The UnitedHealthcare Gunman Understands the Surveillance State

The masked killer who targeted UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the streets of New York City on Wednesday is, after more than 48 hours, still on the run. This is remarkable because he is the focus of a very public manhunt.

We know so much already: Videos of the murder have spread widely on social media; police have described physical evidence, including bullet casings and a dropped phone and water bottle that might have been the assassin’s, and released pictures of a “person of interest” from his stay at a Manhattan hostel. We just don’t know who he is. After an outdoor attack in one of the busiest and most intensively surveilled places in the world—where cameras operated by the New York City Police Department and countless property owners are ubiquitous, supplemented by the personal devices that residents and visitors carry—the attacker has vanished, at least for the time being.

The gunman has succeeded in avoiding identification in part by understanding how technology is used and what its limits are. This killing raises the possibility that our surveillance network—an intricate web meant to enhance public safety and private security—has become so obvious and intrusive that criminal perpetrators can figure out how to dodge it. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, hid in the Montana woods as he killed three people and injured more than 20 in a nationwide mail-bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 in an effort to highlight the dangers of modern technology. Thompson’s killer seems to accept technology as a given. Electronic surveillance didn’t deter him from committing murder in public, and he seems to have carefully considered how others might respond to his actions.

[Nicholas Florko: Murder is an awful answer for health-care anger]

The killer apparently used either a silencer or a relatively quiet gun. In spy movies, assassins use silencers so that nobody even knows that a crime has occurred. In this case, the effect was to buy time. A bystander realized that something had happened and ran away, but no one jumped into action to thwart the gunman’s quick exit on an e-bike—a device that has the speed of a car in Midtown Manhattan.

Yesterday, investigators released images showing the face of the person of interest at the hostel, where he had paid cash. These pictures, apparently taken when a worker was flirting with him and asked to see his smile, would seem a huge error in this well-planned effort. But these pictures, too, show someone who is “extremely camera savvy,” as a senior law-enforcement official told The New York Times. He is still wearing a hood and his face is still partially obscured, making image-matching on facial-recognition systems more difficult.

The killer’s evasion strategy benefits from the public’s response to all of these clues. If you can’t beat surveillance, overwhelm it. The authorities’ revelation of evidence engages a public tantalized by his hide-and-seek. As citizens play detective, police receive a flurry of tips and calls, requiring time-intensive inquiries that in many cases can lead to nowhere and distract from those that may lead to the killer. Intentionally or not, the killer has underscored the flaw in “If you see something, say something”—an approach that floods the system with too much information.

[From the September 2009 issue: How American health care killed my father]

As the hours have passed and the manhunt has continued to come up short, some commentators have started creating a mythology about the killer, who has stayed ahead of the NYPD and all its cameras. The victim ran a business that effectively decides which medical care its customers can and cannot get. Commentators who dislike the American health-insurance system are using Thompson’s death as an occasion to condemn the industry’s conduct, as if the assassin were a modern-day Robin Hood.

The killer, who shot Thompson in the back, may welcome that glorifying narrative. Indeed, despite his efforts to avoid being identified, he seems to have wanted to put on a show. A bullet shell and an ejected live round found at the scene reportedly had words such as depose and delay written on them—apparent references to strategies that health insurers use in denying coverage.

This suggests an obvious motive—perhaps too obvious. The killer is a master of the modern surveillance environment; he understands the camera. No one should be surprised if he is just pointing the lens to where he wants us to look.