All he did was take an average of the pinging interval... I'm pretty sure the analysts actually working on this didn't need to crowdsource that.
I would hope the people working this case could do the same but I also support the idea of crowd-sourcing.
The "crowdsourcers" would be demanding that their theories be looked into and, if they were, it would take away from the search operation vital resources.
It reminds me of when I'm troubleshooting network issues and my (very non-technical) boss calls and offers up his ideas of what might be wrong. It distracts me from what I'm doing and simply results in it taking longer to resolve the issue.