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An infographic exploring what we think we know about Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:53:01 +0000

New from Chartgirl: "Tamerlan Tsarnaev: What We Think We Know About Who Knew What and When."

Boston troopers recount aerial spotting of bombing suspect in boat

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 01:45:58 +0000

“We were there like that. We do this day in, day out. This is what we do. We went over and when I put that [infrared camera] on the boat, I was actually shocked that not only did I see there was a heat source, but I got a perfect human silhouette. That doesn’t happen that much.” Read more at the Boston Globe.

Student wrongly linked to Boston bombings (by Reddit users) found dead

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 01:35:10 +0000

The body of 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi was "pulled from the water off India Point Park in Rhode Island," reports USA Today. Sunil was the student mistakenly linked to the Boston bombings by users on Reddit. "It was not immediately clear when Tripathi, who was last seen March 15, died," nor has a cause of death been determined.

In defense of Reddit (with regard to the Boston bombing, and crowdsourced sleuthing)

Xeni Jardin — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 01:16:34 +0000

"Law enforcement agencies regularly turn to sites like Websleuths.com to help crack cold cases. Maybe there’s hope for Reddit," writes Tim Murphy in a piece at Mother Jones.

Redditors have, for years, worked to use the resources of crowds as a force for good. There's an entire subreddit dedicated to Redditors ordering pizzas for families and raising money for surgeries. But Boston represents a reality check. Can Reddit harness its greatest asset—the tireless brainstorming of millions—while reining in the speculative impulse that makes the site tick? And even if Reddit could solve crimes, would it be worth it?

A profile of the person behind the Boston Police Twitter account

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:17:27 +0000

HuffPo profiles Cheryl Fiandaca, the bureau chief of public information for the Boston police department, a former attorney and television journalist. The @Boston_Police's "CAPTURED!" tweet was retweeted about 143,000 times.

Putin: US and Russia security services should "combine efforts" in wake of Boston bombing

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:21:44 +0000

In a move absolutely no one expected because things like this never happen after high-profile incidents of mass violence, Russian President Vladimir Putin today "urged closer cooperation between other countries' security services after the Boston Marathon bombings," reports CNN, Said Putin, "If we combine our efforts, we will not suffer blows like that." [CNN.com]

Surowiecki: The right way to crowdsource a manhunt

Xeni Jardin — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 04:22:07 +0000

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker:

After Reddit’s attempt to find the Boston Marathon bombers turned into a major failure (for which Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin publicly apologized Monday), the over-all conclusion seems to be that the whole experiment was misguided from the start, and that the Redditors’ inability to identify the Tsarnaev brothers demonstrates the futility of using an online crowd of amateur sleuths to help with a criminal investigation. Or, as the Times’s Nick Bilton put it, “It looks as if the theory of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ doesn’t apply to terrorist manhunts.” That proposition may be true. But Reddit’s failure isn’t evidence for it.

Read the rest: "Reddit and the Marathon Bombers: The Wise Way to Crowdsource a Manhunt" [newyorker.com]

Modern Manhunt: FBI, Hive Mind, Boston Bombers

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:25:20 +0000

At Wired News' Danger Room, Spencer Ackerman's feature on the technology and crowdsourcing dynamics that allowed law enforcement to identify the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing so rapidly. "Hiding in plain sight was an ocean of data, from torrents of photography to cell-tower information to locals’ memories, waiting to be exploited." [Wired.com]

Why was the suspected Boston Bomber charged with using a "weapon of mass destruction"?

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:55:07 +0000

Writes Spencer Ackerman at Wired's Danger Room: A “weapon of mass destruction” is "a very broad category under federal law. Grenades, mines, missiles and rockets all apply. So do homemade bombs of the sort Tsarnaev allegedly constructed."

Transcript of Boston Bombing suspect's bedside hearing (yes, he was Mirandized)

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:30:38 +0000

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, has been charged in a criminal complaint over the bombing of the Boston Marathon. He appeared before a federal magistrate who came to his bedside at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He nodded affirmatively in response to questions, but spoke only one word: "no," after the magistrate asked him if he could afford a lawyer. The New York Times has the transcript. After much controversy, it's good to see that he was read his Miranda Rights. [NYTimes.com] And here's the FBI affidavit. [chicagotribune.com]

Boston Marathon bombing: first-person stories, in audio

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:56:38 +0000

The New York Times has a beautiful interactive feature with audio narratives from "some of the people seen near the finish line." What is most striking about the interactive design: as you scroll down the page to listen to each story, you see where each person was in the still image from NBC's broadcast of the race. Powerful. Here's how the Times put it together.

FBI: we didn't track elder bombing suspect

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:50:03 +0000

Responding to claims from the mother of the two Boston bombing suspects, the FBI said today it had not been tracking her oldest son, nor had the bureau spoken with him last week after the deadly marathon bombing. The only communication the FBI claims to have ever had with Tamerlan Tsarnaev "was an interview agents conducted with him in 2011 at the urging of a foreign government, since identified as Russia." [CNN.com]

Buzzfeed fingers bombing suspect in triple homicide based on Internet comments

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:06:20 +0000

Over at Buzzfeed, Rosie Gray seems pretty sure deceased bombing suspect Tamarlan Tsarnaev may well be responsible for a triple homicide. Based on Instagram comments and tweets. Seems legit.

No, Nike did not just release "Boston Massacre" t-shirts to mock Marathon bombing

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:31:25 +0000

Eric Stangel, a producer with the long-running late-night comedy show Late Show with David Letterman was in a Nike Outlet store this weekend and spotted a shirt with a message that seemed bizarre and inappropriate, after last week's bombings.

The phrase “Boston Massacre” has long referred to a 1770 attack led by British soldiers against civilians, and in this shirt, was appropriated for the Yankees/Red Sox baseball team rivalry.

Stangel spoke to a store employee, and said he believed the shirts shouldn’t be sold so soon after the recent bombing attack.

“We’ve been taking them down, but somehow they keep ending up back on the rack,” the employee is said to have replied.

Prediction: success from Boston surveillance in bombing manhunt will lead to more spying everywhere

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 01:13:30 +0000

"The images captured in Boston are validation of a three-year project in St. Louis to link 150 surveillance cameras into a single security system throughout the city’s central corridor, from the riverfront to Forest Park," reports Doug Moore at stltoday.com. This despite a statement by Boston's police chief that facial recognition technology system did not help find the suspects. How much you wanna bet the "surveillance imaging solved this crime" argument will lead to more forceful pushes for expanded surveillance imaging in any number of other American cities? (HT: @kgosztola)

The Brothers Tsarnaev

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:55:12 +0000

"The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men."—David Remnick in The New Yorker on the Boston bombing suspects.

What legal rights should Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have?

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:47:20 +0000

Modified version of image from Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's account on Russian social network vk.com.

Below, an array of perspectives on what legal rights the 19-year-old American citizen suspected of co-executing the Boston Marathon bombings has, and whether law enforcement is obliged to honor those rights under the circumstances:

• "If captured, I hope [the] Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as [an] enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes. If the Boston suspect has ties to overseas terror organizations he could be treasure trove of information. The last thing we may want to do is read Boston suspect Miranda Rights telling him to 'remain silent.'"—Republican senator Lindsay Graham, on Twitter.

• "There's no way an American citizen committing a domestic crime in the city of Boston could be tried as an enemy combatant. It could never happen. And that shows absolute ignorance of the law."—Alan Dershowitz, prominent defense attorney and Harvard law professor, speaking on CNN.

• "The next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will."—Emily Bazelon, Slate.com, on citizen and suspect Tsarnaev not being read his Miranda rights before interrogration.

— "Not surprising that Carmen Ortiz, who refuses to read Tsarnaev his rights, is same DA who pursued aggressive tactics against Aaron Swartz."—Heidi Moore, Guardian.

• "Needless to say, Tsarnaev is probably the single most hated figure in America now. As a result, as Bazelon noted, not many people will care what is done to him, just like few people care what happens to the accused terrorists at Guantanamo, or Bagram, or in Yemen and Pakistan. But that's always how rights are abridged: by targeting the most marginalized group or most hated individual in the first instance, based on the expectation that nobody will object because of how marginalized or hated they are. Once those rights violations are acquiesced to in the first instance, then they become institutionalized forever, and there is no basis for objecting once they are applied to others, as they inevitably will be."—Glenn Greenwald, in the Guardian.

• "The capture of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect raises a host of freighted legal issues for a society still feeling the shadow of Sept. 11, including whether he should be read a Miranda warning, how he should be charged, where he might be tried and whether the bombings on Boylston Street last Monday were a crime or an act of war."—Ethan Bronner, Charlie Savage, and William K. Rashbaum in the New York Times.

• Law enforcement is reportedly questioning him today, despite his compromised, critical physical condition. He cannot talk, but he "has been responding sporadically in writing to questions."

Covering the Coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:46:44 +0000

In infographic form, Hilary "Chartgirl" Sargent breaks down the highs and lows of the media coverage of this week's attacks in Boston.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev remembered by Twitter friends as "cool bro, average dude" with whom to "smoke blunts"

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:10:05 +0000

Laura Griffin collected some tweets from apparent real-world friends of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev. The post-bombing tweets "from four people who know him, and old conversations they had with him" suggest that @J_tsar was a real Twitter account belonging to the 19-year-old suspect.

Background: Chechnya

Xeni Jardin — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:03:45 +0000

A memorial for victims of armed conflict in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Photo: C.J. Chivers, 2008.

C.J. Chivers, New York Times reporter and author of THE GUN, a social history of the AK-47, co-wrote this "primer on the land from which the Tsarnaev family hailed."

As the NYT piece notes, current Chechen leader Ramzan A. Kadyrov wrote on Instagram (!) that any ties between the Boston bombing suspects and Chechnya were mistaken: “The roots of this evil are to be found in America.”

How technology factored into the Boston bombing investigation

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:53:49 +0000

If you read one article on the role science and technology played in the Boston Marathon bombing investigation, make it this one in today's edition of The Washington Post:

Quickly, the authorities secured a warehouse in Boston’s Seaport district and filled the sprawling space: On half of the vast floor, hundreds of pieces of bloody clothes were laid out to dry so they could be examined for forensic clues or flown to FBI labs at Quantico in Prince William County for testing. In the other half of the room, more than a dozen investigators sifted through hundreds of hours of video, looking for people “doing things that are different from what everybody else is doing,” Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said in an interview Saturday.
The work was painstaking and mind-numbing: One agent watched the same segment of video 400 times. The goal was to construct a timeline of images, following possible suspects as they moved along the sidewalks, building a narrative out of a random jumble of pictures from thousands of different phones and cameras.

Bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev worked out, slept, partied after Boston Marathon attack

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:48:00 +0000

According to his friends, University of Massachusetts sophomore Dzhokhar Tsarnaev worked out, slept in his dowm room, and hung out with fellow students on the same day of the attack on the Boston Marathon, after the bombs went off. One student quoted in the Boston Globe who did not want to be identified said she saw Tsarnaev at a party on Wednesday night attended by some of his soccer team friends.

“He was just relaxed,” she said.

Depending on which acquaintance's quote you read, the 19-year-old either sounds normal or creepy:

Emily DeInnocentis, 23, said Tsarnaev stood out to her because of some odd behavior, like spreading messy string cheese all over her couch, and picking up her cat and carrying it upstairs for no reason.
“We just didn’t invite him over after that. How many people just pick up your cat and go upstairs?” she said.

More: "Bombing suspect attended UMass Dartmouth, prompting school closure; college friend shocked by charge he is Boston Marathon bomber." [The Boston Globe]

How crowdsourcing sleuths on Reddit searching for Boston bomber got the wrong guy

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:33:30 +0000

A subreddit titled "Find Boston Bombers" figured out that Sunil Tripathi, 22, was responsible for the deadly attack. Only he wasn't. This time, Reddit got it very wrong.

Massachusetts police: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was alive during shootout, until his brother drove over him

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:29:44 +0000

Boston Globe: "Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was alive and struggling with Watertown police early Friday morning, when his younger brother and alleged coconspirator drove over him in a stolen SUV, dragging him on the pavement and apparently inflicting the fatal injuries that killed him."

Thermal video and photos of Boston bombing suspect, hiding in boat

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:25:21 +0000

Massachusetts State Police (MSP) released this video shot from their airwing helicopter hovering over "The Slipaway II," the boat where 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second Boston Marathon bombing suspect, was captured and arrested last Friday night. Below, photos taken from the State Police Air Wing during the Watertown manhunt, released through the MSP Twitter account.

The photos were captured with FLIR, "a forward-looking infrared device used to pick up a person's heat signature, combined with night vision technology."

Why armed lockdown in Boston after the Marathon Bombings was a bad idea

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:02:51 +0000

"A large percent of the reaction in Boston has been security theater," writes Popehat. "'Four victims brutally killed' goes by other names in other cities. In Detroit, for example, they call it 'Tuesday.'...and Detroit does not shut down every time there are a few murders. 'But Clark,' I hear you say, 'this is different. This was a terrorist attack.'

Report: Russia warned FBI in 2011 about Boston bombing suspect Tsarnaev

Xeni Jardin — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:30:30 +0000

The Boston Globe is among many media outlets to report this weekend that Russia was surveilling suspected bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011, and "warned the FBI of the alleged bomber’s radical shift" towards "suspicious activities." The FBI acknowledged Friday that it has investigated him in 2011, after that prompt, but "did not find any terrorism activity" in the behavior they observed online and in person, when they interrogated him at his home. The 26 year old was killed early Friday morning during a firefight with police in Watertown, MA. Bonus: The name of the boat his brother Dzhokhar was found hiding in, on Friday? "The Slipaway II."

MIT student raises funds for young Boston bomb victim's family

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:58:09 +0000

Catherine sez,

On Monday, the Boston Marathon was bombed. On Monday night I was feeling blessed and thankful to not know anyone directly affected by the bombs. But on Tuesday morning I woke up to an email from my colleague Chris Peterson at the MIT Center for Civic Media. Chris's family are friends with the family who lost their son Martin in the attack. He sent us photos of he and his brothers playing with their children and the reality was all too close. It is devastating. This family will have a long road of healing in front of them that most of us cannot even begin to imagine.
My friends at MIT and I have spent the past couple of days helping Chris build a site to raise money for the Richard family. We are coordinating with St Marks Area Main Street, a non-profit community organization based in Dorchester, MA, where the family lives. The site is made with the support of the family and their spokesperson. 100% of funds raised goes to the family. Please give what you can. It's the very least we can do to come together in solidarity with these innocent people and help them to rebuild their lives in the wake of senseless violence. In the photo on the site Martin is holding a sign he made in school that says "Peace". Let us spread that peace.

The Richard Family Fund (Thanks, Catherine)

Don't let the Boston Marathon bombing terrorize you, or the bombers win

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:05:00 +0000

Bruce Schneier's terrific Atlantic essay on the Boston Marathon bombings is a must-read. As he points out, the terrorists win only if we let this sort of thing scare us. By being empathic toward the victims and indomitable and fearless toward the criminals, we can create a climate where politicians can get away with telling us the truth -- there's no such thing as perfect security -- instead of politically expedient lies that lead to an out-of-control security state that takes away our freedoms, diverts our education, unemployment and health money to security theater, and leaves us no safer.

How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months. Terrorism isn't primarily a crime against people or property. It's a crime against our minds, using the deaths of innocents and destruction of property as accomplices. When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we're indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed.
Don't glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a "war on terror." Wars involve two legitimate sides. There's only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we're scared.
Empathize, but refuse to be terrorized. Instead, be indomitable -- and support leaders who are as well. That's how to defeat terrorists.

The Boston Marathon Bombing: Keep Calm and Carry On

Get information on loved ones in Boston with Google's emergency Person Finder

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:56:31 +0000

If you're looking for loved ones in Boston and can't get through to them, try Google's Person Finder, a service designed to help produce good information in the wake of disasters (it's also one of Google's free/open source software projects, with code here for you to examine and/or improve). There's a good Reddit thread on it here.

Person Finder: Boston Marathon Explosions