A point of analysis for the inquiry: can Twitter make a full dump of tweets available to journalists and investigators? Historical data is available to organizations who pay for Twitter's full data feed subscription. Many people who write/tweet from a mobile phone will use auto-correct. There were unusual spelling errors in the recent batch of tweets. Were these spelling errors consistent with his past spelling errors? Did his past tweets have spelling errors, or did they include words which are typical of auto-correct (i.e. correctly spelled but wrong within tweet context)? Did the tweets originate from a mobile phone? Any clues from gait analysis of the phone's accelerometer?

If observers are going to use a few tweets as a proxy indicator of evidence for mental state, those tweets should be evaluated within the context of all prior pubic tweets, including a history (or not) of tweeting under the influence. Furthermore, did Ian reach out to other members of his large technology community on channels other than Twitter? Those communications could also be proxy indicators of his perceptions, wishes and intentions. He must have reached out in person and 1:1 for support.

The highest priority is to understand what Ian would want at this point, using all available recent/historical data from all available online and offline channels. This does not mean that all data must be public, only that Ian's trusted confidantes be the ones to review both private and public data, at an appropriate time. But all public data should be consolidated by capable journalists.

A carefully structured public/private analysis can inform our individual and collective response to future incidents. Such tragedies have happened enough times [1] that we need proactive and preventive cultural and data-driven guidance within the technology community, the same way that opsec has become critical to journalists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Programmers_who_commi...