Podcast — Summary of “Linguistics Work was Pivotal in Capture of Unabomber”

Thomas's musings
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

There’s such a rich story as part of the 17-long investigation into the unabomber that I didn’t know about before. Somethings I found fascinating while listening to the podcast:

  • The unabomber had a PhD, was a Berkeley professor for two years and was a child prodigy.
  • He was fighting and rebelling against technology and other things he was frustrated with, equating technologies like USPS to mindless workers and drones. He highlighted this to the world by sending mail bombs via it.
  • They brought in a linguistics expert after many years of no progress. They were able to recognize patterns between his writings and writings from a pool of originally 2500 potential suspects. This was early in the internet-age, but they leveraged it to allow people to write in with tips.
  • The unabomber went into great lengths and paid great attention to detail to not get caught. Some examples include stripping off the cover from batteries to remove their manufacturing batch IDs and making his own glue so they couldn’t trace where it came from.
  • The unabomber negotiated with the Washington Post and NYTimes to publish his manifesto where, if published, he promised to stop bombing “to kill”, but left in a clause to still bomb for sabotage (whatever that means).
  • First time a legal precedence was set for using linguistic analysis as evidence to obtain a search warrant. What sealed the deal for a judge to issue a warrant was his idiosyncratic use of “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too” vs the normal “You can’t have your cake and eat it, too”.

Fin.

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Thomas's musings

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Previously TryWearIt, Uber, Vurb, Zynga, Microsoft.

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