Hacker News Reader

Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Not just facial recognition, the "terror watch list" failed (after a warning from Russia about the older brother) lack of background checks on the AR15s they owned failed, the secured perimeter failed (the teenager was outside of it) the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown).

In the end it was mostly dumb luck, dumb criminals, and the fact the poor victim who lost their legs managed to survive. In fact that was the success, that more wounded people didn't die thanks to fantastic work by the hospital and doctors.

Instead of patting law enforcement on their backs, how about thanking the doctors, where is their applause?

View on HN

It seems disingenuous to say that facial recognition failed. As far as I can tell, all the images we had of these suspects were either very low-resolution, taken from angles, or both. Seems plausible that law enforcement didn't have any good candidate images from which to run a facial recognition search.

> In the end it was mostly dumb luck

What? Painstaking police work went in to getting images of these suspects, and the release of those photos are almost certainly what led to Thursday's events and, ultimately, the killing and capture of the suspects.

> the city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown)

Firstly, the lockdown is what forced suspect #2 to hide out in a boat instead of fleeing the area. Secondly, and less importantly, the guy smoking a cigarette wasn't violating the lockdown. It had ended prior to him going outside.

Was there luck involved? Of course. But there was also tremendous work done by a number of law enforcement agencies - without which, the suspects may never have been killed and captured.

The brothers didn't leave the area, didn't go into hiding and were able to kill a campus officer and hijack a car, all without police finding them for a week.

It was mostly dumb luck. It's not like they were hiding!

Oh, and http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013/03/27/hanover-police-trying-...

They didn't go into hiding or leave because they didn't think they needed to. It seems pretty clear they they didn't want to be caught.

From what I can tell, numerous people called in after the photos were released. Even if Thursday's events hadn't taken place, the police would have known the identities of both suspects shortly thereafter.

It just seems crazy to me not to acknowledge the role of investigators in all of this and chock it up to luck.

As for the edit you just made about the bombs in Hanover: are you implying there's a link to the Marathon bombers? Seems like conspiracy theory reaching - unless there's some sort of evidence you'd like to share.

It just seems crazy to me not to acknowledge the role of investigators in all of this and chock it up to luck

People do crazy things when they have made up their minds before the story even begins.

The brothers didn't leave the area, didn't go into hiding and were able to kill a campus officer and hijack a car, all without police finding them for a week.

I know you dislike law enforcement in general, but such casual exaggeration isn't helping your case. As of today, it's only 6 days since the bombings took place. The bombings happened late on a Monday morning. By Thursday evening, there were photos and videos of the suspects all over the media. There's a good chance that that's what flushed them out of cover.

You are wrong. We know that the younger brother returned to his school 60 miles away from the bombing, and was seen at his school partying it up the day before the MIT officer was killed. Please get your facts straight.

Where do you get a week from? It was 3 days.

> It seems disingenuous to say that facial recognition failed. As far as I can tell, all the images we had of these suspects were either very low-resolution, taken from angles, or both. Seems plausible that law enforcement didn't have any good candidate images from which to run a facial recognition search.

"Failed" might be too strong, but I'd definitely say it's not yet ready for deployment.

My impression is that the Boston marathon was extremely well-photographed from a variety of angles, by everything from nearby security cameras to folks in the crowd. This seems like the best kind of data set you'd reasonably expect outside a controlled environment (i.e., a lab or security checkpoint). If it's not yet good enough to at least flag possible matches based on this data, I'm not sure I believe it's ready for widespread use.

It wasn't a lockdown, it was 'shelter in place'.

that more wounded people didn't die thanks to fantastic work by the hospital and doctors

The EMTs and hospitals did marvelous work, but one nonobvious fact that helped a great deal was that the bombing was within 2 miles of FIVE DIFFERENT level 1 trauma centers. All five are world class teaching hospitals and one of them, MGH, had been recognized as the best hospital in the US at one point.

There are several states that don't have even a single level 1 trauma center....

Actually, the lockdown was voluntary, though with strong community pressure to comply.

But yes, multiple subsystems failed in the police response. If you listened to police scanners, you also heard that they had some trouble identifying streets correctly, or keeping their mics off when not talking. But police response protocols are one human system that definitely needs to be able to work in the face of multiple subsystem failure. I say judge the police on how the response worked as a whole.

I have to say though, thank god that Dunkin' Doughnuts' Tactical Ration Deployment Vehicle ran smoothly.

Talking about the scanners and technology (and failures) didn't "homeland security" give millions to metro police departments around the country to get their communication encrypted? I vaguely remember reading about that a couple years ago. I wonder where that money went if that is accurate.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22federal+grant%22+%22encry...

Apparently the police prefer interoperability over secrecy - if all the departments had encrypted comms during this manhunt, nobody would have been able to talk to each other because there were so many different police forces out there.

Interoperability is very highly valued. I just went through some government training courses on incident response, and interoperability was stressed many times.

I've wanted to ask about this since seeing the Boston police channel available on the internet. In the UK all the channels are encrypted making it virtually impossible for a civilian to listen in. Is it simply financial reasons that the USA doesn't do this?

Speculating from the perspective of a Brit in Boston, it may be to do with the fact that police organization in the US is much more fragmented and federated - rolling out compatible radio encryption equipment, handling key management etc. across multiple police forces would be much more complicated, financially, logistically and politically. On the operation in Boston on Friday, you will doubtless have heard of the involvement of the FBI, ATF, Massachusetts state police, city of Boston police department, Watertown police, MIT campus police, transit police... cops from all the surrounding towns were also involved in the lockdown. In the UK this would all have been handled by one constabulary, possibly with support from specialists from the Metropolitan police, and with fundamentally common funding and control structures from the UK Home Office, whereas all those different police organizations in the US are responsible to different funding and governing authorities.

Is it simply financial reasons that the USA doesn't do this?

Surely not only financial reasons. In the United States, consumer purchase of inexpensive radios that pick up police communication frequencies has been commonplace since the early 1970s (when I first owned one). I remember a Hacker News thread a year or two ago in which a European was surprised that a news report including the name of a person arrested (not tried and convicted, but just arrested) was permitted in the United States. Our historical sense in the United States is that police operations and arrests should be largely in public view, reportable by the news media and observable by the public. Different societies come up with different trade-offs on this issue, in law and in custom, but in the United States arrest records are public (and routinely reported, although often with some time lag, in local weekly newspapers) and police radio activity can be monitored by many private citizens. It was noteworthy this last week that the Boston police make more use of Twitter than many urban police departments, but the general degree of openness observed in the police response to the marathon bombings is fairly typical of the United States.

Yep and no one could use the new radios.

to be fair if you live in Massachusetts you would know, all of the streets are not marked as you would expect in other areas. If there are street signs at intersection often times only one of the streets is marked.

There's no way to ask this without sounding snarky, but: why?

Towns in Massachusetts were laid out before the invention of the automobile.

Why don't they go now and label all the intersections properly?

GPS?

The order to close businesses was pretty broadly heeded, and with no workplaces, shops, daycares or school programs to go to the voluntary 'shelter in place' situation became pretty mandatory, even for people outside the lockdown but working in the Boston area.

What you fail to realize is that the "terror watch list" you speak of doesn't hold people on it from just any hearsay. The articles said that the FBI did its due diligence and found no reason to continue an investigation on them.

Think about it this way: would you want just anyone to be watchlisted based on tips that could be politically motivated, intentionally misleading, or just completely factually inaccurate?

What you can never account for in terrorism screening is the lone-wolf element. There will always be some fringe guys in parts of the world who hatch their plots outside of the view of what we're able to observe. The only options you have are to limit their access to harmful weapons/devices, or contain them as fast as possible when they do go on the offensive.

Yes, doctors and other emergency responders did a great job, but don't be so quick to take away a victory from law enforcement when there are very few positive stories circulated about them ever. The boston marathon runners/crowd didn't know they were putting their lives on the line that day. Law enforcement, on the other hand, made a conscious decision to do so.

Fringe guy in part of the world. Usually these guys have been Americans in America as far as attacks within the USA go.

We don't yet know if the "terror watch list" failed. Perhaps he was checked and they found nothing, because at that time, they weren't terrorists and weren't planning a terrorist attact at that point? We're not living in a minority-report style pre-crime detection world yet.

this is absurd. i'm in Boston. there is absolutely no shortage of support and praise for the doctors and hospitals here.

lots of things went wrong for this to happen. thanks for pointing out the painfully obvious. our police deserve the "pats on the back" (which, by the way, is an extremely condescending way to put it) they're getting, and more.

I believe the curfew had been lifted moments before he went outside for a cigarette - at least that's what's been reported over and over and over.

So the curfew actually prevented earlier discovery of the younger brother, interesting.

You can't state that as fact either. It's possible the lock down and house to house search left the suspect with no other choice but to find a hiding place and stay there. If residents remained on the streets it's possible he could have slipped away.

Well, considering "the second suspect" was possibly armed to the teeth, and maybe wearing a suicide vest, the hope was that, yeah, a regular person would not stumble on him and get killed. The guy who found him got lucky, it sounds like.

city lockdown failed (the guy smoking the cigarette outside when he saw the blood was technically violating the lockdown)

But for the shelter-in-place order (it wasn't a lockdown or curfew) the guy may not have been home in the first place for find Tsarnaev.

According to Cambridge Police, neither brother had a gun permit:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2013/04/21/ma...

Massachusetts does in fact have an assault weapon ban in place (similar to the 1994 Federal AWB), although you can get modified/MA-compliant versions of many "assault weapons" such as the AR-15/AK that are legal, however you are limited to a 10 round magazine. They would have needed a Class-A LTC to even contemplate owning such a weapon -- this involves fingerprints, a full background check, references and a "letter of purpose" along with permission from your local police chief to get.

However, the younger brother was too young to get a permit, the older brother was in fact not a US citizen and was here on a green card and thus is ineligible for a gun permit. Having said that, even if he was a US citizen his previous arrest for domestic assault would've rendered him ineligible for/and or revoked an existing LTC-A had he had one.

I have not seen anything yet reported as to what kind of long gun(s) they had or where they got them. The FBI warned agents responding to Watertown on Thursday night that they had "fully automatic AK47s" [along with grenades/dynamite and IEDs]. It is my understanding that they only recovered two handguns at the scene of the firefight in Watertown and one handgun and a long gun were found on the boat after the final surrender [aside from the IEDs scattered over Watertown].

It is interesting that despite the incredible firepower the brothers had access to (handguns, long gun(s), multiple IEDs), that when there's someone shooting back, the brothers plans were pretty much shut down and the loss of life/injury was very minimal considering the circumstances.

Also, our Internet surveillance dragnet failed too.

I guess when you create a panopticon you're relying more on psychology than surveillance.

> In the end it was mostly dumb luck

Flamebait. Anything people point out, you just define as luck. Luck that LEO found evidence, had pictures of the perps, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com