The FBI should have easily been able to tell that this individual had a caretaker and was not fully independent. They could have worked with the caretaker to direct the individual away from these behaviors and towards safer/healthier outlets. Had things not gotten better, they could have escalated the situation to the point they eventually did but that should not have been a first response.

The FBI does that all the time though. They will secretly monitor and investigate without telling the person they are investigating and then whenever they feel like it they will swoop in and there's nothing you could do about it.

You could be investigated right now for something that might be illegal but it never went anywhere so you just have a file someplace with the FBI that just sits there in a filing cabinet.

Everything is punish first. Guilty until proven innocent or until proven not worth the time or effort to pursue. There is no rehabilitation, or in the case of internet crime, actually communicating when you've crossed the line, which is a humongous problem.

And it happens all over the place not just from the FBI or law enforcement but moderation policies where people get shadowbanned. That really actually doesn't help! Especially in cases where the individual might not know what they've done wrong or that what they've done was wrong. You see it in video games where you could just be a really curious person who downloads a hack for a video game and you're really just not using it to get a tactical advantage in the game you're actually using it because oh this is neat what does this do and then you get banned and the staff of the video game won't tell you a single thing about why you got banned. Take that to the next degree with this case and other cases like it where it doesn't seem like he was ever moderated at all and the first step at all was the FBI showing up at his door. That's so messed up.

I almost feel like what these cases need is basically... There's going to start to have to need to be some sort of organization or advocacy group of people who are on the spectrum and extremely high functioning but still disabled who are able to empathize and talk with the more autistic to try to get these concepts across to them in a way that they could understand. And I'm talking from personal experience a little bit with this idea because I went to a high school for kids on the spectrum and I was one of the ones on the higher end of the spectrum who still had issues but I was able to talk to the lower functioning kids a lot of the time and get them to calm down to listen better to level with them that "hey there's someone else here who understands that what you're being told is bullshit but listen just trust me just go along with it it's fine yes there's a logical fallacy going on here but it's okay." Because sometimes they just need to know that there's someone else out there who has that same kind of line of thinking that they have. But also to know that someone else out there can think the same way they do but also switch on a different mode that they might not be aware of that they could develop that is more compatible with the way the world works.

But the only way an advocacy group like this would work is if it was part of the government if it was part of some sort of law enforcement branch because otherwise it would just be another advocacy group that already exists that actually can't make any changes happen in situations like this. They would need to be able to have some sort of official pull otherwise it would just be pointless to put it bluntly.