zlacker

In that explanation, this purported investigative chain would still require just as much work to create. That's a lot of effort just to deflect from cell phone surveillance, especially for a cop - an aggro type personality would just rely on downplaying the cell angle in the media, rather than spending time coming up with a plausible excuse.

If there's an obfuscation of the actual investigation here, I'd guess it's more a hiding of highly automated tools that process open source intelligence, probably by policy of the federal agency with the tool. Imagine a FBI/DEA/NSA tool that links and summarizes social media activity based on identities. So facial recognition + cell database -> trail of pictures to craft a link-narrative, without the work of having to dig much or do automated facial recognition. Tangentially I wouldn't be surprised if declaring "antifa" a "terrorist" organization is actually an internal dog whistle that blesses the use of XKEYSCORE etc against American citizens.