[Ndymium]

In the end he was caught because his van was identified and because "One of his sons had revealed to his then-girlfriend that his father had placed a bomb in Harvey's."

I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this. You would think if you are going to bomb a place, the first thing would be to not talk about it to anyone outside those that are directly involved. But criminals that have executed the "perfect crime" get caught driving over the speed limit, with expired license, spending money too lavishly...

I suppose he would have been caught some other way if not for this, but it almost seems like a comical trope to me. Maybe you are the best bomb maker around, but you weren't that good at the simpler things.

[kumarvvr]

As always, with any crime, the more people involved, the greater the possibility that human factors will sabotage the operation.

The perfect crime has one perpetrator.

It is also why its fascinating that people will believe in conspiracy theories that supposedly involve tens / hundreds / thousands of people.

Theories that we faked the moon landing always intrigue me. Or that the earth is flat.

[55555]

I see your point! I totally do. I also used to hold this belief. But then the Snowden revelations came out and it was revealed that probably 10,000 people in government were aware of a system that was sucking up all of our data for warrantless search and they had successfully kept the secret for something like 10 years (or more?).

For sure it's true that a secret can be kept by three people if two of them are dead. But there are clear cases where large groups of people have been able to keep secrets as well, or at least keep them from spilling out into public awareness.

I'd bet that for most crimes, the secret isn't kept, and there is someone else out there that knows who did it, who simply doesn't tell law enforcement. And yet most serious crimes aren't solved.

Humans have a real need to tell other people personal things, even to their own detriment. But sometimes things stay secrets even if tons of people know about them.

[GuB-42]

I think that Snowden leaks were more or less an open secret. I mean, it is about spies spying. Sure, the NSA overstepped its borders, but it is not exactly the first time (remember ECHELON), and the way it did that wasn't revolutionary. They didn't have a quantum computer, nanobots or anything like that: just competent computer security specialists and too much money to spend. Not even something significant like breaking commercial-grade crypto or anything like that, they "broke TLS" by inserting wiretaps in datacenters where data wasn't encrypted.

Snowden gave proof and technical details about what was happening. It is like showing proof that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel doesn't talk about it, they may or may not have nuclear weapons, most people think they do, and such a revelation won't surprise anyone, but it is still a big deal, because they can't use their "deliberate ambiguity" strategy anymore.

[jefftk]

I was working at Google when it came out, and that they were tapping our private inter-dc links was a huge update. Before I think it was something like "I guess the NSA could do that a bit, but it would be a prohibitively costly to do much" and then suddenly it was "we have to encrypt all of this as quickly as we can". There was a huge internal reprioritization.

(Speaking only for myself; I didn't work on any of this directly)

[zhengyi13]

"Seriously, fuck these guys"

[tdhz77]

Easy to say f regulations, and oddly and most surprisingly nobody ever says good regulations when the building doesn’t come down.

[closewith]

It absolutely wasn't common knowledge before Snowden. Even the suggestion would have put you firmly in the conspiracy theorist camp to most people.

[beering]

Consider that Wired reported on NSA's secret mass-wiretap of AT&T communications in 2006! This was a high-profile lawsuit (Hepting v. AT&T), which was dismissed in 2009 after new immunity legislation in 2008. That was followed by Jewel v. NSA in 2008 which seems still unresolved.

Not to mention the whistleblowing on the Trailblazer Project and New York Times reporting on the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" in 2005/2006.

[abz10]

I became known as a conspiracy theorist amount my friends when I told them about this. A week later the Snowden revelations came out and yet somehow I’m still the conspiracy theorist.

[fragmede]

Room 641A was known in the hacker community and proven to exist via a lawsuit by the EFF in 2006, 7 years before Snowden entered the picture.

[gre]

I went out drinking once in DC with some people who worked at the NSA in 2005 or so and they said they were hiring for people to analyze "all the traffic on the internet".

When the Snowden leaks came out it was not a surprise. Granted most people don't go out drinking with the people doing the spying, but even people who work at the NSA can't keep a secret, if it was even meant to be a secret.

[stickfigure]

An obvious counterpoint is that the conspiracy was exposed, by Snowden.

I think the lesson here is that a "conspiracy" can exist as long as all of its participants believe they are morally in the right. The people involved in the NSA dragnet believed in the cause; when a non-believer (Snowden) got involved, the gig was up.

It's easy to believe that a government agency would overstep its bounds to spy on people it (according to complex laws that well-meaning people misunderstand or disagree with) shouldn't. It's much, much less credible that a large number of US government employees conspired to, say, bomb the world trade center. A conspiracy like that would quickly enlist someone with moral qualms about it, and it just takes one to blow the whistle.

[ALittleLight]

I don't think that's quite right.

Most criminal conspiracies succeed as evidenced by the fact that most crimes aren't solved and most criminals aren't arrested. In fact, the larger your criminal organization, the less likely you are to go to prison. If I shot a passerby on the street, witnesses would be coming out of the woodwork. Friends or family would identify me by surveillance tape or report my strange behavior. Conversely, if a gang in Baltimore kills some guy, nobody will come forward. Let's not even get started on cartels.

Instead, I think it's much more apt to say that whether or not a conspiracy will be betrayed depends a lot on what will happen to the traitor/whistleblower.

If you want to turn in an evil, murderous, criminal organization, you'd better be willing to die or flee somewhere beyond their grasp. That bravery needs to be combined with an ability to get compelling evidence to the people who need to see it.

[kumarvvr]

Eventually, Snowden came out with the truth isn't it.

Also, not all of those 10k people might not be knowing what they are doing or don't care. You can cloak a lot of espionage activity with forms, sheets, memos, brainwashing and what not.

[vmception]

That’s like a call center agent telling you a policy is for “security” and not knowing the actual policy or the legal rationale or the supporting law

A lot of people in the intelligence community were aware but few had all the details or would care to look

[shahar2k]

how many of those 10k people really have the awareness required to put that kind of data invasion in context and perspective? I think the reaction to large issues like climate change, tells you exactly all you need about people's ability to downplay large issues into "someone else's problem"

[SerLava]

Actually we all knew the NSA was doing it, and what Snowden leaked was just the proof.

[jefftk]

Who is "we all"?

(ex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27989385)

[beering]

Wired reported on the EFF suing AT&T over NSA wiretapping telecom traffic in bulk in 2006. And there were other assorted news reports on Trailblazer, the "Total Information Awareness program", etc. from that time.

So maybe not in the widespread public awareness, but if you were Googling trying to answer the question, "Is the USA gov't eavesdropping on all communication traffic?" in 2013 pre-Snowden, then the reasonable conclusion would've been, "Yes".

[jefftk]

I don't think that's what people thought at the time; see https://www.theverge.com/2013/11/6/5072924/google-engineers-... for something more external. There really was a lot of surprise.

The 2006 lawsuit was about AT&T cooperating with the NSA to facilitate tapping their customers, quite different from the NSA surreptitiously digging up and tapping private fiber.

[adventured]

> But then the Snowden revelations came out and it was revealed that probably 10,000 people in government were aware of a system that was sucking up all of our data for warrantless search and they had successfully kept the secret for something like 10 years (or more?).

Illegal domestic electronic espionage/surveillance wasn't a vast secret. It was widely known that the Feds were making every effort they could to push down that road, and the Feds had a very long history of illegal domestic espionage. Frankly, it was obvious that it was going on. A lot of people I know in tech had crossed paths with other people that knew pieces of the puzzle, that some domestic espionage programs were going on (particularly supercharged after 9/11). You'd get snippets of it in discussions. Snowden's revelations were not the first, it was the bombshell that was comprehensive (and only for a small part of what they were doing).

It wasn't yet proven, and the full extent wasn't yet known, there wasn't enough credible public evidence to demonstrate exactly what they were doing. There's a huge difference between something not being secret, and being proven, and that's what Snowden's actions helped to correct.

While it's in the not-yet-proven stage, the malevolent skeptics in particular will all sandbag any attempt to reveal it, by burying discussions under conspiracy tags and swat away any attempts to dig into what's really going on. Some skeptics do that on purpose because they have a vested interest in doing so, some do that because they're cowards (which is what is represented by the common statement: "if you don't have anything to hide, you don't have anything to fear" - it's cowardly people hiding from a moment of confrontation).

Ready for another one? They're still performing illegal domestic electronic surveillance. That too isn't some vast secret. Oh I know, but but but they're not supposed to be doing that! Golly.

[giarc]

>It is also why its fascinating that people will believe in conspiracy theories that supposedly involve tens / hundreds / thousands of people.

I have the same reasoning for the 9/11 truthers. Do people really believe that no one on the "inside" has come out to say it was all staged/planned/faked? Hijacking 4 planes and flying them into buildings is going to take a lot of planning. Not to mention that people claim there was no plane that hit the Pentagon. Like really? They go to all that planning and just think "let's just use a missle at the pentagon, no one will notice it wasn't a plane."

[barnesto]

Do you believe the magic of Penn and Teller is actually magic?

[rainbowzootsuit]

The moon landings were faked and the government chose the premier director of the era to do it. None other than Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick was a perfectionist and stickler for details. His background as a photographer always showed through in the cinematography of his films. After extensive field testing, he chose to conduct the filming in the only way that he felt was able to adequately capture the unusual environment of the lunar surface using practical lighting techniques: he filmed all of the scenes of the mission and landing on-location.

[paulpauper]

The perfect crime is one in which you will either not serve time or only a little if caught. Politics comes to mind.

[harambae]

While that's a good crime, a really perfect crime is one that no one ever knows took place.

[giarc]

Funny you should mention 'get caught driving over the speed limit'.... from another link in this thread that did happen.

Like most plans, Birges’s fell apart rather early on. One of his sons got a speeding ticket, placing him near the ransom drop point. His girlfriend drove off the road, resulting in her hospitalization.

https://hackaday.com/2015/09/21/this-is-what-a-real-bomb-loo...

[the-dude]

It is because you don't hear about the cases which don't slip up.

[dogorman]

Selection bias is a cheap canned answer, but it doesn't make any sense here. Sensational unsolved crimes make the news. The public hearing about crimes isn't conditional on those crimes being solves. Arguably some of the most enduringly notorious crimes are the ones that go unsolved.

The Zodiac Killer; never been caught. "D.B. Cooper", never caught. The presumed murder of Jimmy Hoffa, unsolved.

[klyrs]

I happen to know somebody who was involved in the investigation of highly professional heist. The bank wanted to keep it quiet, and I can't find much other than this one article about the incident. I was gonna call it movie-worthy, but it's not, because there were no salacious details, no close calls, just in&out and no funny business.

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19980804&slug...

[the-dude]

The best crimes do not look like crimes. The police does not put out press releases repeatedly with 'we got no leads'. Such cases fade fast.

[dogorman]

> The best crimes do not look like crimes.

Sure, but there is really no shortage of known unsolved crimes.

> The police does not put out press releases repeatedly with 'we got no leads'.

They do, in all the cases I listed they've asked the public for help for years. Certainly they don't do that for crimes they don't know occurred, but there is no shortage of known crimes that are very publicly unsolved.

For that matter, there are also a whole lot of missing person bulletins soliciting information from the public. Many of them might be murder victims, but it isn't known whether they are really alive or dead, let alone murdered. The public is nonetheless asked for information.

[adventured]

> Sure, but there is really no shortage of known unsolved crimes.

That's certainly the nice way to put it -

"If you're murdered in America, there's a 1 in 3 chance that the police won't identify your killer. To use the FBI's terminology, the national "clearance rate" for homicide today is 64.1 percent. Fifty years ago, it was more than 90 percent." ... "Criminologists estimate that at least 200,000 murders have gone unsolved since the 1960s"

https://www.npr.org/2015/03/30/395069137/open-cases-why-one-...

[dogorman]

Yes, police are pretty good at solving "the spouse did it" crimes, the most obvious sort. When the victims were chosen randomly, the clearance rate becomes abysmal. They're also bad at solving crimes when the victims come from the marginalized fringes of society. Jack the Ripper is a famous unsolved case of a serial killer who targeted prostitutes more than a century ago. Modern examples include the Long Island killer, the Eastbound Strangler, and plenty more.

When the existence of such a serial killer is recognized, it tends to make the news at least regionally. Sometimes they become internationally famous for many years. But to my point, the public hearing about it is not contingent on the culprit being caught. If anything, the ones who are caught fast and easy tend to make the least amount of news. You can 'juice' unsolved crimes for stories a century after the fact, but stories that follow the "husband did it and we caught him" format tend to disappear from the news after the culprit has been sentenced.

[panarky]

Clearance rate for rape: 34.5% (65.5% unsolved)

Source: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[the-dude]

The Dutch police has a cold case team, yes. For cold cases ( there is even a word for it ) which have not seen progress or public attention for year, some even decades.

[praptak]

I think most police forces have one. A decade might mean there's new tech that can move the case forward or the criminal got caught for something else and it's just a matter of connecting the cases.

[raldi]

Huh? Big unsolved crimes receive unending fame.

[clipradiowallet]

This is not always the case... the DoJ reminds me of a sales organization. Crimes are sales leads. Publicized leads are usually very close to being closed(solved).

That doesn't always work though - the crime may be something the public is aware of, and then the pressure to "close" the lead is even greater. There are numerous "big" crimes that the public has no awareness of though.

[SaltyBackendGuy]

This is somewhat pessimistic..

If the case is high profile enough, they will _always_ find someone to find guilty.

[meowface]

The Zodiac Killer and D. B. Cooper are notable exceptions. And there are probably a bunch more.

It seems statistically unavoidable that there are always going to be some big cases that go unsolved. It'll probably become less and less common - especially since it seems inevitable that nearly all DNA will eventually be traceable via genetic genealogy databases - but some crimes just won't result in any DNA or other significant evidence being left.

[mavhc]

The trick is to make sure no one even knows the crime was committed.

Or to make the crime legal by paying politicians

[gogopuppygogo]

D.B. Cooper

[duxup]

If Harvey got $3 million in cash and gotten away, or just not gotten caught. We would have heard about it.

Unsolved Mysteries type shows and news stories would be all over that sort of thing.

[oneepic]

His name is John Birges Sr., not Harvey.

[temp_account001]

He was such a criminal mastermind he managed to frame the casino for its own bombing.

[paulpauper]

and on FBI wanted lists too.

[littlecranky67]

Posting this link (that somebody else posted in this thread) to an article with lot more coverage on the issue that wikipedia: https://magazine.atavist.com/a-thousand-pounds-of-dynamite/

Eventually, the sons of "Big John" caved in to the FBI in interrogation. While the tip of the former girlfriend made the whole family prime suspects in the first place, they did not have anything on them until the sons decided to talk (and get immunity for their involvement in exchange).

[bityard]

What a fascinating story.

However, the two sons only decided to talk after the police made each one believe that the other was ratting him out. Classic interrogation technique that I've seen in countless procedural tv shows and movies.

[syntheticnature]

A big part of it is the same asymmetry you see with security. All the other side needs is one mistake that leaves an opening.

[AceJohnny2]

The kind of decision-making that leads one to owing a shit-ton of money to a casino, and then deciding that the best solution is to bomb said casino, seems incompatible with covering your tracks well.

[tyingq]

>I always wonder at how criminals that otherwise might seem movie-like masterminds are caught as a result of mundane mistakes and outright stupid moves like this.

I think the same when you watch TV shows like Dateline. Yet the clearance rate for homicides in the US is below 60%. And I doubt that 40% are all master minds.

[me_me_me]

that's because there are very few masterminds on the other side of the fence.

The idea of a detective as per cop movies are romanticised, a lot of them are doing bare minimum and are as dumb as the criminals.

[silexia]

I had the misfortune of seeing this first hand. I caught an employee who embezzled $19,000 from my company red handed. The police refused to help even after I reported it until I called the mayor's office and complained.

[me_me_me]

But if you caught them red handed why are their hands not red? Case closed.

[Apocryphon]

Now that's going all the way to the top!

[erdos4d]

> Yet the clearance rate for homicides in the US is below 60%

The war on drugs helped a lot with this.

[55555]

I assume you mean because LE is splitting resources and also dealing with drug cases. I think it wouldn't be unrealistic to have the drug cases fund themselves through seizures. I wonder how bad of an ROI our LE gets on drug investigations.

[Clewza313]

Drug prohibition also drives up murder rates massively. For your typical turf war murder, even the victims' side has little incentive to talk to the cops.

[nashashmi]

The book and movie the Irishman comes to mind when I think about people who got away. They never really can keep their mouth shut.

It’s in our nature to tell others who we are and everything we do. It’s why we have social media. It’s our nature.

[SLWW]

How does that one quote go?...

"Two can keep a secret if one is dead"

[Apocryphon]

That's how they got the Unabomber.

[moioci]

I would say that wasn't a slip-up, like getting a parking ticket or something. Several newspapers published his manifesto at his insistence, and his brother recognized his writing style.

[abz10]

I presume he would have known his writing style was unique and expected people to figure it out once he got what he wanted. It’s an interesting read.