FBI ups reward to $75,000 for suspect who placed pipe bombs during Capitol riot | Hacker News Reader

FBI ups reward to $75,000 for suspect who placed pipe bombs during Capitol riot

nbcnews.com

50 pointsmhh__28 comments

How is it possible we only have one grainy picture of this person? I mean this in all seriousness. I don't think I could go around the corner without being on at least 4 cameras.

Is this some sort of joke the FBI is playing on us? Do they really not have any more evidence than this?

Found the surveillance capitalism apologist. I know it may seem hard to accept, but the ubiquitous presence of cameras and other broadband sensors to facilitate widescale population monitoring hasn't been nor arguably should be the norm. And no, public safety be damned. That road has claimed more liberties than you can shake a stick at.

I think you read too much into their comment. You can't deduce from the comment that they're any kind of apologist. They just made the assumption that there must already be more cameras and surveillance but they didn't state their opinion on that.

Now, to give you my opinion on it. I completely share your concerns but I think that when it comes to something as significant as the capitol, more surveillance and cameras should be warranted.

If nothing else, you'd think the DNC would have decent surveillance given the history of Republican operatives breaking in to tap their phones.

Looks like night time CCTV quality. Not from the time of the big mob storming Capitol. I still agree they should of released full quality video clip instead of couple of zoomed stills.

Probably because he is more intelligent that the mob and has taken measures to hide his identity.

Notice that those who carried hand cuffs, guns, etc always wore a mask, where as the dumber rocks of the lot openly celebrated by shouting out their names and locations.

Surely you can find some spare change in that 700bn defence budget for a few 4k cameras for a single building?

I'm honestly baffled.

The pipe bombs were placed at the Democratic and Republican national committee buildings, i.e. near the Capitol but not at the Capitol. No doubt both organizations are stepping up the CCTV outfit.

Because they weren't placed at the capitol where everyone was getting snap happy

No exact location, no description of the package, and the picture is cropped to remove any surroundings. What is the law enforcement reason why they would offer a reward but keep this information from the public?

Because they have basically no information to run on and they need to keep some of those normally low value cards close to their chest in order to vet potential tipsters for validity.

They probably have tons of images, but none give more information than this one. No sense in flooding people with information overload when it provides no extra value.

Clearly they went through multiple camera feeds to get the images they displayed.

They may hide the exact location, since that likely irrelevant and may even disclose information they chose to keep non-public, deciding it doesn't add to the chance someone in remote states need to identify a neighbor, but may add help in prosecution once someone is located.

If the facial imaging and/or gate analysis software worked as well as proclaimed, wouldn't many of these people have been caught by now?

Along those lines, why haven't any of the gate analysis companies solved the Missy Bevers murder? https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/questions-emerge-early-morn...

Even if facial recognition worked perfectly, the culprit still needs to exist in the library/database to be caught. And no system claims to be perfect- you need good reference images of everyone with multiple angles and a good view of their face at the crime scene. Driver’s license photos just aren’t good enough and the culprit may not have allowed themself to be in other images. Out of all the people that were at the Capitol that day, there are bound to be a few people that don’t have many pictures associated with their true identity. It’s maybe even more likely that a person who would bring pipe bombs to a mass gathering would be one of those people cautious/paranoid enough to stay out of the system.

Drivers license photos exist for the purposes of identification. If theyre not good enough for facial recognotion software then that software is a joke.

Have you seen drivers license photos? Mine has never looked like me.

They work adequately for checking to see if a person claiming to be John Q. has roughly the right facial features and skin tone- because you are just making a single comparison. It doesn’t work well in the other direction- finding which DL photo might belong to an unknown John Doe.

Given the age of many DL photos (mine is from 8 years ago) and the fact that they are from a single aspect angle, they are not suited for the reverse task of finding which DL image is a good enough match for a person’s face from surveillance footage. If you tried to search every state database for a white guy with brown hair, and account for the fact that he may have a different beard or hair style from the DL photo that may be years old, you’re not going to narrow the pool enough to help the FBI. If you made your match threshold low enough to be reasonably reasonably confident that you didn’t miss the guy, you’d end up with millions of matches.

The only decent facial recognition techniques use more reference images and use other methods to narrow the search space. The reason that Facebook was able to get their automated photo tagging working years ago was because they had exquisite knowledge of your social graph and only matched people 1-2 connections away from you. But a nationwide search for an unknown criminal doesn’t have the ability to drastically narrow the search space like this.

That makes sense. Too bad it doesn't work that well yet- could also be used in cases such as this: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/01/21/highland-hospit...

At the same time we already have instances where false positives led to the jailing of the wrong person. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/technology/facial-recogni...

OP means gait analysis.

The title should be changed from "UPS" to "ups" or better still "increases".

Fixed, thanks

So the timer ticks around, completes the electrical circuit (assuming it had working batteries), heats up the 'steel wool', which ignites the 'powder'

Seems like it might have worked.

Steel wool is not a good igniter though. Anarchy Cookbook (Version 2000, not the unrelated original) uses a strand.

Pic - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/us/politics/pipe-bombs-ca...

The other day some people on HN were upset that what happened at the Capitol is being made such a big deal of when the Pennsylvania Avenue demonstration in May "only" got national headlines...

Maybe those people will slowly start to understand why we're seeing more serious charges than when demonstrators were attacked before they could even reach a fence, let alone a government building.

Those posters will try and gaslight you into thinking it was your fault for being “too lenient” during those other protests..

We need more surveillance. Call the NSA and CIA fast. OTOH if you wanna see who planted the bombs, see who will profit later.

There is a difference between a protest going out of control and a planned insurrection.

Those at the protests were protesting their ill treatment or ill treatment meted out to others.

Those at the capitol were explicitly planning to do exactly what they did.

This should be obvious but the site is choc full of people insisting equivalence.

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