7mo ago

I'm starting to believe the "McDonalds" identification might be a slight of hand to protect privacy invasions?

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?

59 comments

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:
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.
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.
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.
  
  Yea, I live in the UK and his smiling face was all over the news here too.
- Oh come the fuck on, you live in New York or did you not hear that he iced the slimy exec hours afterwards? Cuz everyone in the US did
- 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.
- 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.
- Despite what the critics responding here say, I think there’s some smoke here if not a little fire.
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.
- Hell, I remember during Trump's term they basically waxed a protestor as he was going to work. My guess is McDonald's didn't want the bad press of a shooting on their property.
- It’s all fishy af.
  
  It seemed fishy, but I didn't anticipate that LE would be unprofessional enough to put a bunch of random McD's employees in the crossfire by lying about them being the ones to report. Then again...
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.
- Indeed! Someone should get this opinion around in the news media.
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.
  
  Just don't log into your accounts lol
There is a certain smell of parallel construction. I hope his legal team is very thorough in examining every little detail, tearing apart time-lines of events, chains of custody, witnesses and find any holes at all in the public narrative if this is the case. One hopes that the parallel construction is in the way of they used illegal surveillance and intelligence capabilities to catch him and it could bring their whole case down, not in the way of they made up a claim that someone at McDonalds called the cops but really they were doing basic legal detective stuff tracking greyhound buses.
Mcds is a red herring. They tracked him via the Greyhound bus database. He was dumb and rose the bus using the same fake id. The bus just happened to stop at a mcds when they caught up with it. .
- Which would give the impression that the local police was not prepared with evidence to plant on him.
  
  It gives me the impression the feds were prepared to plant evidence
- What greyhound buses are stopping at a McDonalds?
  
  Rest stop/ travel center. Combination Gas station and a couple/few fast food restaurants, depending on the size of the interstate.
  Though considering it's Altoona, that doesn't work. He would have gotten off the bus down at the station, and the closest McDonald's to there is like 4 blocks away
  
  Most Greyhound routes do.
I personally don't think he did it. He could easily be a grifter trying to take credit for a very popular act. There's no shortage of those. All you'd need to do:
Walk into a public place with a bag of somewhat incriminating items, but nothing that's linked to the actual crime scene.
Arouse enough suspicion to get the cops called on you. Being a white guy with black hair and a hoodie is not enough for someone to call the cops on you, I have no idea why people believe that was enough for a McD's employee to call the cops.
Claim credit for the shooting to the cops.
Bonus points - Have a social media history praising similar actions.
The altoona cops then forwarded this to the NYPD, who were desperate to pin this on someone, after they messed up and let the shooter slip through their fingers. Out of the all the tips, this was the best one they'd gotten so far, so they're running with it now.
This also explains why Luigi's taking credit for some, but not all of the claims the police made (especially about the money he was supposedly carrying).
- And get the death penalty? What?
  
  My sincerest wish is that he waits until most of the way through a trial before providing an incontrovertible alibi.
  Whether he is playing role as a body double for some someone else, or just a grifter, I hope it happens.
  
  He couldn't possibly know they'd go for that.
  Grifters don't always think things like this through.
  A surprising # of people would probably willingly take the death penalty to get 15 minutes of fame, especially for an action as popular as this was.
- So… someone who happens to look like the the person captured on the videos has the wherewithal to craft the manifesto and fabricate the 3D printed gun parts, and also wants to… do this so that he can become famous or gum up the machinery of justice? Seriously, I’m not tracking.
Yep. The cops & feds regularly use illegal means to gather evidence. Then they make up a story about how they could have hypothetically gathered it legally.
It’s called “parallel construction,” and it needs to be explicitly outlawed.
- This story has parallel construction written all over it.
  
  highways too
Three months? And no one correcting you on that? WTF? Couple of days between shooting and arrest...!
Other than that: yeah, unlikely anyone could recognize anyone from those pubished photos.
- I think the story was that he had disappeared from friends and family for a few months prior.
  
  And how is that relevant to the authorities "not being able to find" someone when they are not looking for that person? oO
- I heard that he went into hiding months before the actual shooting.
  
  And how is that relevant to the authorities "not being able to find" someone when they are not looking for that person? oO
- Thank you! I was starting to think I was crazy.
It’s not an uncommon question.
- I would have worried had I been first.
I think it is highly likely that exactly that happened.
- There’s surely something more here than we are being told.
I wholly believe the same. If LM used a mobile device of any kind at any point during his mission, it would be possible to trace his whereabouts and match the path of the shooter to the path of LM. I further believe that the fast food industry (specifically MDs and its associations that lobby to continue the rampant unchecks of processed food) is behind the hit. Or at the very least, is using it as a PR opportunity to deflect blame of health problems in America to the health insurance industry. They are, after all, facing another lawsuit for causing diabetes that was officially filed on the same week as the shooting: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrmbomype/Martinez%20v%20Kraft%20Heinz%20et%20al%20complaint%2012-10.pdf
Md and Starbucks are business partners. How convenient that every mention of this case is accompanied by both their names being lauded as the hero who put a “terrorist” behind bars.
So you could show printed faces of people on the run at the self at a mcdonalds ...

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