The only thing I can point to us this is one of the few cases where some piece of atrocious online harassment actually ended up with someone being held accountable in anyway. There have been plenty of cases of death threats and bomb threats and other such things that didn't seem to trigger any kind of real response.

They typically don't qualify as criminal threats in those cases. The FBI does investigate quite a few of these and I've seen more than a few from FOIAs that don't result in arrests because they fall short of being criminal. I'm still surprised at just how often nothing is done about swatting.

I find this case interesting. While it's far beyond acceptable or fair play even in good fun and trolling to do something like sending someone who suffers from epilepsy a gif known to trigger a seizure, it's being classed as stalking in this case. I'm curious to see the evidence and what precedent this sets, because it seems like a stretch to call it stalking from what I understand of this case, which is admittedly not too much.

A good side effect of this is that hopefully it prompts companies to provide better protections against this, because it's rather unique in terms of medical conditions interacting with technology and has a lot of potential to cause harm.

Isn't it way easier now to find harassers on Twitter because Twitter made a telephone number linked to the account mandatory in some (all?) cases?

Good point.

Maybe there are many other cases but they go under- / un-reported?

I think it serves as a good reminder that it's quite easy for law enforcement to access anything that you have stored in your cloud accounts. We tend to get casual and think of these as our personal backup pods that can't be accessed without our knowledge.

It's good to remember that Google holds the keys and that they are used according to legal procedure (as in this case), and at times, according to Google's fancy (as in PRISM and I'm sure many incidents of unauthorized employee spying).

Pay attention to what you upload, and pay attention to what you're using. It's very easy to cross-contaminate or leak information, and these things can have a very long tail. "The internet never forgets".

Dread Pirate Roberts aka Ross Ulbrecht was eventually tracked down because early on in the Silk Road's lifecycle, he made a post on a btc talk account linked to his personal email account asking if "[anyone had heard about this new marketplace called Silk Road]". Since that was the first mention found online, agents began to investigate Ulbrecht.

It may seem obvious in hindsight, but that was a single long-forgotten post made years before anyone had an inkling of what Silk Road would become. Strict opsec is very important.

It was interesting to me because of how ordinary it was. I just assumed the user would be doing this from a regular computer, and that the police tracked down the IP. Not that the suspected troll would be dumb enough to use his own phone number to register for Twitter. And be someone who is "Clever" enough to use a pre-paid account but then dumb enough to sync data to iCloud. But I guess it's easy to erroneously conflate Apple's device security with iCloud security.

>But I guess it's easy to erroneously conflate Apple's device security with iCloud security.

You might be overthinking it. I get the feeling that many people think of "online" as some sort of magical place where they are shielded from the consequences of their own behavior.

These are common mistakes of cyber criminals. Usually people get caught because they miss a point of data leaking. A commom one is people using a VPN and then accidentally opening their browser that's still logged into Google...All of a sudden that IP is now linked to you personally. If you're going to commit crimes online keep everything separated and use a VM or better yet a different device altogether.

It doesn't have to be something unusual or extraordinary to be interesting. Personally I found it pretty interesting simply to see how the wheels of justice turn, just like I used to watch detective shows when I was a kid.

One odd little thing that caught my eye: the way they used archive.org to establish some history of the victim's Wikipedia page. I would have expected that they would have used Wikipedia's own edit history for that. It made me wonder if the FBI agent just didn't know about the Wikipedia edit history, or if they thought archive.org was a more reliable source.