Produced by ElevenLabs and News via Audio (Noa) using AI narration. Listen to more stories on the Noa app.

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

We already know this much: Videos of the murder have spread widely on social media; Police have described physical evidence, including bullet casings as well as a dropped phone and water bottle, that may have come from the bomber, and released photos of a “person of interest” from her stay at a Manhattan hostel. We just don’t know who he is. After an outdoor attack in one of the busiest and most heavily monitored places in the world — where cameras from the New York Police Department and countless property owners are ubiquitous, supplemented by the personal devices carried by residents and visitors — the attacker has disappeared, at least for now .

One way the shooter managed to avoid identification was by understanding how technology is used and what its limitations are. This murder raises the possibility that our surveillance network – a complex web designed to enhance public and private safety – has become so obvious and intrusive that criminal perpetrators can figure out how to get around it. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, hid in the woods of Montana as he killed three people and injured more than 20 in a nationwide mail bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995 to raise awareness of the dangers of modern technology. Thompson’s killer seems to accept the technology as a given. Electronic surveillance did not stop him from committing murder in public, and he appears to have thought carefully about how others would react to his actions.

Nicholas Florko: Murder is a terrible response to healthcare anger

The killer apparently used either a silencer or a relatively quiet weapon. In spy movies, assassins use silencers so no one knows a crime has been committed. In this case the effect was to buy time. A bystander noticed something had happened and ran away, but no one intervened to prevent the shooter’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 suspect’s face in the hostel where he paid in cash. These images, apparently taken as a worker flirted with him and asked to see his smile, would seem like a major mistake in this well-planned endeavor. But these images also show someone who is “extremely camera-savvy,” as a senior police officer said The New York Times. He is still wearing a hood and his face is still partially obscured, making image matching with facial recognition systems more difficult.

The killer’s evasion strategy benefits from the public’s reaction to all these clues. If you can’t defeat surveillance, overwhelm it. The revelation of evidence by the authorities concerns the public, who are captivated by his hide-and-seek game. While citizens play detectives, the police receive a flood of tips and calls that require time-consuming investigations that in many cases lead nowhere and distract from those that may lead to the murderer. Intentionally or unintentionally, the killer highlighted the error with “If you see something, say something” – an approach that floods the system with too much information.

From the September 2009 issue: How America’s Health Care Killed My Father

As the hours passed and the manhunt continued to fall short, some commentators began creating a mythology about the killer who was always one step ahead of the NYPD and all its cameras. The victim ran a business that effectively decided what medical care its customers could and could not receive. Commentators who dislike the American health insurance system have used Thompson’s death as an opportunity to condemn the industry’s behavior as if the assassin were a modern-day Robin Hood.

The murderer who shot Thompson in the back may welcome this glorifying narrative. In fact, despite his efforts not to be identified, he seems to want to put on a show. A bullet casing and an ejected live cartridge found at the scene reportedly contained words such as “ put down And delay written on it – obvious references to strategies health insurers use to deny coverage.

This suggests an obvious motive – perhaps too obvious. The killer is a master of the modern surveillance environment; He understands the camera. It shouldn’t surprise anyone if he only points the lens where he wants us to look.