Boston bombing: How Internet detectives got it very wrong | Hacker News Reader

Boston bombing: How Internet detectives got it very wrong

bbc.co.uk

16 pointsgreyman10 comments

Professionals, even though they are not perfect, tend to perform better than amateurs most of the time. The few times amateurs get it right, it becomes news because those events are statistically rare.

Because the instances in which sufficient evidence exists to find a suspect from resources made public (often times a single photo or a short, low quality video) are rare themselves.

Should we just ignore the fact that the FBI had access to resources that would've certainly resulted in the amateurs coming to the same conclusions? A video of a man dropping a bag which then exploded -- it doesn't take a professional to guess he's involved.

> A video of a man dropping a bag which then exploded -- it doesn't take a professional to guess he's involved.

If it's so obvious as you make it seem, then what's the benefit of having the public involved?

Remember that there's a cost to making information public - for just one example, it can be bad to let the suspect know how close enforcement is to catching them. (eg. The Cambridge police department stopped tweeting updates when they realized that they were probably just passing on information to the suspect.)

Sure, and the cases where it's particularly useful is when there's a lot of data and nothing is incredibly cut and dry. Or in finding the people after they've been identified (which is why the FBI released the photos on Thursday even though it looks like they had the evidence for > 36 hours).

It turned out not to be too useful here given the identification process was trivial and the suspects started a crime spree the next day. This isn't always the case.

Up voted for discussion. It is not just about data (video, photo, etc). It is about how such resources are utilized as well. Professionals have better processes. They can draw upon their experience, as well as the experience of others within their profession as well. An amateur, even if he gets the data, may not know how to process it the right way. He/she would also won't be as good as a professional in eliminating noise and isolating signals which help in moving towards the end goal.

This is especially true in specialized professions like that of a national law enforcement officer.

I don't disagree. I think in general, there aren't enough professionals given the amount of crime that happens. This is a notable counter-example. The number of people working on this case professionally is/was staggering. Usually, though, it's a town detective that's got 20 cases open, and a few free eyeballs can definitely be of huge benefit.

Some professional processes appear not to work well under this environment, too. For one, professional investigators compile a list of everyone who could be a suspect, and then disqualify them methodically and quickly. The reddit discussions established many potential suspects, but had no real way to disqualify them. The unfortunate result is that news media picked this up and the disqualifications came from public statements -- definitely not the way such a thing should work, and having your name publicly attached to a crime is really terrible. I'm not happy this happened, and I place blame primarily on the people who didn't bother to look at what was happening and instead took a picture with a box around someone as an indication that they were a suspect. Instead, it was just a picture meant to draw attention to something that seems suspicious for discussion, for cross references with other images, and with potential information people have that could be forwarded to the FBI as a tip.

It also definitely showed that there's a very high noise to signal ratio in this, most likely due to the chaotic nature of an open forum like reddit. It's not ideal in this regard, but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand because it has shown that it can be a valuable resource if used correctly.

There's a good reason we have amateurs as jury members.

Professionals often have an axe to grind, and will sometimes let their experience and ego cloud their judgement.

The Aaron Swartz episode come to mind.

There's good related article about twitter and big news stories (including reaction to the Boston bombs). All online discussion sites produce the same problems: endless conjecture, half-truths, outright falsities. How do you sift fact from fiction?

http://simonnricketts.tumblr.com/post/48115760648/twitter-an...

This is just a sad showing of fear-mongering mob mentality. Sadly, I expected more from these communities.

That's absolutely not what happened in that subreddit. The people who took the discussions out of context and tried to make things go viral outside of that reddit were the problem makers.

I watched pretty much everything that went on there, and everything these stories about "internet sleuthing gets it wrong" say is wrong. They're just sensationalist headlines. Journalists these days don't really care to get it right (you should note that many news outlets published factually incorrect data regarding the bombing claiming it was from a reliable source), they just want eyeballs.

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