“Nonetheless, it raised an awkward prospect: That a fugitive who had eluded German police for 30 years was found in about 30 minutes by Mr. Colborne, a Canadian journalist who works for the investigative website Bellingcat, and is in junior high school...” Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2024/03/01/w...
Daniela Klette, a militant from the Red Army Faction, was on the run for decades. Yet with publicly available digital recognition tools, German police could probably have found her much sooner.
Sounds like German police weren't trying very hard.
Having lived in Germany for many years, this part hits home: "Another problem, he said, was that Germany has been struggling and failing for years to digitize a government that has remained stubbornly beholden to paper mail and even fax machines."
You know, I'm starting to think the German authorities just really aren't very good at anything www.npr.org/2020/12/10/9...
Whether it's officers participating in neo-Nazi chat groups or hoarding ammunition to prepare for a doomsday scenario, extremism is a persistent problem among those who enforce the law in Germany.
He is not a junior in high school - you are misreading it. "That a fugitive who had eluded German police since Mr. Colborne, a Canadian journalist who works for the investigative website Bellingcat, was in junior high school," She has eluded police since he was in junior high school (30 years ago).
Fucking junior in high school snitching on people living on the other side of the world. Yeah, we're fucked.
“His realization that his sleuthing had in fact worked, has inspired conflicted feelings. It shows the power, he said, of what someone using easily accessible software can do with a single photograph. ‘I can’t stress enough that some of these tools can and will further be abused by bad actors.’”
he's 42
Oh wow, from the Baader-Meinhoff Group? I've been hearing about those guys a lot lately.