FBI Updates on Boston explosions | Hacker News Reader

FBI Updates on Boston explosions

fbi.gov

107 pointsmartin_107 comments

For me, the HN part of the story is that the FBI servers are having trouble keeping up with the traffic to their site.

Edit: Here's one of the responses I got while trying to load the FBI website

ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved

While trying to retrieve the requested URL the following error was encountered:

    Zero Sized Reply

Footprint did not receive any data for this request. Footprint 4.8/FPMCP Generated Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:42:44 GMT by 8.12.217.126 (Footprint 4.8/FPMCP)

If anybody is looking for a mirror...

http://imgur.com/a/wRl0g

the link up top is a malformed url - looks like maybe a bad c&p

http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multip...

worked for me

Wrong - it may look like a bad c&p, but if you go to fbi.gov and check the link on the right hand side, it is, in fact correct. The servers are just struggling right now with the assets, now mine are cached it loads instantly.

ya - guess you're right - what a redundant url.

Yep your link (kind of) worked. It's not loading quickly or entirely.

Yeah, I hate to say it, but my first thought was: "Is there no one at the FBI who has ever heard of a CDN or S3 or even Imgur to upload static assets to?" The issue at hand isn't a national emergency (because the attacks happened a few days ago with the suspects apparently quiet) but one of these days, they'll need a more robust way to disseminate info.

While these photos and video are the opposite of confidential, I am not the least bit surprised that the FBI wants to keep the FBI's data on the FBI's servers given the nature of their business.

The website is public. There's nothing keeping them from having using a CDN or other caching service or, better yet, setting up their own caching servers to handle the load better.

I would find it quite amusing if the FBI was posting to imgur.

To be fair, I don't think that many people on HN are facing the kind of traffic spike the FBI site just got.

The primary release is from the fbi YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M...

There are two unblurred suspects in that video, and the FBI site has some other grainy photos of the two suspects.

The BBC have mirrored some of the data: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22211190

The site loads up fine for me, and an Etherape scan shows that the site uses more than just one or two servers.

In addition the linked footprint site is not responding!

cnn.com, nytimes.com, nbcnews.com

That's not the point. The public should be able to get the information directly from the FBI's website without it being filtered through the media. You'd think the FBI would be able to setup some server caching to handle traffic spikes to their website.

So far, crowdsourcing has identified one high resolution image that shows both suspects running from the scene:

http://i.imgur.com/I1dF69f.jpg

(Note the guy with the white polo hat on the left and his partner not far behind in khakis and black hat)

I'm a firm believer that crowdsourcing is going to find out the details on these guys much faster than a government agency trying to collect all this digital data and do it themselves.

First off, I completely fail to see the partner in khakis and black hat in this photo.

Second, the mirrored imgur photo is much smaller and compressed than the original photo to which the New York Times linked. If a crowd of people are attempting to identify an individual, it's unfortunate if many are looking at a suboptimal image. This should be a lesson NOT to use imgur for such a task. Just throw the original on S3 behind CloudFront.

Original, high quality photo: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/thelede/posts/susp...

It's interesting that Carmen Ortiz is the (a?) US Attorney who is working on this. I would have thought they were compartmentalized by type of crime a bit more.

And I'd imagine a successful prosecution will render her completely beyond political reproach and put her on the fast track to higher legal leadership (which she must already be on to be assigned this case).

So, if nothing else, an HN angle here is that the outrage of 3 months ago is completely undone and meaningless. Moreso than even the common cynicism of that time would have charged.

I have no basis to object to her assignment to this case in isolation (I would imagine that she's perfectly competent in prosecuting a case with less moral subtlety), beyond complaining that in a just world she should have at least fallen too far out of favour to be assigned this case, and that there must be other US Attorneys in line who could handle it at least as well. But it would be public-opinion suicide for any tech causes to widely protest someone who will soon become a public hero.

If anything, her role in the Swartz case shows she is aggressive and interested more in using the full weight of the law rather than "moral subtleties". In a case that is bound to be full of race issues, having someone who can filter all the noise and see the facts is an asset.

It's not particularly interesting. She's the U.S. Attorney for the Massachusetts district office and therefore, the official spokesperson and executive decision maker for federal prosecutions in her jurisdiction:

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/

It's regional, and she's the boss of that region.

Yeah, I guess I had no idea USAs were segmented like that. Would it not make more sense to have them segmented by type of law, since they're all arguing in federal courts anyway? (Obviously I know nothing about law :-)

There are divisions by type of crime (financial, terrorism, government corruption, capital murder) but these types of crime often overlap and thus require overlapping resources and personnel from a DA's office...and someone has to be the person who decides how and what to allocate to each case.

This is not much different than police departments, which have separate departments for patrol, homicide, burglary, vice, internal affairs, etc....no matter how the squads are organized, there is still a chief and/or a commissioner who makes the policy and management decisions and who makes the official public statements.

  | Would it not make more sense to have them segmented
  | by type of law, since they're all arguing in federal
  | courts anyway

She probably has many specialized areas under her, but she's at the top of that particular power structure.

No, the US attorney is a per-state office. They're like attorneys-general for Federal law.

Nitpick: it's a per-district office. Massachusetts only has one US Attorney due to population and judicial district organization, but a number of states have more than one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Attorney

I stand corrected, thank you.

In the video, there's a girl wearing a yellow pullover and a large back-pack that is a little behind the guy labeled as a suspect. She shows up in each of the scenes (at 0:08, 0:20, 0:29) Is there information outside of this video that makes him more suspicious than her?

Otherwise, I'd say both of them exhibit the same level of innocence/guilt.

Is there information outside of this video that makes him more suspicious than her?

Most assuredly. I suspect they have video of these two guys dropping their bags. The photos they released are so that people can identify them.

Reddit seems to have already identified Black Hat's hat. Assume the FBI had already, but interesting how fast the crowd works on details like that.

http://i.imgur.com/D9tSDUf.jpg

I wonder if some sort of image processing could be done to further clear the images of the face given the belief of how the hat ought to look?

I had the same thought.

You'd think that knowing accurate dimensions and features of something so nearby could be used to gauge distortion on the face.

Likewise, perhaps some kind of computer vision could quickly search for the distinctive pattern of that hat in other images/video.

Link to the thread?

Edit: Nevermind. Found it http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1cmt5j/video_of_suspec...

The handling of these photos has been very interesting...since early this morning, the FBI have been telling the press that they do have good footage of the suspects...but they didn't release it until the end of the day, at least 12 hours later.

Assuming that the FBI had total control of this release schedule (and that'a a big if), I don't see the strategy of this. Even if they were 99% sure that they had legit footage of possible suspects, why announce that, until they are good and ready (i.e. within an hour) to release them to the public? In fast-moving crime scenes, the strategy is usually to withhold as many facts of the crime from the public until a good suspect has been nabbed...among other things, this prevents people from claiming to have witnessed specifics when in fact, they only saw them on TV or heard about it in the news.

When a witness (or suspect) tells the police a fact that has been withheld from the public, that's a tool for the police to use to determine a witness's reliability.

In the case we have now, the suspected bombers have had at least 12 hours notice that the FBI had working images of them. Even if it were a complete bluff...what would be the point? Isn't it better to keep the suspects in as much ignorance as possible? It may be that at least one of them is dumb and complacent enough to think they've gotten away with it.

But this is a new age of news dissemination, so maybe the FBI was just flying by the seat of their pants. Part of me thinks that they did have a suspect/person of interest all this time (since yesterday's erroneous reports) and that this release is a partial ruse to flush out a co-conspirator (who, if he/she believes the press conference, thinks that the FBI has no one in custody yet).

In the press conference they said they found one suspect and then took time to check if he was working alone or with someone. They wanted to have all suspects before the released anything.

By "found" you mean that they identified a possible suspect as being captured on video, right? Because I don't think they said anything about anyone being in custody, and the latest Times report doesn't mention that: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/us/boston-set-to-mourn-bom...

So again, why tip off the suspect(s) to anything? I know the pressure for movement on this case is intense, but it seems like the FBI could get away with another day of "We're looking at some leads and talking to witnesses, we hope to make a break etc etc." until the photos were ready to be released without giving the suspects much warning.

Yes I meant identified.

I don't understand how already having a suspect in custody makes this release of photos a logical move to flush out the co-conspirator. Maybe I'm slow..

Because if the conspirators have agreed to maintain radio silence until a given point, the assertion that the FBI is still looking for two suspects could lead the non-captured conspirator to assume that the first conspirator is just continuing to lay low.

As to why release the photos at all...well, it might not be to flush him out directly, but just that the FBI really is hoping that the public will be able to identify the uncaptured conspirator.

Maybe they were hoping that the knowledge that FBI have good footage would be enough for the suspects to hand themselves in... before this turns into a public witch hunt.

Maybe they are putting these pics out knowing full well that they are not suspects and they already have the real suspects either in custody or are on their trail. This release could be a bluff. Wouldn't be the first time.

Purely out of interest - and I'm possibly showing my ignorance here - when has this tactic been used before?

That's what the cynical person in me is thinking. However, the realistic person in me is thinking: if that is the case, then the FBI released these photos knowing full well that innocent men who look at all similar to these blurry photos are now at risk of getting beaten/murdered...which would not help the investigation.

Wouldn't make sense. You can't just say "OK, we were kidding, we got these guys we didn't tell you about!" and get away with it. Massive lawsuits would be filed by these guys and many at the top of the FBI would be forced to resign.

You read too many bad crime novels and I wish I could downvote you.

This is an absurd conspiracy theory. Downvoted.

I have to think that the suspects had to assume that there would be images of them. If you do something in public (much less a major event), you will be recorded countless times. The conspirators would have to be incredible dumb to think otherwise, which is why they are probably long gone.

There's some photos on this FBI page of a 17 year old kid, who was fingered by our internet detectives - and has already come forward to clear his name

http://news.yahoo.com/teen-am-not-boston-marathon-bomber-175...

These are pretty clearly different people than the 17 year old. The Yahoo article is currently confusing cause it has photos of the actual two suspects and none of the person who came forward on the story, but the person who came forward isn't in the FBI photos.

are you sure?

These photos [0] seem better as you can click on the high-res option! I am only running linux but do you think the SmartDeblur program (Mac/Win) [3] would work here? Some cool examples [1] [2]. [4] seems like the best option for the SmartDeblur.

[0] http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multip...

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2221466/Smart...

[2] http://en.paperblog.com/smartdeblur-will-work-magic-on-your-...

[3] https://github.com/Y-Vladimir/SmartDeblur

[4] http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multip...

I tried it with both the stable version the github page links to and the latest beta version on http://smartdeblur.net/. Other than changing the blurryness to blockyness, it doesn't seem to do a whole lot. [1]

Maybe it works better on motion blur e.g. because with motion blur all of the information is still there (just overlayed or convoluted in some other way), while this image is just an interpolated version of a smaller image that doesn't contain as much information.

It's definitely possible that someone else might be able to change some program settings for the better though.

[1] http://imgur.com/DnkbL3V with a 100x100px kernel and 51% smooth in the v2.0 beta. Not exactly an improvement

After playing with SmartDeblur myself I concur with this finding. No betterment to be had.

Does anyone know if the crowd sourcing of suspects on 4chan the other day picked out the same suspects the FBI announced today?

No, neither of these suspects came up on 4chan or reddit.

There seem to be no real hi-res images of these suspects, except for a photo which just showed up of suspect at site #1 [1]

[1] - http://imgur.com/a/34wtj

Gosh that'd be eerie if it turns out to be these guys knowing they walked right past you and your friends and to have a photograph of it.

The source material here looks to be CCTV cameras, which were probably not posted online.

No they didn't

They were pretty close. The 4chan suspect had a forward-facing white baseball cap. The FBI suspect has a rear-facing white baseball cap. These kinds of minor inaccuracies are fairly common in crowdsourced solutions.

Their site is absolutely hammered right now. The live video feed here (http://live.reuters.com/Event/Boston_Marathon_Explosion?live) has details. They have video of 2 suspects, one of which set down an "unusually heavy" backpack.

Someone has an Imgur mirror of the pictures: http://imgur.com/a/wRl0g

I'm curious, I watched the conference on cnn.com and there was some guy going off about the FBI lying and waiving around photographs that the press seemed to swarm after the official press conference was over. He said a website a few times, but I never got it. Did anyone else see this or know who he was?

I don't know who he was but the site he was screaming out was infowars.com. I think he was trying to draw attention to the photos you may have seen of the black backpack special ops guys who popped up in a few images

Curious article. Though now I do wonder why those guys were there..

I really don't think there's a big conspiracy with them. I think the article correctly identified them as members of a private security firm, but I really just think the city authorities hired them to assist with protecting the race, which probably explains why one of them appeared to be walking around with a radiation detector.

Just the fact that they're young makes me think international rather than domestic. If they're bombers they don't exactly seem the conspiratorial old bitter unabomber type.

...because domestic terrorists are always conspiratorial, old, and bitter?

Many members of the IRA were active in their twenties. Some members were even younger - the same was true for ETA in Spain. In the US, Timothy McVeigh was 26 at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, and Eric Rudolph (of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing) was 29.

You don't have to be old and believe in conspiracy theories to be a domestic terrorist.

Timothy McVeigh was just days from turning 27 when he blew the crap out of that building in Oklahoma City. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh

If they're international then the FBI shouldn't need to crowdsource the identities of these people. They will at least have fingerprints and facial photographs of these guys.

only if they entered through proper means. Its just hop and skip across that Northern border.

That's not true any more.

Wait - what?

"U.S. Department of State consular officers and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers collect biometric information (digital fingerprints and a photograph) from all non-U.S. citizens between the ages of 14 and 79, with some exceptions, when they apply for visas or arrive at major U.S. ports of entry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Visitor_and_Immi...

I assume he is talking about passport photos and whatnot.

Of course they could have gone to Canada and simply driven across the boarder at any number of places without anyone around for miles. Or they could have come in from Mexico without papers, like thousands of others do all the time.

Explosives have always had a fascination for some disturbed youths. The Columbine kids had planned to detonate a bomb in the cafeteria.

I'm amused to see that the FBI has a YouTube account, and posted the surveillance video on there. :)

Mirrored on imgur: http://imgur.com/irnkk5e

I'm disappointed in the technical solution for uploading footage at www.BostonMarathonTips.FBI.gov

It would be very powerful if they had a public-(upload-only)-dropbox where folks could drop relevant footage in a seamless manner.

Is there anyway to "stitch" together the photos to improve quality? Like filling in details on the hat for instance. I could have sworn I have seen similar technology before.

I believe there actually is! Isn't this part of the new version of Adobe Photoshop?

Surveillance video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M80DXI932OE

This is from the FBI Youtube account and it's linked to on FBI.gov.

Guy in the white cap is the one who they say placed the bomb.

The second bomb. The first bomb is unknown, and they haven't stated why Suspect #1 is of interest

It appears to me that the two bebackpacked individuals are together. The second one loses his backpack in the footage. I assume the first has the first bomb in his backpack.

I've watched the footage a couple of times. I don't see either of them losing their backpacks. What part of the video are you seeing suspect #2 without his backpack?

You know what you're right. Thankfully, I'm not on the investigation team.

A wise man once said: "Assumptions are the mother of all fuck-ups"

lol, I wouldn't go so far as calling the villain in any Steven Seagal movie "a wise man".

One had a clear and lengthy view of the other.

So I take the photos aren't clear enough and/or the FBI doesn't have the facial recognition capabilities (read not in the database) to identify these fuckers?

Can anyone elaborate on the scope of facial recognition technologies used by law enforcement? NSA surely has something powerful...

Also - cell towers - they can look at logs for the time period when these guy were on the phone and nail down a list of suspects, etc.

Wonder what their approach is here. Clearly enlisting the public to help is key but I'm sure they have a variety of technologies to find these fucks.

Be careful calling them "fuckers" - that kind of thinking will lead to conclusion making.

http://news.yahoo.com/teen-am-not-boston-marathon-bomber-175...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell

unless they were using burners

Or aren't the bombers, but just suspects for the time being.

They don't have to be the bombers to have been using burner phones.

True good point, damn burners.

Two gigantic idiots - walking the streets together, around corners carrying heavy backpacks. Can't fathom how they didn't know with todays surveillance and a million people taking photos that they wouldn't get spotted.

Because two friends don't walk streets together carrying backpacks... Because the FBI is always accurate in their information...

Two reasons, they might not care to get away with it, or these aren't the people responsible.

From what they are showing us, Suspect #1 isn't seen as doing anything just walking in front of Suspect #2 and wearing sunglasses and a backpack.

Like I said, from what they have shown us Suspect #1 might not have been involved at all.

Sorry, what's a "burner" ? I've no clue what that word means in this context.

A prepaid phone specifically purchased to be used briefly and then replaced is known colloquially as a burner phone or burner.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepaid_mobile_phone

So basically a phone that can't be tracked to you and you can get rid of and replace easily.

anonymous cell phone. cell phone bought without any identification used.

A cheap disposable phone

When the Met(ropolitan Police) or Gendarmerie Nationale or Carabinieri raid a property, the terrorists they are looking for have only household improvised weapons. Every European is today, once again glibly pointing this out (touché). When they are in the US, given the behaviour [le mot juste] of congress today, is it surprising that they can and so will shoot back? Of course they will. It is inexplicable and totally bizarre to the rest of the world that they are lethally "armed and dangerous" because they ARE LEGALLY ALLOWED TO BE.

"We don't care that the world things we are all immovably, constitutionally crazy" is such a weird position. You seem not to. One nation demonstrably under the NRA.

Americans seem to actually think that these weekly gun massacres happen everywhere else too. They just don't.

It is now absolutely clear that you can kill hundreds in a day with a few of your own guns, and the federal government will spring into not the tiniest bit of action.

The atrocity in Boston has not the slightest thing to do with gun policy. Any nutjob can create homemade bombs whether or not guns are legal.

And the people who planted the bombs are definitely NOT law abiding citizens. If they're willing to kill a bunch of random, innocent bystanders how much more willing do you think they'd be to kill law enforcement bent on their apprehension? Once they decide they're willing to break the law and blow up bombs it stands to reason they'd be comfortable procuring some illegal guns as well.

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