Lucky Breaks, Video and Pink Gloves Led to Austin Bombing Suspect

By the end of the day Wednesday, police had another tool: A 25-minute confession, left on the suspect’s phone, in which he attempted to describe his odyssey. “It is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point,” the Austin police chief, Brian Manley, said.

Interviews with political leaders briefed on the inquiry, along with briefings from investigators and a federal law enforcement source, shed light on an investigation that saw hundreds of federal agents descend on Austin, gathering and reconstructing bomb fragments, interviewing witnesses and gathering video footage. “We haven’t seen an effort like this in many, many years,” said Christopher H. Combs, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s office in San Antonio.

Officials said Mr. Conditt planted one bomb in the upscale Travis Country neighborhood of Austin on Sunday, and tied the bomb’s tripwire to a “Caution: Children at Play” sign — which he himself put next to the sidewalk and that he bought, along with four others, at Home Depot. Investigators used his cellphone data to put him at the scene of explosions in Austin and also got his Google search history. But officials said the crucial first break came when Mr. Conditt mailed the packages at the FedEx store earlier this week.

Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, said that when Mr. Conditt left the FedEx office, he got into a pickup that had been called in by others as a potential lead. “And then they got the license plate and from there were able to get the cellphone number,” he said, adding that from there, agents could track the cellphone directly, “as a location device.”

Mr. Conditt’s suicide left more questions than answers about who he was, how he became a bomb-maker and why he did it. But Chief Manley seemed to assuage worries about more bombs when he said all seven had been accounted for. Law enforcement officials had worried that Mr. Conditt might have placed or sent additional bombs in the hours before he died. And officials said they were still looking into whether Mr. Conditt had any accomplices.

In the Austin suburb of Pflugerville, where Mr. Conditt grew up and lived, a steady fear persisted throughout the day, even after his death. Neighbors were forced to evacuate from the area surrounding the house Mr. Conditt shared with two roommates after investigators found explosive materials there. They were allowed to return late in the day.

The Austin police said they had questioned Mr. Conditt’s two roommates. One had been released; the other was still being questioned as of Wednesday afternoon. Neither roommate was identified. Outside Mr. Conditt’s parents home in Pflugerville, Detective David Fugitt with the Austin police said Mr. Conditt’s family was cooperating and was allowing investigators to search the property, including several backyard sheds.

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“We don’t have any information to believe that the family had any knowledge of these events,” Detective Fugitt said.

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Pflugerville is a tranquil Austin suburb nearly 20 miles northeast. It is a spacious town of 59,000 that has long made its unusual name with the silent first letter part of its charm, as visitors notice when they pass such businesses as Pfast Lube. At times on Wednesday, Mr. Conditt’s hometown was transformed. Military-style SWAT vehicles sped down the wide avenues. Neighbors and friends said they were stunned that Mr. Conditt was the serial bomber.

“He always seemed like he was very polite,” said Jeff Reeb, 75, who has lived next door to Mr. Conditt’s parents for about 17 years. “It’s extremely shocking. My summation is it doesn’t make any sense. It just doesn’t make any sense, which, most of these things like this, don’t make any sense.”

Mr. Conditt was a home-schooled student who had attended Austin Community College. He described himself on a blog as “not that politically inclined” but expressed conservative views on issues like gay marriage and the death penalty. Friends and neighbors described him as a loner.

“He was a nerd, always reading, devouring books and computers and things like that,” said Donna Sebastian Harp, who had known the Conditt family for nearly 18 years. “He was always kind of quiet.”

The attacks began when a package bomb detonated on the porch of an Austin home, killing Anthony Stephan House, 39. That was followed 10 days later by two bombs that were found outside homes, one of which killed a 17-year-old man.

The first three bombs were apparently detonated when they were picked up or jostled. Later, on Sunday, a package bomb exploded in the Travis Country neighborhood, set off by the tripwire. The fifth explosion occurred at a FedEx center in Schertz, Tex., outside San Antonio on Tuesday. Another bomb, this one unexploded, was found at another FedEx facility in Austin the same day.

“We do not understand what motivated him to do what he did,” Chief Manley told reporters.

In a mere 19 days, the bombing sprees sparked fear across the Austin and San Antonio regions of Central Texas, evoking the nowhere-is-safe quality of the anthrax mailings of 2001 and the Washington sniper attacks of 2002. For a young man of 23 who did not complete a degree from Austin Community College, his devices and shifting methods as a serial bomber left some of the country’s most experienced federal explosives experts baffled early on in the investigation.

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And yet, that change in his tactics is largely what led police to him.

His first three bombs were hidden in packages that were not mailed but instead placed on people’s doorsteps. His fourth was set off using a tripwire across the Travis Country sidewalk. But his fifth was different — he shipped it from the FedEx store, which captured him on security video, wearing a baseball cap and a black T-shirt and standing at a counter, in addition to other surveillance video from the area. He shipped two package bombs there, and when one of them accidentally exploded at a FedEx center in Schertz, investigators traced the shipments back to the FedEx store, and, ultimately, to him.

After that explosion at the FedEx facility in Schertz, investigators had turned Mr. Conditt from a person of interest into the primary suspect. “Maybe for about 24 hours before his death, they were able to closely monitor him and his movements,” Gov. Greg Abbott told reporters.

Mr. Conditt’s vehicle was traced to a hotel in Round Rock, just north of Austin, Chief Manley said, where a SWAT team surreptitiously surrounded the hotel and called other specialized units.

But the suspect drove away before those teams could arrive. Officers followed the suspect, who stopped in a ditch off Interstate 35, and SWAT officers approached the vehicle on foot.

“The suspect detonated a bomb inside of the vehicle, knocking one officer back” and slightly injuring him, the police chief said. Another officer fired his gun at the vehicle. And investigators began the long process of trying to find the answer that wasn’t in the surveillance video: Why.

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After Days of Silence, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg Admits to ‘Mistakes’ With User Data

The growing controversy has shaken the social-media company, knocking its stock price lower and prompting renewed calls for governments to better regulate technology businesses that hold enormous quantities of information about their users.

Mr. Zuckerberg, in a post Wednesday on Facebook, said the company has already taken many steps to address user privacy in recent years, but he said “we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”

Among the measures he said Facebook will take, the company will investigate and look for any potential abuses of personal data by app developers on its platform that have had access to large amounts of user data. Facebook also will audit any apps that display suspicious activity and notify any users affected, he said.

The investigation requires Facebook ​to map out how much and what kind of data was requested by app developers between 2007 and 2015, an expensive and far-reaching endeavor. Facebook will start by examining apps that had large user bases of around 100,000 people or more and those apps that pulled extensive data about a smaller group of people, according to people familiar with Facebook. ​The process could involve analyzing tens of thousands of apps, some of the people said.

In an interview with CNN, Mr. Zuckerberg apologized and said the company had been too trusting of developers in the past. Mr. Zuckerberg added that he would be willing to testify in front of Congress if it was the right thing to do and said he didn’t oppose some forms of regulation, specifically around ads transparency—a project that Facebook has been working on since last fall.

Sen. ​Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), who has been critical of Facebook’s response, said earlier Wednesday that the company’s leaders need to do more and Mr. Zuckerberg needs to testify. After the interview aired, she said she was “surprised” at his support for the Senate’s ad transparency efforts and called on

Twitter
Inc.

and

Alphabet
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to do the same.

“The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify” before Congress, she said in a post on Twitter earlier Wednesday. “Facebook should show good faith support the Honest Ads Act. To truly regain the public’s trust, Facebook must make significant changes so this doesn’t happen again.”

Facebook’s board issued its own statement late Wednesday, from lead director Sue Desmond-Hellman, saying Mr. Zuckerberg and his No. 2, executive, Chief Operating Officer

Sheryl Sandberg,

“know how serious this situation is and are working with the rest of Facebook leadership to build stronger user protections. They have built the company and our business and are instrumental to its future.”

Sen. ​Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), who has been critical of Facebook’s response, said the company’s leaders need to do more. ​“The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify” before Congress, she said in a post on Twitter. “Facebook should show good faith support the Honest Ads Act. To truly regain the public’s trust, Facebook must make significant changes so this doesn’t happen again.”

The user-data controversy was the latest setback for Facebook, which has struggled to respond to a barrage of criticism over the past 18 months about a range of issues, including manipulation of its platform by foreign actors, the spread of fabricated news stories and user privacy.

Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments come days after the crisis prompted calls for him to testify before legislators in the U.S. and Europe, carved tens of billions of dollars off Facebook’s value and raised new questions about the leadership of one of the world’s most powerful technology companies.

“Facebook is exhibiting signs of systemic mismanagement, which is a new concern we had not contemplated until recently,” Pivotal Research analyst

Brian Wieser

said in a note Wednesday morning. Mr. Wieser has a “sell” rating on the stock.

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Facebook’s stock rose slightly Wednesday, after losing about 10% or $50 billion, of its market value over the past few days.

In 2007, Facebook opened its platform to developers, paving the way for dating, job-search and other apps, as well as a new style of political campaigning. The move helped the social network become a fixture in its members’ lives, catapulting the company from 58 million users to more than two billion today. It also addressed criticism from people who argued Facebook shouldn’t have sole custody over the data generated by users.

In 2014, Facebook severely restricted the data that could be available ​developers, including dozens of different data points about users’ friends. Those changes were implemented in 2015. ​

The current crisis began with Facebook’s statement Friday that it was looking into reports that data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, improperly accessed and retained user data obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge.

Mr. Kogan followed Facebook rules in gathering the data but violated its policies by sharing it with Cambridge Analytica, Facebook said. Cambridge Analytica has said it complied with Facebook’s rules.

Mr. Kogan collected the data through a personality-quiz app he built for Facebook that was downloaded by about 270,000 people in 2013. At the time, Facebook’s data policies allowed developers to gather personal information about those users’ friends.

Facebook said it plans to notify the tens of millions of users whose personal information was collected by Mr. Kogan and shared with Cambridge Analytica. Reports in the New York Times and Britain’s Observer said the episode involved information on some 50 million Facebook users.

Mr. Zuckerberg on Wednesday said the transfer was a “breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.”

Ms. Sandberg, in her own post, said “I deeply regret that we didn’t do enough to deal with it. We have a responsibility to protect your data—and if we can’t, then we don’t deserve to serve you.”

Over the weekend and early this week, senior Facebook officials spent much of the time trying to nail down what happened with Cambridge Analytica and contemplating whether and how Mr. Zuckerberg should respond, said people familiar with the matter.

The company also spent those days trying to devise a plan to secure user data collected by developers since Facebook’s 2007 decision to provide outsiders access to user data to build apps and service, according to Ms. Sandberg and other people familiar with the company.

On Wednesday, Facebook said it would audit apps that showed suspicious patterns in how they pulled certain types of data. Developers who don’t submit to a thorough audit will be banned from Facebook. Developers who misused personal user data also will be banned from Facebook and their users notified.

Facebook will further restrict data access currently available to developers, including removing developers’ access to data about users who haven’t used their apps in three months.

Some critics ​said the changes were too little too late. “They were effectively irresponsible years ago—now they just got caught,” ​said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, a think tank focused on antitrust issues. “The government needs to actually act.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s statement comes as Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Facebook’s user-data practices violated terms of a 2011 settlement. Users have aired their anger over social media, using the hashtag #deletefacebook. Late Tuesday, Brian Acton, co-founder of WhatsApp, a messaging app that Facebook bought for $22 billion in 2014, appeared to join them, with a message on his Twitter account saying “It is time. #deletefacebook.” Mr. Acton has declined to comment.

The scrutiny has weighed on Facebook staff, with many questioning why Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t earlier discuss the company’s role publicly, according to current and former employees. At a question-and-answer session for employees Tuesday about the episode, Facebook lawyer Paul Grewal presided. Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg weren’t in the room.

Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg and their teams were “working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward,” a Facebook spokesman said before the executives’ statements Wednesday.

Facebook has been under fire for more than a year on a range of issues, but criticism intensified last month when special counsel Robert Mueller secured indictments against a group of Russians for manipulating Facebook and other social platforms to sow discord.

Mr. Zuckerberg had kept a low profile during this period. In the month before Wednesday’s statement, Mr. Zuckerberg has posted publicly on his Facebook page, typically his main venue for disseminating his views, only twice: once with photos of his family celebrating Chinese Lunar New Year, the other of them celebrating the Jewish holiday of Purim.

Publicly, Facebook has left it to other senior executives to make its case, often using posts on rival Twitter Inc.—a strategy that has sometimes backfired.

Executives responded to the current uproar over the weekend by arguing that what happened didn’t constitute a data breach—prompting users, privacy advocates and others to say it was missing the point.

The company stumbled in its dealings with Congress, waiting nearly two weeks last September before deciding to turn over more details of divisive ads that Russian entities paid to run on its platform during the 2016 presidential campaign. It also sent the company’s lawyer Colin Stretch rather than Mr. Zuckerberg to testify in Washington.

“Perhaps internally they felt that it didn’t rise to the level of direct involvement by the CEO,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, “but I think they realize now that while the platform has immense positive impact in the world, that it has had some significant downsides.”

Last month, Facebook’s head of advertising, Rob Goldman, drew fire when he defended Facebook’s handling of the incident and argued the Russians bought ads to exploit social divisions, not primarily to sway the 2016 election—a point that some in Washington interpreted as contradicting the indictment.

Internally, Mr. Zuckerberg has appeared to take the criticism in stride. During an employee question-and-answer session last month, Mr. Zuckerberg said Mr. Goldman’s comments didn’t reflect the company’s thinking, people familiar with his comments said, but he still backed Facebook’s strategy of having a select group of senior executives engage directly with critics, academics and journalists on Twitter and be more transparent about the company’s process and thinking.

—Robert McMillan contributed to this article.

Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com

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