What happens when you give 4chan images of the Boston Marathon?
basedheisenberg.tumblr.com
basedheisenberg.tumblr.com
The media did that with the Atlanta bombing and it destroyed a guy's life.
Or even more recently Ryan Lanza at Sandy Hook http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lanza#Investigation
The media doesn't learn and doesn't care to learn.
The people who turn it into a witch hunt are likely not the people actually using their heads enough to know what to be looking for in the images.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/mystery-man-on-roof...
Edit: It's another picture though.
The problem is that all it takes is one group to start quoting the other, and the effect starts to snowball:
"Internet detectives on the popular website Reddit have identified three possible suspects..."
"[Rival news organization] tonight reported on three new leads. The suspects, Joe Bloggs, Susan Smith and Bill Stickers..."
"Ask Reddit - who of the three suspects do you think is most likely to be behind the attacks?"
Christopher Jeffries http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/mar/16/christopher-jeffrie...
Oz: Lindy Chamberlain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_Chamberlain-Creighton
Countless others, and one of the reasons why death-penalties can kill the wrong person
I don't think they needed to learn anything. They know it's bad to jump the gun. You still see "Dewey Defeats Truman" jokes.
They just make mistakes. It's easy to criticize a nameless faceless concept like "the media". Individuals in the media are largely upstanding people trying to do the right thing.
With recent news about someone "watching a race while brown" (an injured Saudi's home is searched while he's being treated for injuries) I don't hold a lot of hope for accurate and careful policing.
I would say this is an absolutely worst case heat of the moment outcome. Can't claim its unrelated or irrelevant. Its a sad outcome that lots of americans automatically equate being arab with being a criminal, and its sad he got tackled after nearly being blown up, and its sad the cops trashed his house, but in the long line of human injustice, its not that bad, no one shot him or lynched him or ruined his reputation.
In a somewhat slower paced, more methodical, less emotional situation like looking at pictures of backpacks online, I think the likely outcome compared to the poor arab dude would be immensely more likely to tend toward rational wise justice than uncontrolled rabid injustice.
They are nothing more than unethical algorithmic drones, that dig up stuff. So far, no problem. But when showing their findings in public, they have a responsibility in thinking through the possible consequences, that might arise for these two guys if the (with a by the way very high probability) are innocent.
So raising the internet-pillories with possible media outlets taking these images and (not fact checking) showing them in different channels, might just destroy lives.
So yeah, sit in your chair and believe this unethical bs about them not convicting anybody. Right, the internet is just a tool.
As wise Uncle Ben once said: "With great power comes great responsibility."
That is, what seems to be missing here.
ps.: Imagine a different scenario:
They dig up these images, they send it to the law enforcement agencies. They find these guys to be potential suspects. They get a fair trial. After all is said and done . These guys come out to show what they did. Something in the line of finding a security flaw at your favorite digital place.
Isn't that almost the same thing as this, just with a higher probability that the shamed person is actually guilty of the crime?
http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/09/misconduct-is-only-news-wh...
Yeah, how about those drug offenses? Or copyright issues? Or computer fraud and abuse? Or...
Would you prefer it if copyright holders were free to exact their own "justice" outside of the court system?
They also have the super power of getting a search warrant and going through your fucking house so that they can find real evidence not just some pictures or possibly innocent people on the internet.
I don't know why I'm so pissed about these photo's but it most have something to do with the hypocrisy of HN being a group of people who hate to be watched and yet... WE are watching YOU. Seriously how are these photos any different than the government having drones? They are public? The public doesn't need to do everything and the government shouldn't be 100% open. I think this demonstrates just how bad it would be if private citizens were given the launch codes to nuclear weapons.
You are at a public event, you have no reasonable expectation of privacy and could not argue so in court.
If you are in your backyard and your neighbor is videotaping you, then that's illegal if you have the expectation of privacy. The government can basically do the same with impunity with drones without it being illegal.
See the difference?
What is true is that if you have a 12 foot fence and are in your backyard topless and your neighbor films you, then that's illegal because you had an expectation of privacy. Same goes if someone is being taped in a bathroom. You are in space that's not publicly accessible. I'm not 100% sure where the definitive case law on what is and is not private resides, but most of it is well defined in the physical world. So consider these three things: barriers (walls, space is not public), ownership (I own or are here with consent of who owns), and consent (I agreed to wave privacy rights explicity or de facto i.e. I'm walking down this street). These three things have to be ALL met or else you could tape people taking showers at your house legally.
With your apartment, things are even more gray because you don't have an absolute right to privacy there as your landlord can enter the premises under many pretenses.
But that's not the point I'm trying to make, Someone took a photo (publicly available) and found someone without a backpack, then the put it up online and said, this guy is a suspect.
Now we have a crowd of people (here on Hacker news and if you follow the threads others on Reddit) who have seen this guys face. The law of idiots leads me to believe that someone is going to recognize him and this could adversely affect his life.
Is it illegal... no. Is it morally wrong to post something like this online, I believe so. Sure, he has no right to privacy, and I'm no lawyer, but to slander someone's name with a very limited amount of evidence seems fucked up. I said it in another area, but they should have privately released this information to the police and let them investigate.
The Presumption of Innocence is actually not directly enshrined in the US constitution, and has been relaxed or reversed by the government to serve "societal needs."
http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1be5xv/til_in...
Also recall this from a few years back:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/02/02/691881/-Holder-Habe...
That's just as well. It's better to let a not-so-innocent walk, than to make an innocent pay.
The very notion of justice in civilized western societies is that you DON'T need "lawless vigilantes".
And they ain't that good either. All their allure comes from BS movies, TV shows and comic books.
In real life "lawless vigilantes" are more like Southern lynching mobs.
You're playing the foll, right? If not, then I'll tell you why.
Instead of going to your neighbours house and beat him with a baseball bat when you suspect his kids did pee in your rosebuds, you should report to the police and ask for a reparation.
Why? Because we live in a society, not in a hurd. The guy with the most muscles is not supposed to be more right than the guy with less, or in a wheelchair.
The way to do this is to agree together to not use force and let an institution use force, thusly forming a "social contrat", which you have already signed at your birth.
And what if you don;t agree with this contract? You woould need to go in another place, but all of them places have such contracts, you'll be sorry to hear.
What do we have? A shit ton of people and photos of people with backpacks. This is great if you give it privately to the police so they can go out and use the rest of their tools to find stuff, but there is a reason why they don't announce their "suspects" to the public.
You're completely right. Everything was much better when the mob could just perform justice with a rope and a tree.
But a bunch of people on a forum? Will they even feel responsible for their individual small part of participation in a thread that ruins someone's life? It's very similar, psychologically, to a mob. And that's why it's so dangerous.
Law enforcement has absolutely zero legal liability for anything they do in the course of their job. Anything. This is well-settled law.
On the other hand the forum mob is legally liable for their actions.
So if your sole criterion was legal liability, we should expect greater care, consideration and accuracy from the forum mob than from law enforcement members.
Whose livelihood is threatened by participating in a 4chan thread pseudonymously?
That's not actually true, random internet anecdotes aside.http://www.columbia.edu/itc/journalism/cases/katrina/Human%2...
FYI: This submission is just some images pulled off a thread of idle speculation that somebody posted to Tumblr. It's not some kind of organized campaign claiming to have found the people responsible.
This is bad, and very wrong.
No, actually. We average out to the same kind of mob-prone mooks we like to tut-tut at others for being. Except our mobs are about standing around going "Well, actually..." and that's marginally less puerile than what we see from 4chan mobs.
It might feel like skepticism, but from where I sit it looks a lot like pretentious pseudo-intellectual grandstanding. It's like hanging a somebody's napkin doodle in an art gallery just so you can complain that it's not the Mona Lisa.
1. assemble the pictures
2. give sources for their pictures (an imgur link doesn't count)
3. show what evidence they think that makes the person a suspect
4. submit it to the FBI
5. not post it on the Internet
Posting it on the Internet doesn't help. The FBI will need to track down original photos, and being duplicated everywhere on the web, with a bunch of other people photoshopping comments on it in various ways, won't help their efforts.
The FBI only needs to see it once. This isn't voting. A bunch of people submitting something doesn't make it more likely to be true, or more likely to be listened to.
On another note, it's funny how people tend to focus on people who stand out, like the guy with the white baseball cap. He stands out in a sea of dark colors, so of course people focus on him. It's very hard to believe (although possible) that the actual bomber would wear clothing that makes him stand out in any way.
I fail to see how this is more applicable to the average 4chan viewer than it is to the average human being.
If there is something the US intelligence services are lacking when it comes to terrorism than it is certainly not the lack of manpower and money...
I saw this when it was new, yesterday, and it is one pic in a in a giant series of photoshops showing Dorner is responsible, and a zillion of the other usual 4chan and reddit suspects.
So I glanced at this (or one of the numerous others very similar) and at a glance said Oh LOL very funny to photoshop Moot into the pix but Moot is going to be pissed now. At closer glance today, Moot is in fact a skinny white dude but this seems to be a different one (insert racially insensitive comment about skinny white guys all looking the same to me at long distance and low res, hey recognizing the problem is more than half way to fixing it). And its all rather tasteless humor so I scrolled past it pretty quick for better stuff (aka pretty much ANYTHING other than jokes about blown up people) I'm surprised this is still "of interest" today.
The properly journalistic way to look at this is in context, you REALLY need to look for instance at the reddit posts on the same topic immediately before and after which show the probably late mr dorner being responsible in one via some pretty amusing CSI style animated gif photoshop work, and another photoshop job doing the same with spiderman (no kidding). And some dumb anime ones, and the usual racial slurs, etc. However in a giant sea of photoshops, this one story is gaining traction. Probably because its politically correct to assume an angry white dude did it, whereas the similar photoshops of arabs in turbans are too politically incorrect (aside from also being completely ridiculous and tasteless).
Now the question of the day is who is this dude who probably got photoshopped in, and I'm not a huge Stargate fan by any means (err, well...) but I am about 95% sure this was a generic uniformed dude from SG:U or SG:Atlantis. Now it could all be real in which case SG:U or SG:Atlantis uniforms are going to be solely for the tasteless next Halloween, or its just vaguely coincidental that the the SG uniform people used some pretty much off the shelf stuff from Gander Mountain or uscav and it means pretty much nothing.
I wrote a bunch of stuff about which episode of SG:U I think this uniform and backpack comes from, but the pix is so low res and I'm working from memory, so I deleted it.
I don't know whats more embarrassing, a bunch of people getting all worked up believing one pix on a site known for "funny" photoshops is authentic, or me admitting in public that I watch syfy network sometimes, even worse I got roped into watching SG:U and I'm still kinda pissed they never had any closure to the series.
I guess if there is any "startup lesson" here for the HN community its that you can't usefully research something in total isolation of its surroundings.
That doesn't mean its absolutely false, just probably. For gods sakes whoever is doing this research for real, do us all a favor and DO NOT publish it in the funny photoshops section if you want it taken seriously, OK? Frankly anywhere else would be better.
This doesn't mean its all a waste of time. If the pix are not photoshopped, and if for example the SG:U costume department bought its backpacks and shirts and caps from Cabellas Outfitters or REI or whatever, and the dude in the pix shopped fairly recently at the same place, extensive research into that topic MIGHT help the authorities.
The writers ran out of ideas in SG:U and it never should have been a series. Would have been a great movie or short mini-series.
There's probably a startup lesson about ambition in the SG_U story, something about designing a great six hour product results in disaster if "success" descends on you and you've suddenly gotta fill dozens of hours, any way possible. If they did a SG:U miniseries we'd probably still be ranting about how it was the best miniseries in years, etc.
Unofficial Stargate Universe, Season 3 (scripts) http://laurencemoroney.azurewebsites.net/?page_id=2
In fact the mob in this case seems to be showing a lot of common sense with top voted comments like the parent here urging caution.
Vigilante justice is reckless and comes with big risks, as romantic as it may sound to some to sit in the comfort of your desk chair and bring about digital justice.
Isn't this romantic notion, bringing justice with a click the driving force of nearly every online-petition, and things like this.
Isn't this romantic notion the reason why the new demo is so often practiced? New demo = to ddos someone to mars or jupiter, and rationalize it with: I could just as easily have gone to their headquarter and demoed there?
Well most people could not have done it - and would not have done it in rain, snow, wind, driven 500 miles just to demo there, and so on.
As a lot of psychological studies showed, people saying they would do something and people doing this thing in the real world (not in their imagination) are two totally different things.
So there you have your real, underlying problem, a psychological problem, with this kind of digital activism. It is so totally different from real activism, and at the same time so new, that we really do not have proper ways as a society to deal with the dark sides of it.
The ability for one person to have that much power is either scary or empowering depending on your point of view.
Additionally, it seems some people have a hard time realizing they have polarized views of the same thing in their head. So while it may be both scary and empowering, people can have strong polarized views of the same topic without realizing it, it just depends on their point of view at the time. Maybe I was trying to get people to think and realize that such things exist in their mind, or maybe I am giving myself too much credit for an omission of words.
I guess we'd like to say accountability, but even that's not really there. Take Louis Cuen Taylor, who just spent over 40 years in prison for setting fire to a hotel, despite actually helping the police attempt to save people. After all this time, it was finally accepted that there was no evidence whatsoever that Taylor actually committed the crime. He was released after pleading No Contest, making it very difficult for him to get any sort of reparations. So yes, he was finally released, but with 4 decades of his life taken from him.
Bad things happen even with reasonable safeguards in place - cars will keep crashing even if everyone is alert and sober, yet there is still a world of difference between a drunk swerving between lanes and a sober/attentive driver.
The fact that the criminal justice system, based around impartial trials, the right to defend yourself before your charges, and the assumption of innocence, will at times ensnare innocents is not an excuse to adopt the opposite system - i.e., the assumption of guilt, mob justice, and the lack of opportunity to defend oneself.
Put more practically, the difference between bad vigilante justice and bad institutional justice is its occurrence rate. Vigilante justice frequently ensnares innocents - the other posts in this thread demonstrate this in spades, and makes wrongful convictions in the US criminal justice system look like a drop in the bucket.
Any country that has an incarceration rate 5-10x higher than most other countries ("civilized" or not), I'd be real hesitant to call their wrongful convictions a "drop in a bucket".
I'd be in agreement with that argument if it were any other country. Still, vigilante justice is (of course) not a solution for the US because if that became commonplace, it'd be even worse. Less incarcerations, but you may not like what they'd get replaced with.
That's not what I said. What I said is that miscarriages of justice in a vigilante environment would make the current US situation look like a drop in the bucket. The level of injustice that would exist in society would make people yearn for the days when we were imprisoning >1% of the country's population.
I would have guessed the libel, which I will not repeat here.
Memory sucks.
Not telling anything for days isn't acceptable anymore -- the government used to get away with these kinds of things because it used to control the narrative, but it can't do that anymore.
The media? No the FBI did that. "The media" ought to have known better, and still hasn't learned better.
While it's possible the person in the image could be the culprit, lets not jump to conclusions until we have some more solid evidence. Some people take off their backpack in crowds because it can get in the way, how do we know this isn't the case here? There are a thousand legitimate justifications for not having a backpack on you were seen carrying earlier.
I usually walk to the train station to commute to work in the mornings and take my backpack off once I get on so it doesn't get in the way of others. Now I know what people will be saying if the train gets blown up and they have imagery of me with a backpack on and without...
He's in a really terrible spot but it's not because of some confused reporting.
When I was going home, I stuffed my lighter jacket in my backpack with my laptop... and it looked exactly like that. In crowded areas, when I'm not going anywhere, I almost always take off my backpack and put it between my legs. It's the only way I can safely swivel my upper body to look around without knocking people over.
Don't jump to conclusions. It's a dude with a big black backpack. There's hundreds of thousands of those in Boston. I would be surprised if there weren't a picture of a guy with a big black backpack in that area. Lots of people work around there and lots of people don't get the day off... I didn't. I saw a ton of regulars on the Commuter Rail that morning that obviously also didn't get the day off.
I applaud the efforts of people to scan photos looking for the perpetrators... but saying they may have found the guys responsible is incendiary and dangerous.
Yes, but are there not only a limited number who were at the bombed locations around the time of the Marathon. Identifying those - if the evidence about the bombs being in black bags is sound - gives you leads to investigate.
>but saying they may have found the guys responsible is incendiary and dangerous. //
It's also true. They may [huge huge caveat] have found the people.
Personally I think the only real way the public can help is to identify themselves and their family/friends in images that others have handed over or they've sent to the officials investigating (Boston FBI presumably).
I'm assuming that the office based enquiries are based on using available imagery to build a profile of all movements and to list people who may need to be interviewed. I poured over a few images (in one reddit thread) of the area of the bomb outside 671 Marathon Place and it was quite easy to spot certain people hanging around - what surprised me was that there wasn't already more imagery available. There must be many video feeds, CCTV and such in the area, eg from the shops at the bomb sites.
Anonymous are not investigators. As altruistic as their intentions may be here people cannot forget that. Leave the investigating to the real investigators who do this for a living. Random people on the internet are not going to see something that agents from multiple federal agencies wont see.
Your point about people from the public identifying themselves in pictures is a great one. That was what I first thought when someone posted a "suspicious" photo of a guy in a blue bathrobe. If I were that guy, and had nothing to do with the attack, I'd call the police right now and say, "hey that's me and I didnt do anything."
I think you overestimate people who do that for a living. I think that what 4chan did, analyzing all those pictures with such minutia, real investigator would never have done.
That being said, I would be absolutely shocked if they weren't scanning photos of the event programmatically for items resembling a black bag, and then the people who were carrying them.
Collaborative Google Doc for list of suspects: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgtCl8YvqiBodEl0...
Raw collections of photos: http://www.reddit.com/r/findbostonbombers/comments/1cipl7/ph...
IRC Channel: ##bostonspeculation
Closer up view of person in OP (includes shot of face): http://i.imgur.com/BBxplgk.jpg
Checking out the speculation is valuable because it gives the perspective that many such leads exist (and it is unlikely that they are all in on it.)
But I think what uchikoma was trying to say is that you may be ruining the life of an innocent man and that's not cool.
Also note, the blown apart backpack image has been desaturated because the color is way off (again OP post).
The Umbrella Man at Dealey Plaza, which shows how anything can look odd when scrutinized to an extreme http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuoZWb9gqv0
Because if you had several drones circling for 24 hours before the event with high resolution and night-vision cameras, you could trace every single person on each of their timelines before the event.
Awesome tool for when crime happens but what do we do when it's guaranteed to be abused?
Its always been the job of society to be rational about this and look at the cost of further infringement upon your liberties vs the marginal utility offered by a tool which enhances crime fighting ability.
Drones can circle a city for days and with high resolution sensors can not miss a thing.
This isn't just a more advanced CCTV, it's a near-infallible machine.
Why not?
Use some common sense: CCTV cameras aren't ubiquitous. There are gaps in coverage all over the place.
Possibly even 200yds!
While we're on camera most of the time in London, we can be pretty confident that the sheer hassle of obtaining footage and cost in processing them keeps the police from abusing it all that much...
You don't need total coverage. You just make sure some cameras have calibrated timestamps and automatic number plate recognition. That allows you to build up a sequence of cctv coverage of suspects.
The UK has one fifth of installed CCTV in the world. With that many cameras they pretty much are ubiquitous.
EDIT: The link above is a Reuters reports (Uploaded in 2011) on London's use of Ipsotek's Tag & Track software (now owned by BAE Systems http://www.baesystems.com/page/BAES_026518)
EDIT 2: Sorry, apparently not owned by BAE Systems, they're partners.
Yes it is, that's quite common in Britain, or at least London, because CCTV coverage is so dense there. To turn your argument inside out, drone deployment is temporary whereas CCTV deployment tends to be permanent.
The vast majority of them are low quality privately operated cameras that are not networked in any way, and with varying degrees of retention - all the way down to no retention at all.
It is incredibly hard for the police to trace someone based on CCTV even after the fact - even after the 7/7 bombings it took an immense amount of manpower to stitch together the movements of the bombers.
So while in theory, yes, you could be traced that way, in reality police often don't even bother gathering CCTV tapes from the cameras they know cover a relevant area unless it's for particularly serious crimes and they lack other evidence because of the cost involved.
In the central core of London, it's a little bit different in that there are sections that are well covered by police operated CCTV, but even then "well covered" usually means that operators decide what to focus on and zoom in on, so ongoing coverage of a specific location might be spotty.
None of these problems will last very much longer, in the grand scheme of things.
Westminster and City are probably the two small parts of London where there'd be a reasonable chance of "total surveillance".
But even Westminster is also chock full of CCTV dead zones due to the narrow streets and complicated building facades with lots of nooks and crannies - it might be "easy" to get coverage of people moving along the streets in Westminster, but incredibly hard to eliminate opportunities for people to hide away.
Here is where the discussion jumps the shark.
This is about forensic and surveillance technology advancement vs civil liberties, the expectation and right to privacy, and the abuse of new powers.
> ..tool for when crime happens but what do we do when it's guaranteed to be abused?
Law enforcement would love to be able to record all phone calls and keep comprehensive videos of every event.
Going backwards, people have argued for having people fingerprinted by default vs only when being processed during a criminal investigation.
In each case, it is the acceptance that while the tools are valuable, we draw the line saying that :
"Yes, the marginal utility of having 1 drone flying or 1 or a 100, vs their impact and chance for abuse is something we are uncomfortable with."
The question I suspect that is worth looking at, which I don't have data for, is the value of increased CCTV/Monitoring technology in solving crimes.
I'd rather offer a Stradivarius to someone who can get the most out of it, vs someone who can occasional hit the right notes from it.
An example of one benefit to having CCTV spread out over downtown is that you can relieve some police presence and spread them out to places that aren't. Another benefit would be that crimes committed in downtown would be recorded forcing criminals to wear masks rather than relying on the shock of the incident to make the victim forget details about the perpetrators features. If you have criminals walking around wearing masks then they can be quite easy to spot.
Another benefit would be in the case of this bombing. When I first heard of the bombing I was pretty interested, I wanted to know who put the bombs there, when and then who they were and what their problem was. I figured well they'll pull up CCTV and we'll all know what happened.
Instead police are being relied on to manage all of it in the moment.
It isn't a violation of freedom to be filmed in public, that's completely legal. People just start getting up in arms about it when it's a service offered by the american government for some reason. Any private individual is allowed to film for who knows what reason.
Somewhere else in this thread people were talking about drones. But that can happen right now, through private surveillance firms that would then sell information to the government. But then you're just lining some CEOs pocketbook instead of having a surplus. How is that a benefit?
"legal" is hardly the same thing as "[not] a violation of freedom"; in fact they're often orthogonal.
It would only take several drones to watch the entire city from altitude.
https://www.google.com/search?q=argus-is
The ARGUS-IS can stream up to a million terabytes of data and record 5,000 hours of HD footage per day. It can do this by the 1.8 gigapixel camera and 368 different sensors all housed in the ARGUS-IS.
Drones take pictures of the tops of people's heads.
Jesus. How? That's 11.5TB p/s
It takes a very long day to record 5,000 hours of of footage per day with a single camera.
ARGUS is taking care of the 'problem.'
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-free-speech-...
uh yeah... Cameras have a focal point, a drone creates a kind of panopticon.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004P5O37W/?tag=dedasys-20
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
In short, the idea is to allow lots of watching, because it'll help reduce and solve crime, but also radically increase the watching of the watchers.
They've read Brin and Orwell, and have learned. They pass legislation, or ignore existing laws when it's one of them that's threatened. Examples abound. Corruption is rife.
False Premise
--
Crime doesn't happen on a set timetable. So how do you determine when it should or shouldn't be in use?
For something like this, and most crimes(if not all) I don't see how a drone really helps all that much anyway. The standard procedures work well enough. Crimes like this are generally "solved." The goal, however, should be to prevent them.
When something like this does slip through the cracks though, it's important to "Keep Calm and Carry On," not get all bent out of shape and fuck up your society.
- If he was planning to commit the atrocity he did, why would you stand & talk to someone? (unless they were perhaps working together)
- There's a water bottle in the backpack which leads me to believe that person is a runner?
- The bag seems a bit small to hold a 6L pressure cooker. Plus he doesn't seem to be straining/leaning forward.
- If you're standing in the crowd most people will take a backpack off & put it at their feet?
- The crowd in the second & third photos is much busier which means it's not the same spot. If you planted a bomb why would you stand in the crowd?
Been trying to line up the flags in the last 2 photos to get an idea of where he's standing but can't manage it.
They are photographed together in both photos, both carrying bags.
But I believe it's jumping to conclusions way way too quickly.
I do. Both to alleviate the weight, minimize the space I take up as well as reduce the chance of someone slipping a hand inside my bag. Likewise when I'm carrying a messenger.
I'm a little weary of this set of pictures. It seems like he's edging to the front of the crowd, whereas I thought the explosions occurred a little further back. Moving to the front would be a great way to get stuck, much like ending up against the rails at a concert.
Anyhow, I think crowd sourcing this kind of investigation can potentially be of great help to law enforcement, but I really hope the internet community keeps itself in check when it comes to determining guilt & doling out punishment.
Doesn't every stereotypical American have a giant bottle of water in hand / on his/her lips every two minutes?
> If you planted a bomb why would you stand in the crowd?
Makes sense for suicide bombers.
s/water/soda if you enjoy stereotyping so much.
In the crowdsource images, there are so far three possible 'guy nearby with backpack, then spotted walking away apparently without backpack'.
Keep in mind that there may be multiple people involved.
Dammit I hate 'slideshow' pages like http://www.reuters.com/article/slideshow/idUSBRE93F06T201304... Such a pain saving the images. Reuters, please just post a zipfile somewhere of the original full resolution images, please, please.
Some more good images at http://cryptome.org/2013-info/04/boston-bombs/boston-bombs.h... http://cryptome.org/2013-info/04/boston-bombs-02/boston-bomb...
I looked at a few flickr images and identified about 6 people who were in 2 or 3 images at the location of the Marathon Place bomb¹ without too much effort. So I don't find that particularly amazing.
>If you're standing in the crowd most people will take a backpack off & put it at their feet? //
Based on this limit section of the marathon watchers that "most" appears to be patently false. I only saw one guy standing in that area with a bag between his legs but at least 20 other backpacks (or similar). This surprised me, I hold my backpack on my front in any crowd to try to avoid being robbed.
¹ - you can use the video footage to "triangulate" the location, the video line-of-sight passes through a tree from the centre of the finish line, you can see these details on Google Maps. Around the area between the South African and Norwegian flags.
Wouldn't it be a crime or at least be against basic human rights?
Trying to understand, as I'm not american and wish to come to grips with the reasoning behind showing these images in public and not mailing them to law-enforcement.
edit: Killing repeating use of "just asking" ;-)
Take the example of an ad agency snapping a picture of you on a public sidewalk and later broadcasting that image in a $10M CocaCola Superbowl commercial. You own your own image, and are owed compensation for that advertisement. And it is fully within your rights to not accept an agency's offer to compensate you at all, thereby preventing them from legally using the image you have been capture in for commercial purposes.
Now, if you are in a picture, but nearly impossible to identify (ie: a crowd shot taken at a baseball game, or a marathon finish) then the image can probably be used without your permission and without compensation.
Newsworthy events, of which this clearly qualifies, also change the rules. Press have expanded rights when it comes to publication of images. But is reddit a news site? When it comes to UGC relating to a news worthy event, do the individuals publishing enjoy similar rights to the press? To what extent? And assuming that there aren't 6 murderers all wearing backpacks, can the innocent ones successfully sue for defamation if/when their names get published?
Answers to these questions aren't clear, so I expect that one of these internet-witch-hunts-that-identify-the-wrong-person will end up in court sometime soon. Maybe one already has? Anyone know?
Try this: http://i.imgur.com/E4AmAk1.jpg
Also, some people put their bags down near/between their legs to watch the race. That doesn't mean they were planting a bag. Something to consider.
I'm sure the FBI is all over Reddit and every site/photo they can get their hands on.
Neat little Google Spreadsheet here breaking down the suspects, photos, etc. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0AgtCl8YvqiBodEl0...
I think there's a ton of photographic evidence out there, a lot of which we don't have access to (CCTV, pro photographers, media, etc.) FBI has all of this is analyzing it like crazy.
I wonder what kind of system they are using to create a virtual timeline of events with photos and video evidence to sift through the content...
What's hilarious is someone thinks it is very convincing while posting a spreadsheet that shows it is not...
Because I can't see either way. He looks like me MIGHT still have a backpack on.
Also the backpack seems small based on what's meant to be in it?
Very curious to know this person's story. Looks like a fed.
But: yes.
Crowdsourcing may be useful to develop leads. But LEO really should take it from there.
Frankly "due process" does not seem that important right now (as soon somebody is formally detained or accused, agree with you 100% on due process), but what is most important at this moment is getting credible leads/clues into the hands of law enforcement as quickly as possible.
The people poring over photographs are doing just that
Whether those eyeballs belong to proper investigators or random folks on an internet forum is largely irrelevant right now since the people who did this are still at large and no one has yet claimed responsibility.
I assume most people here are completely against drone coverage and yet we are thrilled at the idea of going through public pictures and pointing out people who brought backpacks to an event...
What harm is it if the public puts forward some suggestions and some of those investigating use them as a starting point? All this information is in the public domain, I don't think we can simply pretend it doesn't exist.
None of the 4chan analysis photos I've seen are anything close to reasonable. They all have blatantly obvious flaws and the pictures do not support the claims being made. In this case, a few commenters have pointed it out but there are many valid explanations for the "no backpack" shots the main one being that because the crowd is much thicker the backpack is removed and being held at his feet. It's a very common thing to do and there's nothing at all suspicious about this behavior.
Still, I wouldn't be surprised if photos like these, and crowdsourced examination, does generate actionable leads.
1. http://www.reuters.com/article/slideshow/idUSBRE93F06T201304...
2. http://www.amazon.com/Tenergy-3000mAh-Battery-Tamiya-Connect...
Part of photo 16/28 looks somewhat like a ferrite loopstick from the AM radio portion of a portable radio, but again it's hard to be sure. The distinction is important because if that's what it is, then this PC board is probably from a benign device that just happened to be carried by someone nearby.
As for the ferrite loopstick, it occurs to me that if the battery pack is from an RC device (which is what it's marketed as), the bomb maker have used the RC interface as a trigger. But that's just a guess.
Yes, they are, on my monitor.
nor are the people bozos for not making your life maximally convenient.
Yes, they are bozos. The FBI released those photos to the press for a reason. What do you suppose that reason might have been?
I just don't see the value in insulting people for having their systems run to your specifications. It makes you sound like a dick. I suggest you write to them and offer to host the high-resolution versions or something.
Yeah, I'll write to Reuters and see if they need to borrow some bandwidth from some random guy with a cable modem. There's a plan.
Seriously: why are you defending the all-too-common practice of posting miniscule images in important news stories?
You can trivially google for RC car traxxas connector and compare the pics to the pix of the ESC used.
Of course the overall "project" was probably kit bashing a ready to run full kit, not buying bits and pieces off amazon one at a time. Of course if you google for ready to run RC cars sold with traxxas connectors and tenergy batteries there really aren't that many possibilities. So that is interesting. If they find the remains of the RX that should probably narrow it down to like, one model of car or something. At which time things will likely get exciting for retailers of that ready to run model...
Crowd source the security.
I the modern world we don't take pictures of people we don't know, its considered rude. We let the state do it because somehow they are not human. However if it became the norm that 50% of a crowd of people took pictures of everybody else then you have a massive record to call upon when a crime happens. If nothing happens then the jigsaw is incomplete and privacy is maintained.
This truly goes for most large online communities that I have seen. They all have their negative aspects, but this is an example of the combined efforts reaching a productive conclusion.
We don't have access to the images being sent to the FBI, which I imagine might include a lot of personal photographs taken on phones. Deadspin's images from a few minutes before the first explosion show clearly that there were a lot of people in the vicinity actively taking pictures in all directions, so I suspect someone got a shot of the area where the bag was placed (near the intersection of the wall of the Lenscrafter's and the black railing) within 10-20 minutes of the explosion.
This is all based on public photographs and poorly coordinated timestamps. There are likely 100x as many being submitted as evidence that we can't see. It'd be nice if they were all public, as the leads a mass of volunteer investigators could turn up might result in something credible, but privacy and everything.
EDIT: after finding the higher-resolution photos, it's almost certainly the same 2 guys in each pic. On the other hand, the descriptors label him/them as moving, when my impression is that they're just standing there. Worthy of study, sure, but pretty weak sauce by itself.
In the first picture, they're standing next to the lamp post near the tree (you can see the branches on the left). Also note the no stopping sign facing inwards.
In the last picture, they've moved further away from the finish line to the next lamp post - you can see the first lamp post and tree in the background. Also note the no stopping sign on the second lamp post is facing the road.
Less obviously, you can see the Slovakia flag, third to the left of the lamp post in the first picture. Harder to make out in the second picture, but it's clearly a white/blue/red tricolor.
I'm guessing they're not significant because while they first drew attention for both carrying heavy-looking bags (a black backpack and a blue duffel), that may be a subconscious bias towards the fact that there were two explosions. On the other hand, the two explosions were separated by a city block; so unless one or both of them were spotted a similar distance away from the start point, the fact of the two big bags is probably just coincidence.
So many people were taking photos and video that by the time the investigation is done, I imagine there'll be a patchy but contiguous animation of people's movements through the area, at which point it'll be far easier to spot dichotomies in behavior between race viewers and the criminal(s) that carried out the bombing.
Also where did the dude go to use two bulky RC car transmitters to set off the bombs? Can't be far away. Portapotties? Look for one with two RC car transmitters dropped in them? I would imagine that would help with DNA analysis too, having 1000s of peoples samples in there.
So the vigilantes need to find pix of the portapotties, which I suspect were within a a hundred feet of the blasts. In fact their location combined with the predicted blast size probably defined where the blasts happened as the bombers would want to be just outta range of the blast while still having a great RC car signal.
TLDR is the witch hunt should be searching for two guys with bulky backpacks and one guy with a weirdly shaped pack who left the portapotties with a much smaller backpack right after the two booms.
The days when we the people could trust the motives or results of official investigations into politically significant crimes, are long gone.
The government develops ever-more powerful technological tools for monitoring ordinary people. It's entirely appropriate for ordinary people to use every technological tool at their disposal to guard against government wrongdoings.
If the Internet was able to identify the person(s) responsible here, and prove (for eg) that this was a government ploy to ban the sale of ammunition reloading black powder or bulk cartridge sales, that would be of immense significance.
For this reason I applaud the posting and permanent archiving of photos of events where such attacks occurred. We need some way to bypass the controlled MSM's low bandwidth and tendency to publish low-res, selected, edited and generally useless news images. 4chan doesn't cut it, due to the impermanence problem.
Another thing to be wary of, is the 'vanishing 911 photos' syndrome. Some organization appears, solicits the donation of original photo/film media with the promise of building a public archive, gets given a vast amount of such material, then vanishes along with all the material. NEVER give away or sell your original material. Post copies!
The man with the blue jacket and back pack is seen helping an injured person... where's his back pack? (We have no idea)
There appears to be a back pack in the same picture.
On the OP page the third photo stating "Backpack seems to be missing... it appears to me that the man in the white cap is looking down and doing something, perhaps getting something out of his back pack?
http://i.imgur.com/i1yLgzY.jpg
Racial profiling?
Kind of scary, especially with the internet creating suspects for the government.
It may be well intended, but it escalates very quickly into publicly accusing people for doing relatively normal things.
[1]: http://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cf5wp/2013_boston_m...
[0] Photosynth example - requires Silverlight: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=d7d78324-ad5e-41ea-94dd-...