• Salah Barhoum
• Unfortunately for Barhoum, and well over a dozen others, they were the victims of shoddy detective work – their identities were broadcast publicly while they were accused of crimes they had nothing to do with and maligned by the national media as terrorists.
• Barhoum and others were not even being investigated by the authorities involved with the case.
• they had been outed by anonymous commenters on Reddit and 4Chan, who believed they were guilty based upon their clothes and appearance.
• What started as an atypical request by the FBI to gather evidence from the public quickly morphed into a much uglier digital witch hunt, one where the crowd’s fears, prejudices, and suspicions were given credence, while guilt and innocence were doled out based on shreds of circumstantial evidence.
• Although media outlets have been quick to lump all of the crowdsourced efforts together, there were two very different processes occurring which proved to have drastically different outcomes: crowdsourced intelligence gathering – a massive success — and crowdsourced crime solving – an abysmal failure.
• The FBI only ever asked for the first, but both happened simultaneously.  
• They each offer important glimpses into major issues surrounding the future of law enforcement, justice, and surveillance.
• Surveillance cameras have become ubiquitous, but they are fixed in place and have large blind spots – people, on the other hand, can provide deep context and multiple points of view of the same situation.
• Regardless of the FBI’s statements or wishes, they could never stop people from trying to conduct their own investigations.
• it’s a natural fit for Big Brother to look to tens of thousands of “Little Brothers” for their help in gathering intelligence.
• It is unlikely that this trend will ever reverse – human beings love to speculate and gossip.
• We’ve been empowered with communication and collaborative tools far more powerful than our own understanding of what they can do.
• The traditional media could play an enormously valuable role here by separating fact from fiction and providing verified, trustworthy information.  Instead, most outlets just repeated false claims made online – providing a megaphone to statements that never should have seen the light of day in the first place.
• Like with many crowdsourcing-related activities, individuals are good at providing information or reporting events, but it is the next stage – taking action, where things often fall apart.
• We now live in a world where information moves faster than we can assess its value and this is especially true in times of panic, disaster, and crisis.
• Ultimately, these are the things which separate an empowered crowd from a raging mob.

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• Crowdsourcing or witch hunt? Reddit and 4chan users attempt to solve Boston bombing case
• As the search continued Wednesday for clues as to the person or persons behind the Boston Marathon bombings, hypothetical suspects and crime scenarios began popping up via online crowdsourcing.
• After 24 hours passed without an arrest in the attack, the Federal Bureau of Investigations
• asked the public to submit photos, videos or anything suspicious that they may have seen or heard.
• Members of the link-sharing community Reddit.com launched a sub-section called "findbostonbombers" late Tuesday to collect clues.
• Reddit users targeted at least three men, based purely on speculation.
• critics warn of the temptation to turn data collecting into a witch hunt.
• "Labeling people as 'suspicious' based on the scantest evidence can do real damage
• Clinch doesn't discount sites like Reddit or 4chan, but believes taking a measured approach is a better way to make use of photos and videos spread on social media.

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• The investigation of Monday’s deadly twin bombings in Boston will rely to an extraordinary extent on crowdsourced surveillance, provided by Marathon spectators’ cellphone photos, Vine videos, and Instagram feeds.
• n an unusual move, the team of local, state and federal authorities investigating the crime openly called for spectators to provide any images or video they might have, all of which could potentially provide leads or evidence in the case.
• “We’d like to review any type of media,” to include “video [and] photographic evidence” of the attack that killed three and injured more than 150 people
• A crowdsourced investigation runs a high risk of becoming a witchhunt

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• How Reddit Became A Hub Of The Crowdsourced Boston Marathon Bombing Investigation

             

  Reddit's users launched a new subreddit, Findbostonbombers, where hundreds of amateur sleuths are crowdsourcing clues and suspects in the Boston terrorist attack.
• A new subreddit called Findbostonbombers had over 870 subscribers and 1,600 visitors on Tuesday, April 16 who were analyzing photos, parsing through video, and conducting third-party forensic analysis of the Boston Marathon attack independent of law enforcement.
• Commenters and contributors to the subreddit are posting a mixture of useful analysis, misguided amateurism, and racist or anti-gun activist invective.
• Other users are organizing collections of mass photo dumps in order to sort through any photographs of the attack found for possible clues.
• While amateur sleuthing is fun, motivations behind the crowdsourcing can be questioned.
• In addition, Reddit users are identifying potential suspects with potentially life-ruining consequences.
• There is always the risk of a crowdsourced Richard Jewell--that is, the risk of an innocent person being unfairly accused of a horrific terrorist attack by the subreddit in a meme that spreads across the Internet.
• In the meantime, even the FBI is embracing crowdsourcing of sorts: The law enforcement agency is requesting that anyone with photos or video of the Boston Marathon contact them.
• One of the biggest ramifications of the Reddit crowdsourcing effort, as I discussed earlier, was the incorrect identification of suspects.
• the Reddit community, they were still amateurs conducting a terrorism investigation in an extremely public forum.

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• Should the Internet hive-mind really be getting into the crime investigation business?
• Whereas Twitter and other kinds of social media are open firehoses of information, massive Internet forums like Reddit provide a community platform for dissecting information.
• Many Reddit users offered their homes to stranded runners and spectators after the Boston bombing.
• But when Reddit’s powers were turned to finding the suspects, the hive-mind’s work took on a bit of a nasty turn.
• Meanwhile, two innocent high school students were identified as people of interest and later wound up on the front page of the New York Post.
• Reddit users soon focused their attentions on a missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, who also turned out to not be involved.

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• To the Web’s volunteer detectives, they were the “Backpack Brothers”: two slender men in track suits spotted in photos of the Boston Marathon crowd.
• But the Internet had the wrong guys.
• They had no apparent connection to the bombings.
• Instead, the Backpack Brothers showed the dark side of an audacious effort to crowdsource a murder investigation.

• By day’s end, the two men had been barraged on Facebook. Sought by the media. Featured on the front page of the New York Post.

  And then cleared.

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