that time that the russians will in no time catch up and surpass ukraine in their FPV drone usage.

It's the intersection of morality, and power. In the game of power morality is often suspended, or vastly differs. In the realm of ordinary human affairs, where people are not endless in competition, morality reigns supreme and governs ideals for interactions, such as interpersonally. Both morality, and game of power, are necessary and important, I guess. But it's not easy because I think there's a fundamental tension between morality and power always.

That's why people in intelligence (fundamentally a power game) need moral flexibility. This can go right, or sometimes it goes wrong. But having to make such high stakes decisions all the time would at the least be fatiguing I imagine. And overtime, with the inevitable bad decisions, or implementing decisions made by others, the moral injury sets in.

Sort of related but a lot of the bigdrone pilots have serious PTSD and suicide: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2GFcNynl9qY

Regarding Luigi, he took no steps to alter his very prominent facial features before or after the crime.

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