Note: the full title of the article is: The FBI used a Philly protester’s Etsy profile, LinkedIn, and other internet history to charge her with setting police c

Note: the full title of the article is: The FBI used a Philly protester’s Etsy profile, LinkedIn, and other internet history to charge her with setting police cars ablaze, which is 50 characters too long for HN's title limit. I did not omit the "to charge her with setting police cars ablaze" as a way to mislead people into thinking the FBI were doing a dragnet of Internet histories of all protesters. The meat of the article is the (mostly logical and common-sense) investigative techniques the FBI used to uncover the protester's identity. What she's charged with, or whether she's guilty of it is tangential – though obviously the seriousness of the crime they accuse her of is a likely factor in how much work they put into searching for her. To put it another way, it's interesting (and a relief) to me that they didn't find her out using a mass geofencing request, or other big data request that do constitute large scale dragnets.