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Comment by AdamTReineke | Hacker News Reader

The problem with a mob is the lack of due process. If 4chan were to try to exact justice themselves and get it wrong (or right for that matter), stuff could get ugly fast. That said, I'm all for crowdsourcing discovery from people with downtime to pour over images as long as the discoveries are processed properly.

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Whoever placed these devices is/are presumably still lying low someplace in New England right now and has demonstrated a willingness to murder/maim innocent people and could be planning to do so again.

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

It is when due process seems the least important that it is in fact the most important.

That sounds like something a terrorist would say. I don't think we can take the risk of not keeping you in jail until we've sorted this.

And thanks to NDAA he can be detained indefinitely for that very reason! These are scary times.

Without due process, law enforcement is just the vengeful application of (well financed) power.

Random groups of people on the Internet are stitching together photographs to help find the people who did this- that's not a police action or legal proceeding yet

Now apply that in reverse, that is, a militant regime trying to identify legal but politically inconvenient protesters. Relevant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3h-rae3uo

Throwing a lot of eyeballs at this identification problem is fine given the circumstances of this tragedy and doesn't rise to the level of something like imposing martial law.

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.

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