WaPo | FBI officials declined to say what precise searches were used to try
to identify the owner of the account or to possibly link it with other
social media profiles. Cruz had two Instagram accounts that also contain
his name: cruz_nikolas and nikolascruzmakarov.
A law enforcement
official said the FBI will review the steps it took in responding to
the tip to determine whether anything could have been done differently
or if practices should be changed for the future.
A search of the
public records database Nexis for people with the name “Nikolas Cruz”
returns 22 results, three of which use different spellings. It was not
immediately clear if the FBI attempted to contact any of those people.
Without
more to go on, officials felt there wasn’t enough legal justification
to issue a subpoena to YouTube for the underlying information about the
“nikolas cruz” who had threatened a school shooting, a law enforcement
official said.
Google, which owns YouTube, has a policy of not
turning over user information to the government without a subpoena,
search warrant or other court order forcing it to do so. Google
representatives did not return messages seeking comment.
Limited resources
Hosko,
the former FBI assistant director, said the FBI gets more than 100
threat reports each day, in addition to other reports of mental health
and other issues. That leaves supervisors in the difficult position of
deciding how many resources should be devoted to each case and for how
long. Even in terrorism cases, Hosko said, the bureau sometimes has to
leave suspects unmonitored because the FBI lacks personnel to follow
each of them all the time.
“The FBI has terrorism subjects that
they’re looking at — they’re not all under 24-7 surveillance, and if
they prioritize that wrong, yes, something bad can happen,” Hosko said.
“These are the hard resource-allocation decisions you’re making if you
don’t have unlimited resources.”
Hosko said in most cases of
possible threats, an early question supervisors ask is, “At the end of
the day, would we even have a federal crime if we proved a person sent
this or posted this?” And in Cruz’s case — where the comment is a not a
specific threat — the answer was probably no, he said.
Bennight
said that after agents interviewed him about the comment in September,
he didn’t hear anything more from the FBI — until Wednesday. Agents
called him to say that there had been an incident and that they wanted
to follow up on his earlier complaint.
Bennight said he did not
know how it was connected to the shooting in Florida until agents
informed him that the comment he’d flagged had been posted under a
username matching the name of suspected shooter Nikolas Cruz.
