The only thing I can point to us this is one of the few cases where some piece of atrocious online harassment actually ended up with someone being held accountable in anyway. There have been plenty of cases of death threats and bomb threats and other such things that didn't seem to trigger any kind of real response.

I think it serves as a good reminder that it's quite easy for law enforcement to access anything that you have stored in your cloud accounts. We tend to get casual and think of these as our personal backup pods that can't be accessed without our knowledge.

It's good to remember that Google holds the keys and that they are used according to legal procedure (as in this case), and at times, according to Google's fancy (as in PRISM and I'm sure many incidents of unauthorized employee spying).

Pay attention to what you upload, and pay attention to what you're using. It's very easy to cross-contaminate or leak information, and these things can have a very long tail. "The internet never forgets".

Dread Pirate Roberts aka Ross Ulbrecht was eventually tracked down because early on in the Silk Road's lifecycle, he made a post on a btc talk account linked to his personal email account asking if "[anyone had heard about this new marketplace called Silk Road]". Since that was the first mention found online, agents began to investigate Ulbrecht.

It may seem obvious in hindsight, but that was a single long-forgotten post made years before anyone had an inkling of what Silk Road would become. Strict opsec is very important.

It was interesting to me because of how ordinary it was. I just assumed the user would be doing this from a regular computer, and that the police tracked down the IP. Not that the suspected troll would be dumb enough to use his own phone number to register for Twitter. And be someone who is "Clever" enough to use a pre-paid account but then dumb enough to sync data to iCloud. But I guess it's easy to erroneously conflate Apple's device security with iCloud security.

It doesn't have to be something unusual or extraordinary to be interesting. Personally I found it pretty interesting simply to see how the wheels of justice turn, just like I used to watch detective shows when I was a kid.

One odd little thing that caught my eye: the way they used archive.org to establish some history of the victim's Wikipedia page. I would have expected that they would have used Wikipedia's own edit history for that. It made me wonder if the FBI agent just didn't know about the Wikipedia edit history, or if they thought archive.org was a more reliable source.