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Comment by 13of40 | Hacker News Reader

"She said staff time and manpower devoted to the case is diverting from programs that more urgently need attention, so the FBI decided to close its active investigation."

I'm surprised they don't have an (even unannounced) THX-1138 style limit on how much effort they spend on a single suspect. My wife had her purse stolen and about $10,000 extracted from various accounts a few years back, and the amount of effort they spent on the case is far less than a 20th of this one.

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Best bet, they haven't spent any significant resources on this case in decades. With no credible leads, what would any assigned staff be investigating?

Declaring the case closed is an administrative issue, nothing more.

If this case was still active, the staff would probably be involved in monitoring the banking system for the serial numbers of the bills given to the hijacker, as well as going over any seizures that included hard currency (for example: drug busts and civil forfeitures across the country; not a small task).

Theoretically, the job could be done by a single python script with a direct line to some central currency database fed by all banks and local law enforcement but with government, everything is more complicated.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that the hijacking with hostages was what put the case on the radar, not the $200,000.

I cannot imagine it would be "career enhancing" to be an FBI agent assigned to DB Cooper in the 2010's.

Imagine if you solved it though!

Unless, of course, you are Fox Mulder.

Then it would matter not that it isn't quite career enhancing. And, it's exactly the kind of case you want to be on.

"It turns out DB Cooper was a shapeshifting alien hybrid, and that most of the incident was a false memory construct implanted by the Men In Black to hide the fact that he didn't escape using a parachute, but a teleporter."

Already better than season 10. Bring it on.

Keep in mind that the $200,000 is equal to over $1,000,000 of today's money. Also, as someone else pointed out, there's also the hijacking endangering the passengers which probably more serious than taking the money.

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