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Crime Government United States

FBI Used Etsy, LinkedIn To Make Arrest In Torching of Philadelphia Police Vehicles (6abc.com) 325

Authorities used popular websites including Etsy, Poshmark and LinkedIn to identify a woman who has since been charged for the arson of two Philadelphia police vehicles during the unrest that followed peaceful protests on May 30. From a report: Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal, 33, of Philadelphia, is currently in federal custody and had her initial court appearance on Tuesday. According to United States Attorney William M. McSwain, on May 30, two vehicles, one PPD sedan (number 2514) and one PPD SUV (number 1612), were parked on the north side of City Hall. During the violence that began around City Hall following peaceful protests, Blumenthal allegedly set fire to both vehicles.

[T]he FBI says it was Blumenthal's T-shirt and a forearm tattoo that helped authorities identify her. In amateur photos given to authorities, she is seen wearing a T-shirt that says, "Keep the immigrants, deport the racists." They were able to trace the T-shirt back to an Etsy shop, where a review was left by a user that displayed a Philadelphia location. Investigators say open searches for the username led them to a Poshmark user by the name of lore-elisabeth. Open searches for a Lore Elisabeth in Philadelphia led investigators to a LinkedIn profile for a woman who was employed as a massage therapist. [...] If convicted, Blumenthal faces a maximum possible sentence of ten years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $250,000.

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FBI Used Etsy, LinkedIn To Make Arrest In Torching of Philadelphia Police Vehicles

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  • by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @08:29PM (#60195590)
    Behave accordingly
  • Good (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ahodgson ( 74077 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @08:35PM (#60195610)

    Hope they sue her for the cost too.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Why, so that they have a huge debt hung round their neck as well as the criminal conviction and are unable to return as productive, reformed members of society?

      I guess it's profit for the prison-industrial complex, so not all bad.

      • Our taxes keep going up for all sorts of reasons. Trying to minimize that, I guess. After all, it's tax dollars that will be spent to buy new cars to replace those. That brings their yearly budget up a pretty good deal, as those police cars are fucking expensive due to the equipment that's inside them. When their budget goes up, so do our taxes.

        Besides, what was she trying to accomplish by setting fire to 2 police cars? Do we really expect that a thug-mentality is going to take any country anywhere? I

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Didn't you get a huge tax cut a couple of years ago? Or were you not rich enough to benefit from it?

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by fuzznutz ( 789413 )

        Why, so that they have a huge debt hung round their neck as well as the criminal conviction and are unable to return as productive, reformed members of society?

        I guess it's profit for the prison-industrial complex, so not all bad.

        According to one news report I read, she may be looking at $500,000 in fines so the price of a couple of patrol cars is peanuts. Besides, that is called restitution. Isn't restitution one of those pillars of restorative justice that your type is always harping on?

    • Hope they sue her for the cost too.

      If she is convicted, restitution for the cost of the vehicles will almost certainly be part of her sentencing. Not that there would be any reasonable expectation of her paying more than a token amount each month, but if she ever comes into any money (e.g. from an inheritance), the feds will be there to take their cut.

  • noobs? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @08:36PM (#60195616)

    so evidently the FBI has achieved entry-level 4chan-doxxing skills?

    • Re:noobs? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mamba-mamba ( 445365 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @01:26AM (#60196284)

      They have access to plenty of data. After they figured out who she was the easy way, they had to construct a chain of evidence in parallel that is admissible in court. This is known as "parallel construction."

      Don't lull yourself by thinking that the FBI is incompetent at tracking people down. They are not.

      • Considering how easy it was to track her down I highly doubt this was a case of double construction... Most criminals are idiots and what keeps clearance rates low is a lack of investigative resources, not criminals being good at not getting caught.
    • so evidently the FBI has achieved entry-level 4chan-doxxing skills?

      This IS significant. Apparently they didn't need to break into everyone's iPhone and actually learnt some investigative skills.

    • When they start analyzing directions and times of airplane vapor trails in the sky cross-checking them with flight schedules, they'll have achieved the 4chan level.

  • by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @08:39PM (#60195634)

    I think the amount of effort here was probably overkill, but people need to remember that no matter how peaceful or violent a protest/riot is, if you do property damage, you're never absolved of it.

    When there was a Riot in Vancouver, Vancouver PC/RCMP used the ICBC insurance (That's the DMV to you Americans) to identify nearly everyone at the riot and everyone that engaged in property crime was punished to some extent, either through the media (which had a field day with it) or with fines. Some kind of facial recogniction was used in this process, but because ICBC is government owned, the police had express permission to do this.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_riot#Criminal_prosecution

    301 people were found guilty out of the 100,000 people who were in the crowd. So 0.3% were responsible for all the property damage.

    Now, on the other hand here, was it worth the amount of manpower to go after each and every one of these guys? Probably not. A lesson other cities should have learned by now is to not escalate a riot so that vandals can blend into the crowd.

    So this one person who torched two police cars, was basically found because:
    - They did something stupid (vandalism in excess of $10,000)
    and
    - They made it easy to identify (tattoo's, hair dye, clothing, etc. Whatever happened to "masked bandit"'s wearing solid black huh?")

    • Right, because only the cops can escalate a situation. I suppose if the cops just stayed in the donut shop everything would have been just peachy.

    • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @09:19PM (#60195754)

      I think the amount of effort here was probably overkill,

      The amount of effort here was a small fraction of the cost to replace two police vehicles. That means it wasn't overkill.

      I'd agree with the idea that lives are more important than property, so we shouldn't be shooting (and potentially killing) rioters. But in this case there's a direct economic comparable - the cost to replace the property she (allegedly) destroyed, versus the cost in labor to track her down and arrest her to stand trial. And it's skewed pretty strongly in favor of tracking her down. This stuff isn't free. If you figure replacing the two police cars will cost $100k, then it's going to take the equivalent of a generic American working roughly two years to fix what she broke. Two years of labor which we can no longer apply to improving society in other areas. That's what she (allegedly) robbed society of with her actions - two man-years of productivity.

      • by N1AK ( 864906 )
        I find it hard to argue this was wasted effort by the police, even though I have sympathy for the cause and am pretty much fence sitting as to whether some direct action is justified; you can hardly expect the police to just shrug and ignore it if you burn down stuff.

        However; what I do have an issue with is that as many of you will have had personal experience of the amount of effort the police put into investigating issues relates almost entirely to what they want to put effort into and not what is necc
      • by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        Don't forget the cost to society of allowing this sort of thing to go unpunished.

        Deterrence is important! It might be one thing to allow the misdemeanors might be allowed some investigative and proprietorial discretion amidst impassioned political happenings, its quite another to allow people to go thinking serious felonies will just be ignored and a demonstration means its some sort of free-for-all.

        I don't think if you ask people, "Hey do you want to live in a society where become someone posted something

      • Let's not pretend that money would ever have gone towards 'improving society'. I'm not a fan of the BLM rioters but it's telling it's not the people looting and setting on fire shops that are getting doxxed and charged,
      • We should have been much more aggressive to head off the rioters to begin with. As of a week ago, the BLM riots resulted in at least 15 people being murdered after the murder of George Floyd. At least 10 of those lives were black. For context, that is one more black person then all of the unarmed black people killed by all cops nationwide in 2019. I have not recently seen a count of how many people have been murdered since then, surely the number has grown. The knock on effect inspired the city of Chicago t

    • It's _fortunate_ no one got hurt. Well made molotov cocktails are very difficult to extinguish. These Molotov "mocktails" were much less dangerous, but still pose real risks to fire personnel and innocent people who may be unable to escape a burning vehicle's sparks, flame, or smoke in a rioting crowd.

    • > I think the amount of effort here was probably overkill

      They spent half an hour clicking. Maybe an hour.

      I suppose you one could maybe make a cogent argument for "I think people should torch police cars". A bad argument maybe, but a comprehensible one.

      Arguing that 30-60 minutes sitting on your butt is too much effort to bust someone who has torched at least two of them? I don't buy that.

      I say "at least two" because I've known quite a few people who have been arrested and precisely zero of those people

    • I think the amount of effort here was probably overkill

      I think there was 15min of Google searching to track down an arsonist. Now if they took the iPhones off everyone and started paying an Israeli company thousands of dollars to unlock them while complaining to congress that Apple is the root of all evil, then we can talk about overkill.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @05:55AM (#60196680) Homepage Journal

      By that logic the police can never be absolved of all the violent crime they perpetrate.

      Can't have it both ways, if it's just a few bad cops then it's just a few bad protesters too. If protesters become a mob then so do the police. In fact it's far worse for the police because the protesters are not really organized or trained, but the police are so bare even more responsibility for members of the group.

      All this is just a distraction though. The way to stop this kind of crime is to address the issues.

    • "no matter how peaceful or violent a protest/riot is, if you do property damage, you're never absolved of it."

      Tattoos and scars have been used to identify people for hundreds of years.

      No matter how peaceful or violent a protest/riot is, if you do property damage, you're better wear a white or black T-Shirt and no tattoos.

  • Good! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @08:44PM (#60195646) Homepage

    Actual detective work. Good for them!

  • by godel_56 ( 1287256 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @08:52PM (#60195670)

    She was rubbing the police the wrong way.

  • by nomad63 ( 686331 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @08:57PM (#60195680)
    People who are out to cause harm, just because they think they can get away with, must have learned a lesson from this sting operation. It was bout time, actually a little too late in my opinion. But better late than never. May you rot in jail, arsonist...
  • Not bad (Score:2, Insightful)

    That's some decent sleuthing, tracking her through all her mouse droppings on social media. Remember, even something completely innocuous can end up leading people to your door.

    (And I'm glad she got caught because I don't think people should be allowed to run around setting fire to shit whenever they feel like it.)

    • "Where are your Rebel friends NOW? Heh. Heh. Heh."

      I suppose this should teach you that if you go after the police, they'll go after you.

      But I kinda wonder if they just didn't have a cell phone ping match for the two locations at the times of the incidents, and had to reconstruct a more palatable excuse like Etsy and Linked in. I mean, really, did they do an image match on the shirt against Etsy?

      It seems much more likely to have outed her that way without wanting to disclose the capabilities at play here.

    • It's not so much the innocuous: it's the uniqueness. If you've ever read more than one Sherlock Holmes story, you see a pattern to his deduction. Holmes even comes out and says as much, at one point (cite needed, but I'm not searching the entire canon for it, atm): The mundanity of a crime is what makes it hard to solve. It's the unique angles - such as this girl's shirt and her tattoos - that provide the clinching clues. If she had no tattoos or an Abercrombie and Fitch t-shirt, the cops would've been he
  • by divide overflow ( 599608 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @09:17PM (#60195746)
    Luckily, most petty criminals are pretty stupid. That's what got little miss molotov a free photo session at the local police station.

    Smarter criminals know how to avoid leaving incriminating evidence behind.
    • Well she'll certainly be much better at it by the time she gets out.
      • "Getting better at it" may be above her pay grade.
      • _That_ is a real problem with US policies for jail time. However, this was not a non-violent drug crime. It was arson. These two already had law degrees as well, so they were certainly aware of the risks. It does make me wonder how many of their former clients were mis-served by an attorney "helping the homeless" who hands out Molotov cocktails in public. How many of her clients exxperienced convenient arson, especially if they were due for eviction?

        • The lawyers should also have considered that a felony conviction, which will be hard to avoid, will cost them their licenses. They won't be lawyers for much longer, but the cost will be with them forever.
    • by ghoul ( 157158 )

      Smarter criminals dont break laws. They buy Congressmen to write the laws that make their actions legal and use the cops to enforce their will.

  • And not gotten that tattoo. ;-)
  • Protests. Good.
    Riots. BAD.

    Throw the GD rioters into prison. Oddly, a number of them are being shown to be on the far right, not far left, like this woman.
  • If you torch a police car, you shouldn't include that on your resume.

    Save that tidbit for the second job interview.

  • by bferrell ( 253291 ) on Wednesday June 17, 2020 @11:45PM (#60196122) Homepage Journal

    As they used to call it, good old fashioned police work

  • The pressure on her is going to be intense over the next few weeks or months, as she is nailed dead to rights committing a major felony, but the Feds actually don't care about her much and want to go up the chain to get whoever organized and funded these riots. Of course, it's almost 99% certain that she doesn't know anything useful and was just drunk/high and caught up in a moment that will result in her passing away in prison.

  • by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Thursday June 18, 2020 @06:29AM (#60196728)

    A police station in Minneapolis was burned down via arson. Videos from around the area showed a white guy in a distinctive shirt throwing a molotov cocktail into the building [duluthnewstribune.com] along with a second person.

    After reviewing a Snapchat account, the ATF found comments from the criminal such as, “These guys have never made a Molotov Rookies,” and “We need gasoline.” Investigators reviewed another Snapchat video in which Robinson can be seen setting a fire in a stairwell inside the third precinct.

    Fortunately for investigators, a woman emailed the ATF and identified Dylan Shakespeare Robinson as the criminal in the video. She explained Robinson was from the Brainerd area and she was familiar with him, the complaint stated. She requested anonymity and said Robinson removed pictures from his Facebook account. She said Robinson also posted he “also did AutoZone” and had posted videos on Snapchat. During the rioting on May 27, the AutoZone building across from the Minneapolis precinct was burned to the ground.

    The police found the criminal in Breckenridge, CO a few days later. According to court records, Robinson is currently on probation in Crow Wing County for a fourth-degree possession of a phencyclidine/hallucinogen conviction. Robinson also has been convicted of petty misdemeanor and misdemeanor traffic and parking violations in Crow Wing, Ramsey and Hennepin counties.

    • Nothing helps urban minority communities like having young white liberals from the suburbs come burn them down.

      Doesn't make any sense to me, but I'm not part of either group so maybe I'm missing something.

      As a side note, it looks like Brainerd is a picturesque lakeside vacation town. It's also 95% white, so you know this Shakespeare kid was deeply immersed in black culture and the problems faced by urban minorities.

  • Bet she was surprised
  • Jaron Lanier needs to publish an updated version of his book, "Eleven Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now."
  • ...but I do wonder if the involved agencies would have expended a similar amount of effort if it had been a protestor's vehicle, or one that just happened to have been parked near a protest, that was damaged.

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