A Canadian investigative journalist sat down with some old photographs one December day in 2023. Thirty minutes later, he had identified one of Germany’s most wanted fugitives. Daniela Klette, a onetime member of the Red Army Faction, had lived openly in Berlin for years. She took part in a capoeira troupe. She appeared in Facebook photos from local festivals. Yet German police never found her. Not until Michael Colborne ran her image through facial recognition software. The Power of Public Tools Over Police Efforts Colborne, who works with the open-source investigation group Bellingcat, acted at the request of a German true-crime podcast. The New York Times detailed how the software quickly matched decades-old wanted posters to images of a woman named Claudia Ivone. That was the alias Klette had used while hiding in plain sight in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. Police arrested her in February 2024. They found cash, gold, weapons and fake documents in her apartment.…