Gaby Gomez's List: DGL Citizenship

• The New York Post made several bold blunders, first reporting that 12 people had been killed in the explosions and then published a front-page photograph Thursday of two innocent students labeled "bag men" and claimed that investigators had a Saudi Arabian national suspect "under guard at an undisclosed Boston hospital." 
•  Rupert Murdoch himself took to Twitter in defense, claiming the "bag men" photo had been distributed by the FBI, but the move was quickly labeled by citizen journalist Seth Mnookin, professor of journalism at MIT, "a totally dishonest excuse." 
• Mnookin was one of many that tweeted what was later labeled as misinformation about suspects in custody.
• When asked in an interview with NPR about the ethics of live-tweeting, Mnookin said, "A thing I tried to do was as often as possible remind people that what they were getting from me was a sort of instantaneous, unedited snapshot of what was going on. And I tried to remind them that even if I was reporting something as being said to me by a police officer, that didn't necessarily mean that it was going to end up being true, as was the case when they thought that they had a second suspect in custody and it turned out they hadn't."
• , viable journalists are sacrificing their assumed credibility to instead beat one another—and civilians—to the punch.
•  “This defensive posture is counterproductive for both sides. Rather than pointing out flaws in order to uphold one model over the other, we should appreciate the interplay between them with a sense of symbiotic dependence that ultimately produces a more participatory, accurate and compelling news cycle.” 
• In the end, it was new technology that tracked down the marathon bombers as the FBI pored over 2,000 crowd-sourced digital images and closed-circuit video footage, as well as a reported ID from victim Jeff Bauman,

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• Within seconds of the first blast, social media filled with updates, photos, and videos from the Boston marathon.
• Assistant professor of culture and communication at Drexel University, Devon Powers, says, “I think what you saw was the development of almost a social media vigilante. That is, average citizens who felt it was their duty to pursue suspects and do all that they could to sort of help the police and help the FBI.”
• There were a lot of clues, tips and speculation on various sites that led to at least three people being misidentified as the bombers.

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• The Boston Marathon bombings showcased Twitter as a source for real-time citizen engagement between authorities and the public.
• When the Boston police Twitter handle, @Boston_Police, announced, “CAPTURED!!! The Hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And Justice has won. Suspect in custody,” the city of Boston and the watching world took a deep sigh of relief after following the 48-hour search for bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev online in real time.
• he was also responsible for posting the chilling news that the bombs had gone off near the finish line of the marathon just days earlier.
• For a police department in pursuit of a dangerous criminal, Twitter has become a means to spread information, and often diffuse misinformation.
• “[Chief Dan Linskey] was thinking that [social media] is an important component to responding in a crisis. We immediately started sending out real-time tweets of what was going on at the scene and gave people instructions on what to do and where to go.
• Social media is becoming an active force to instantly engage and instruct the public in times of crisis.
• . In the wake of the bombings, the story unfolded through the real-time news cycle by citizens and the media alike.

• Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook showed a constant flow of information, real or perceived, related to the manhunt for the remaining suspect.

   
• CNN fell victim to rogue reporting in the aftermath, claiming that the suspects had been arrested, when they were still on the loose.
• The New York Post erroneously posted photographs of people they claimed were suspects, when the FBI claimed otherwise.
• The Post also falsely stated that 12 people had died in the aftermath, when the number was actually five.
• Events like this magnify how useful, but sometimes dangerous due to misinformation, the social media culture has become.
• Social media is changing how citizens communicate, interact and mobilize—reinventing the everyday work of government and public service management.

• The era of the digital citizen is now a force to be reckoned with, and that is only going to continue to grow.

   

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• , journalists and spectators alike took to social media and online tools to report the scene.

    
• Twitter was active worldwide yesterday, with the #BostonMarathon hashtag trending around the globe.
• The Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal and the New York Times all suspended their websites' paywalls to allow more accurate information to be spread, but that didn't prevent a dose of bad Twitter intel.
• "What’s worse than the misinformation...was the short form instant punditry. Blowhards didn’t wait to weigh in with theories and blame and predictions," Mat Honan wrote in this Wired piece
• "Whether it’s a rush to assign blame, a speculation regarding motive, or an I-told-you-so matters little. That kind of stuff can play badly enough in a next day op-ed, but in an unedited 140-character tweet issued shortly after some terrible thing has just gone down, it’s pure poison."
• A Boston Marathon volunteer hosted a Reddit AMA on site. Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, who ran the marathon, live-tweeted events from the scene, and YouTube set up a dedicated channel compiling all videos related to the events, including President Obama's press statement.
• A Vine video of the explosions has gone viral.

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• This last piece provides the option of letting you wire into the positive and negative diodes of the speaker on the cell phone board.
• We found that the speaker phone has more power going to it and was more commonly used. When the phone is called, it activates the ringer, which makes the connection between those two components and kicks off the signal to detonate the explosive.
• In shutting down cell service, you block the ability to create that circuit and ignite that fuse. In the military we would use jamming devices on our trucks, sometimes seven or eight of them on a single vehicle.
• If law enforcement in Boston did shut down the service it could have been because they found other, undetonated IEDs that were equipped with cell phones.

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• . Faced with this deluge of images, law enforcement officials combined facial recognition technologies, digital enhancements and old-fashioned detective work to sift for clues.

• “Technology itself has improved significantly so that the false acceptance is less than 0.1 percent in an ideal situation,” he said. “Facial recognition is as good as a fingerprint.”

   
• Investigators used a similar method in 2010 to capture assassins of a prominent Hamas leader in Dubai and make progress in the probe of a Times Square bombing attempt.

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