Capturing Luigi Mangioni: A Cautionary Tale

By William Mackenzie,

A host of clues helped law enforcement profile Luigi Mangioni as they tried to track down the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

There’s a cautionary tale in one element of that profiling effort.

One of the clues to learning more about Mangioni was his reading habits, which were revealed when media found his account on the online book review site, Goodreads, used by over 150 million members.

A key feature of the Goodreads site is an ability for members to post the titles of books they’ve read. Any member accessing the site can go to another  member’s profile to see and search their bookshelf if they haven’t set their account to private. Members can even find out if anybody in their Gmail account is a Goodreads member.

Before Mangioni’s Goodreads account was deleted, Wall Street Journal reporters discovered Mangioni had written at least 13 book reviews there. Four included links to public Google drive folders containing his thoughts and feedback.

“A review of his reading diet suggested that, at some point, his ideas about activism had crossed into an interest in violence,” the Wall Street Journal reported, including a  “chilling” January 2024 review of  Theodore Kaczynski’s “Industrial Society and Its Future,” also known as “The Unabomber Manifesto.”

In the review, he wrote: “A take I found online that I think is interesting…Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right…. When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.”

Who would have thought Goodreads would be a treasure trove of information about a suspected killer.

Your first reaction might be, “Great news. A potentially dangerous person’s online actions revealed his reading habits, political opinions and behavior inclinations.”

But let’s take a look at another situation where online actions are monitored.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported on how some students’ online typing was being monitored by local school districts:

“Dawn was still hours away when Angel Cholka was awakened by the beams of a police flashlight through the window. At the door was an officer, who asked if someone named Madi (a student at Neosho High School ) lived there. He said he needed to check on her. Ms. Cholka ran to her 16-year-old’s bedroom, confused and, suddenly, terrified.

Ms. Cholka did not know that A.I.-powered software operated by the local school district in Neosho, Mo., had been tracking what Madi was typing on her school-issued Chromebook.

While her family slept, Madi had texted a friend that she planned to overdose on her anxiety medication. That information shot to the school’s head counselor, who sent it to the police. When Ms. Cholka and the officer reached Madi, she had already taken about 15 pills. They pulled her out of bed and rushed her to the hospital.”

The Times story noted that from 2014 to 2018, Neosho had eight student suicides. It would later be learned that the students had often told friends of their plans, but they had not reported concerns to adults. The district decided to contract with GoGuardian, a company offering software tools that scanned what students type on their computers, alerting school staff members if they appeared to be contemplating self-harm or suicidal ideation.

“Millions of American schoolchildren — close to one-half, according to some industry estimates — are now subject to this kind of surveillance,” the Times reported. “Most systems flag keywords or phrases, using algorithms or human review to determine which ones are serious. During the day, students may be pulled out of class and screened; outside school hours, if parents cannot be reached by phone, law enforcement officers may visit students’ homes to check on them.”

At first glance, all this may seem like a good idea that helps protect kids.  But the systems are incredibly intrusive, false positives can become consequential for children and their families when they prompt dramatic interventions, and there are potential privacy violations.

 “Using these tools, schools can filter web content; monitor students’ search engine queries and browsing history; view students’ emails, messages and social media content; and/or view their screens in real-time,” says EdSurge, a digital news and research magazine about education. To stay the least, that can turn schools into Big Brother, invading students’ privacy not just for signs of suicide, but also for “unpopular” political opinions, signs of interest in LGBTQ issues, indications of drug use, the notes of student journalists and more.

Research by the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a nonprofit organization that works to shape tech policy and architecture, shows that monitoring can have a “chilling impact” on students who won’t share their true thoughts or feelings online if they know they’re being monitored. It also raises potential concerns that the data collected through the activity monitoring will be used out of context.

Amelia Vance, founder and president at Public Interest Privacy Consulting, told EdSurge that Districts also tend to collect and store too much sensitive data that can be used to paint a very detailed, intimate profile of “everything that kids are doing, and that may be retained far longer than it should be,” said Vance. That data could be subject to a data breach.

Schools’ online surveillance is permitted through the Children’s Internet Protection Act, which requires schools to monitor students’ online activity and educate them about appropriate behavior on the internet. Some organizations are advocating that the act should be amended to make it clear it “does not require broad, invasive, and constant surveillance of students’ lives online.”

It’s also useful to remember that in today’s culture young people are always online, not just when they are doing schoolwork, so pervasive monitoring can capture their whole life. Just about every time I’m in a public place I see teenagers in groups totally absorbed in their screens, staring at them oblivious to what’s around them and likely unaware that their activity is open to capture by others.

And all of this debate about online monitoring of students is part of growing concern that it is becoming far too intrusive in the broader population. Many people who responded to a recent Pew Research Center study on the pros and cons of a digital life expressed deep concerns about people’s well-being in the future.

“Much like a mutating virus, digital services and devices keep churning out new threats along with the new benefits – making mitigation efforts a daunting and open-ended challenge for everyone,” said David Ellis, Ph.D, course director of the department of communication studies at York University in Toronto.

“The technologies that 50 years ago we could only dream of in science fiction novels, which we then actually created with so much faith and hope in their power to unite us and make us freer, have been co-opted into tools of surveillance,” the study said.

And all the data being accumulated from that surveillance is not lying in repose. It is being actively mined to build rich, detailed dossiers on each and every one of us. not just Luigi Mangioni.