Yes, the operation of the mixer itself is automated, but I've wager than the owners have blacklisted addresses known to be involved with massive BTC theft - it just doesn't make sense to touch them from a risk perspective.
Sorry, I don't get what you mean? Do you mean the criminals could simply move the coins to a new wallet before moving them to an exchange?
Transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain are public, so it's relatively easy to keep tabs on movements of known criminal proceeds (as the article demonstrates :)
> it's relatively easy to keep tabs on movements of known criminal proceeds
Until they've been obfuscated by a mixer... and not every mixer is going to be interested in blacklisting every set of coin from every known criminal activity. And many criminal activities are surely unknown, including many for which the sources of coins are not going to go to any extent to report. (The senders may be committing crimes that were unrelated to Bitcoin crime, and so entirely off the radar.)
I'd hazard a guess that the majority of crime committed in and around the ecosystem of Bitcoin is not even Bitcoin theft, so might never be reported.
How many times does a value have to move from one address to another address, and mix with untainted coin, before it's going to be considered too far removed from the original addresses to be palpably associated with the original crime?