Jackie Davidson's List: 3.6 Digital Literacy

• Investigators have a suspect — a Saudi Arabian national — in the horrific Boston Marathon bombings, The Post has learned.
• It was not immediately clear why the man was hospitalized and whether he was injured in the attack or in his apprehension.
• Police also confirmed that there was a third explosion, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. It was not immediately clear how much damage was done or whether it was related to the bombings at the marathon finish line.

1 more annotation...

• However, though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The reddit staff and the millions of people on reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened. We have apologized privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Tripathi, as have various users and moderators. We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure. We hope that this painful event will be channeled into something positive and the increased awareness will lead to Sunil's quick and safe return home. We encourage everyone to join and show your support to the Tripathi family and their search.

• CNN had company: the Associated Press, Fox and the Boston Herald, among others, also went with the rapidly discredited story.

  Once again, four months after the error-riddled reporting on the massacre at Sandy Hill Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., there was a major media malfunction in the coverage of a mega-story.

  To be sure, this was hardly an across-the-board meltdown. Many news outlets showed admirable restraint. As the electrifying but bogus reports circulated, such major news organizations as NBC, CBS and Reuters reported steadfastly that there had been no arrest.

• After identifying two suspects believed to be responsible for Monday's bombings at the marathon, authorities killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, overnight in a confrontation. Residents of Boston woke up Friday to a storm of media coverage recapping the night's events and following the police hunt for the remaining suspect, Tsarnaev's brother, 19-year-old Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev.
• Authorities asked the media to stop reporting on police movements in order to prevent the suspect from obtaining information about the in-progress manhunt;
• the Federal Aviation Administration prevented news helicopters from stopping over the area where the suspect was potentially hiding. Feeds on two websites playing police scanner audio stopped working midday, as much of the chatter overheard there was reported all morning on Twitter.

1 more annotation...

• Update 2:58 p.m.: CNN has now completely walked back their original report that an arrest has been made. (The AP and Fox News, however, appear to be sticking to their stories for the moment.) Shortly after the Boston Police Department came out with a rather definitive statement:

• Sources say investigators are trying to identify a person described as a young white man who is standing in the crowd near the scene of the second bombing just before the device exploded, reported CBS News correspondent Bob Orr. A surveillance camera at a nearby Lord and Taylor department store captured images of the man who was carrying a backpack and talking on a cell phone.

    

    

  The man was wearing a black jacket, a grey hooded sweatshirt and a white or off-white baseball cap backwards. He is 6 feet or 6-feet-2-inches tall with a medium build.

     

    

  Investigators say the man, who seemed to be alone, put the backpack on the ground. Then, when the first explosion occurred at the finish line about 100 yards down Boylston Street, he took off. Just a few seconds later, the second bomb exploded near where the man had been standing.

• The Huffington Post slipped up -- grappling, like many other outlets, with the sheer volume of information that was posted online and shared through social media within seconds. But cable news seemed to be the most error-prone sector, to the point that cable reporting became a story in its own right.

• CNN and other outlets found themselves with egg on their face when they reported that an arrest had been made in the Boston bombings and were then forced to walk that news back.

    

  Though it was not alone, CNN took the brunt of the blame for its faulty reporting. It was the first and most prominent outlet to tout its scoop.

• "CNN had three credible sources on both local and federal levels. Based on this information we reported our findings. As soon as our sources came to us with new information we adjusted our reporting."

       

• He offered one word of advice on social media.

• "You need to develop trusted sources on Facebook and Twitter because you don't want to believe something that someone is sitting in their basement making up," he said.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation is asking people with visual images, video, and/or details to e-mail them at boston@ic.fbi.gov. They said that no piece of information or detail is too small.

   

    <!--startclickprintexclude-->  <!--endclickprintexclude-->  

• Terrorism experts said that social media helped people in Boston and beyond determine their next steps after hearing about the explosions.

  "Authorities have recognized that one the first places people go in events like this is to social media, to see what the crowd is saying about what to do next," said Bill Braniff, Executive Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Response to Terrorism. "And today authorities went to Twitter and directed them to traditional media environments where authorities can present a clear calm picture of what to do next."
• "We know from crisis communication research that people typically search for corroborating information before they take a corrective action—their TV tells them there's a tornado brewing and they talk to relatives and neighbors. And now they look at Twitter."
• "I was first notified to the event by my daughter, who was on Twitter, and that was before it came out on CNN," said Anthony C. Roman, president of a security consulting firm in New York called Roman and Associates.

1 more annotation...

• Just hours after the Boston Marathon bombings Monday (April 15), scammers were already using the tragedy to fuel their malware campaigns, according to a study by Romanian anti-virus firm Bitdefender.
• The use of news events to spread malware is nothing new for scammers.
• With subject headers such as "Aftermath to Explosion at Boston Marathon" and "Boston Explosion Caught on Video," these emails aim to ensnare those looking for more information about the attacks.

1 more annotation...

• The dramatic finale came less than an hour after the news conference was over. A resident of Watertown came out of his house and noticed blood on his boat and that the tarp covering it was ripped. He lifted the tarp and saw a bloody form. He called police, who raced to the scene and exchanged gunfire with Tsarnaev, said Davis, the Boston commissioner

• The devices—which are in addition to the two that exploded near the finish line of the marathon—were discovered over the course of a frantic inspection of suspicious packages, many of them abandoned as pedestrians, runners, and others scrambled away from crowded public streets. Each had been rendered inoperative or was in the process of being rendered inoperative, the officials said.

   

  But the officials also sounded a note of caution, saying they are moving quickly and each device they believe is a bomb hasn't been fully dissected or analyzed.

   

   

  Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis could not confirm whether any additional devices were found, but he said that officials were still investigating.
• The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that officials doubt the devices found were indeed bombs. 

• Boston Police, who are using Twitter to post updates of the investigation via @Boston_Police, say two people have been killed and at least 22 injured.

   

  Here are some of the first and most dramatic photos shared on social media. Warning: Some images and language are graphic.

• here's no way around it: As well-intentioned as Reddit's power sleuthers may have been in their desperate, amateur efforts last week to track down the Boston Marathon bombers, they failed.
• It seemed like a good idea at the time: get people who spend the majority of their time on the Internet to help with the most crowdsourced terror investigation in American history. But /r/findbostonbombers — the page that vanished from the user-powered site this weekend almost as suddenly as Reddit became a household name when the FBI released suspect photos in the climax-to-the-climax-to-the-climax of last week's events in Boston — was "a disaster," says Reddit user