I feel like I’m missing a step here. So his tatoos showed and someone who happened to know about this guy happened to notice? Does he have a particularly distinctive tattoo?

I’m not rejecting the claims in the article, but they sure are pretty surprising. Two ideas that seem far fetched but more likely to me:

1. Some intelligence agency running voice recognition on YouTube videos. 2. Parallel construction, where he was actually caught via another source (like a tip) and they decided to say they detected via YouTube to obscure the true source.

That's incredible - yet unsurprising