UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops - Just Part and Parcel of visiting a Big City

That‘s funny because yesterday a kiwi was going on and on about what a loving wholesome family got destroyed. I guess it wasn’t all that great. Probably should have realized it when the wife was giving interviews mere hours after his final send off.
Well, I bet there’s an escort, or girlfriend, out there that’s truly heartbroken she’s not getting that Birkin bag she wanted for Christmas from him.
 
TMZ: Ex-Bodyguard 'Baffled' by Total Lack of Security ... Wake-Up Call for Other Insurers


Interesting that he had a bodyguard ages ago - the bodyguard says he probably didn't have one anymore due to personal preference.
Security industry sees big $$$$ contracts coming from the health care industry in the coming days. One CEO murders makes business boom for rent-a-cops and TMZ is happy to give them free advertising.
 
I think the funny part is that this stone-cold assassin made his getaway on one of these gay things.
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Don't these things have location tracking?
Niggas are stealing these things all the time, you can even chop 3 and weld them together if you desire with zero consequences.

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since this I've been wondering a LOT about how much this happens and cops just don't put out a press release.
Happens a lot more often than you think. Especially in EVROPA. Palantir boss says outfit's software the only reason the 'goose step' has not returned to Europe 97 comment bubble on white Motor-mouth CEO Alex Karp claims biz stopped 'innumerable' terror attacks in Europe. "You would have had a very different political reality in the West". - archive Very interesting comments @ 1:57:00 Archive.org

The CEO of controversial data-mining firm Palantir has claimed its technology has prevented terrorist attacks in Europe, thereby implicitly saving the continent from the return of fascism.

The fast-talking Alex Karp took to the stage at the FII Institute conference in Miami last week to tell the audience how proud he was that "innumerable terror attacks" had been stopped by Palantir in Europe.

"In all modesty, if they were not stopped, you would have a very different political reality in the West. And that's just a fact," he said.

"I love when I'm getting yelled at in cities in Europe… Keep yelling at me... the only reason why someone's not goose-stepping between me and you is my product. Say thank you," Karp added. You can replay his comments from 1 hour 57 minutes onward in the video below.



The CEO was referring to the marching style adopted by German and Italian fascists in the 20th century. From the 1920s to the 1940s, fascism came to prominence in Europe.

Propelled by an ideology advocating racial purity, extreme nationalism and perpetual war, the trend culminated in the Second World War, which killed 15 million to 20 million people in Europe. German Nazis and their collaborators were responsible for the Holocaust, one of the most horrific events in human history.

But it is software — rather than the collective cultural memory of such events — that is preventing the return of the doctrine in Europe, Karp would have the audience believe.

Pushback over privacy in Germany​

As of last year, cops in several states of Germany are not allowed to use automated data analysis from Palantir, the CIA-backed surveillance software company. The Federal Constitutional Court made the ruling in March 2023, calling such processing "unconstitutional."
The plaintiffs had argued that the so-called "Hessendata" program – based on Palantir's Gotham platform – facilitated "predictive" policing by profiling suspects before any crime was committed.
Palantir strategy chief Jan Hiesserich told German national Handelsblatt at the time: "Our customers alone determine which data is relevant to the investigation in accordance with relevant legal provisions," adding: "Palantir brings the software to the data, not the data to the software." It told the FT that "Palantir's software can be flexibly adapted to new legal frameworks thanks to its high configurability."

Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who made his money and name co-founding PayPal. It attracted early investment from the US Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, and won early contracts in US defense and intelligence applications of its data analytics technologies, along the way supporting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE), which was accused of separating children from their families.


Estimates suggest that Palantir commands a little less than 2 percent of the data analytics market, which is a small fraction of the total enterprise software market.

But let that not get in the way of Karp's hyperbolic fantasies.

"Look, the fundamental reason for America's outperformance right now is tech [and] Palantir plays an enormous role on the commercial side," he said.


The FII Institute, which hosted the conference during which Karp performed, is a global nonprofit foundation with an investment arm designed to make an "impact on humanity." Karp's comments would certainly make an impact on any sane listener. ®
 
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It is also kind of strange that the CEO himself didn't have any social media presence (I haven't seen any tweeter account or facebook account pop up or anything)
Ok I looked it up and the CEO guy did actually have a LinkedIn. He hadn't posted in more than a year at the time he died. Let's have a look:

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No links because LinkedIn includes tracking shit and is impossible to archive - but certainly his most recent posts in the past year had more and more disgruntled people. There was no way in hell this guy wasn't getting fedposts in his personal email/phone number and no way that he wasn't aware of the harm his company was doing. There's no video/audio of him.

Most of the positive comments left on his shit are from people that work at his company or partner companies btw.

edit:
employment history
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Online sleuths are racing to catch the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s killer
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Drew Harwell, Caitlin Gilbert, and Douglas MacMillan
2024-12-05 21:55:35GMT

Volunteers in a crowdsourced manhunt are scrambling to identify the gunman, even as some online seek to lionize him for what they suspect is vigilante justice.
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A “wanted” poster outside of the New York Hilton hotel near the scene where UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot to death Wednesday. (Justin Lane/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Amateur internet sleuths are racing to identify the gunman who killed the chief of the nation’s largest health insurer in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday, hoping to piece together clues and beat police investigators at their own high-profile manhunt.

The shooter seemingly vanished after being caught on video in one of the world’s most surveilled cities, offering an online community of wannabe detectives a tantalizing case. They pored over street footage and digital data to guess his brand of backpack, debate how he had silenced his pistol and scrutinize his getaway bike.

But they are being confronted online by a rival movement: users who have lionized the killer over an unconfirmed belief that the murder was an act of rage over the health insurance industry. They have shared memes branding the shooter as a “folk hero” and warned digital vigilantes not to track him down. “Anyone who helps to identify the shooter is an enemy of the people,” said one post on X with 39,000 likes.

Police have not given a motive for the killing. But bullet casings found near the shooting that displayed the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” — tactics insurers have used to reduce liability or reject claims — suggested to some that the attack could have been driven by fury at the insurance industry.

The dueling factions show how social media outrage could shape for online audiences what New York police have called the “brazen, targeted murder” of UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, a 50-year-old father of two from Minneapolis whose company provides coverage to 50 million people nationwide.

In the digital age, high-profile crimes often kick off crowdsourced investigative efforts among volunteers eager to use the internet to solve a mystery. But they have rarely sparked this volume of backlash due to the identity of the victim, or this kind of empathy with the killer.

Social media posts and news reports have been flooded with dark jokes and tidings of goodwill for the gunman some have compared to vigilante-justice figures from comic books. One viral comment on a TikTok video of the murder said, “Praying for this man and his family … he must be so scared being on the run.”

The shooter remains on the loose after gunning down Thompson outside a hotel Wednesday morning and reportedly escaping through Central Park. In the hours since the shooting, police officials have released surveillance-camera footage of the suspect inside a Starbucks before the murder and riding away on an electric bike.

When officials early Wednesday said they suspected the gunman had fled on a Citi Bike, software engineer Riley Walz quickly pulled up data he had been collecting on the mass movements of New York’s popular bike-share fleet.

Walz, who has used data to visualize YouTube history and map out the changing prices of Big Macs, thought the bikes’ GPS coordinates would make a cool online art project. For a few weeks, he had run a script that automatically logged the ID numbers and other details every minute from 16,587 bikes at all of the New York City area’s 2,234 docks.

Walz looked up the bikes taken from the six docks closest to the midtown hotel where Thompson was killed and found one that seemed to match the police time frame: bike No. 421-6511, which was pulled just before the shooting and docked eight minutes later near Central Park. He tweeted his findings and alerted the police.

“It would be so cool if I can use this data to figure out where the murderer went,” Walz told The Washington Post in an interview Wednesday afternoon. “And, like, I’m just some random guy.”

The data, however, was a dead end, and police officials have since said that the gunman hadn’t used a Citi Bike after all. Critics laid into Walz not just for getting it wrong but for attempting to help in the first place: An X post with more than 130,000 likes called him “the biggest NARC/ NERD combo” in the world.

Anant Sinha, who posted a video to X in which he interviewed Walz about the data, said he and Walz were pummeled with online death threats, and he shared a screenshot of his X inbox filled with messages calling him a “pig” and a “snitch.”

Since the killing, users have flooded social media with their grievances over the health-care industry at large. Some made light of the shooting, celebrating the news and encouraging New Yorkers not to assist police in their search. One meme, showing a smiling star and the words “CEO DOWN,” was shared widely on social media; a TikTok video posted by the Daily Mail claimed a balloon with the meme was also left near the hotel where Thompson was shot.

The shooter was also widely glorified. When the New York police published images of what they said was the suspect’s smiling face online, some people suggested he was handsome.

Thompson’s wife, Paulette, said in a statement to the Minnesota Star Tribune, “Our hearts are broken, and we are completely devastated by this news.”

Policing experts, speaking generally and without direct knowledge of this investigation, said the internet’s wealth of information has traditionally been a gift to modern detective work. Joseph Courtesis, a former inspector for the New York police who ran its real-time crime center from 2016 to 2019, said “social media, quite frankly, is the greatest thing to ever happen to a criminal investigation” thanks to possible leads, like a suspect’s old photos and posts.

But there’s a big difference, he said, between unearthed digital clues and the shaky “internet theories” that tend to bubble up online. “If somebody hits on a rabbit hole that they’re going down, yeah, they’ll look at that,” he said. “But most of that can be ruled out in seconds because you know where your investigation is going.”

The early evidence shared by police has largely been composed of images from New York’s vast infrastructure of surveillance cameras, a mix of public and private recording devices that investigators routinely access to identify and track criminal suspects throughout the city. In 2021, as part of a crowdsourcing project, volunteers with the human-rights group Amnesty International counted more than 25,000 cameras on buildings, poles and streetlights across New York City. Stanford University researchers that year estimated that New York’s camera density was nearly four times higher than Los Angeles.

The murder scene’s location in one of Manhattan’s busiest districts likely ensured the man was recorded from many angles, said Ralph Cilento, a former commander of detectives with the New York police who retired in 2021 and now teaches police science at John Jay College.

“Midtown is like the Iron Dome of cameras,” Cilento said, referencing the rocket-repelling air-defense system that blankets the Israeli skies. “You cannot get into Manhattan at all now without being caught on camera.”

But finding and gathering all that visual evidence can require considerable effort — and take more time than some sleuths on social media are prepared to give. “They will track the guy all the way through the city,” he said, but “it’s extraordinarily tedious work.”

The crowdsourced online manhunts that have arisen alongside police work have often raised their own concerns, due to the chaotic nature of early investigations and the risks of amateurs getting it wrong.

In one infamous example from 2013, users on Reddit wrongfully accused a missing college student, Sunil Tripathi, of participating in the Boston Marathon bombing, comparing his photo to a suspect photographed before the attack and flooding his family’s social media pages with threats of revenge. Later, after finding Tripathi’s body, police said he had died by suicide before the bombing. (The man caught on camera was actually Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, now in Colorado on death row.)

Manhunts following high-profile crimes can drag on for days, even when suspects are quickly identified. It took nearly 30 hours for the New York police to arrest Frank James, a man who later pleaded guilty to shooting 10 people in a crowded subway car in Brooklyn in 2022. By that time, James had been photographed by a bystander who tweeted the image; James had even called the police himself, reporting that he could be found in the East Village inside a McDonald’s.

Christian Quinn, a former deputy chief of cyber and forensics for the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia who now consults on public-sector technology issues, said he suspected the investigators aren’t “really affected by online chatter of … people with opinions who don’t truly have the expertise.”

But the possibility that a random tip could help unravel the murder — or give a clue to the gunman’s preparations or motives — forces them to keep watch, just in case.

“A lot of what you’re going to get is well-intended folks who aren’t really contributing to information,” Quinn said. But sometimes “you get that one little tidbit” that can turn everything around.
 
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I wonder what made them change their mind so all of a sudden...

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oooh.... that's why.
The more time the killer is around, no one knows who he is and he hasn't been caught the more scared Healthcare CEOs will start to get

It's kind of funny seeing this unfold, I imagine if the killer isn't caught by the end of this week, we might start to see more panic moves by the same companies or even more

Especially if people are putting the names of CEOs out there on social media

CEOs probably double checking their cars, the locks on their doors, their surroundings lol
 
I do love that they haven't caught him yet.

Honestly, he's got the public on his side so much that he could probably seek shelter in any random house and have an 80% chance of getting someone to keep him Anne Frank style.
New Yorkers are notoriously loyal, altruistic and inclined to do what’s right over collecting a monetary reward.
 
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