The first major social media criminal/terrorist investigation in history

[cheguevara]

Serious question. What are the implications of employing the millions of internet users as fellow investigators. Don't you think its a terrible road the FBI and others are taking? Or is it possible, all this is just FBI smokescreens to confuse the terrorists?(doubt it, it would be giving FBI too much credit)

IMO I prefer the old fashioned way of investigating, leaving it ALL to the professionals. But what do I know in this pathetic social media era :lmao

I mean seriously, as of this minute there are thousands if not milliions of internet losers "investigating", "theorizing" and "deducing" on this criminal case :lol

and before you say "that's all harmless in the end". Is it? already some poor fools reputations have been destroyed, and this conversation of the race/etc of the "suspects" is already on another level, when nobody has been even charged of a crime yet.

what's next? an internet lottery of who can pilot the next drone attack? :lol

[Drachen]

I don't think that the FBI wants the internet to investigate. They just want to use the internet for its data. Them releasing the images is no different than this:
http://www.circlekb.com/merchant2/graphics/00000002/WP-32med.jpg

[cheguevara]

I don't think that the FBI wants the internet to investigate. They just want to use the internet for its data. Them releasing the images is no different than this:
http://www.circlekb.com/merchant2/graphics/00000002/WP-32med.jpg

I believe those posters were posted after people were charged of a crime or for fugitives. Also the FBI has publicly requested "any information" and is willingly accepting any "theories, images, video" on the matter. Not to mention mainstream media is encouraging this type of shit.

IMO they are depending way too much on social media, or is it the other way around?

[Drachen]

those posters were posted for suspects. You can go view the FBI's top ten most wanted right now, etc. The release of the photos is nothing new. As to the rest, as I said, they wanted to use the internet for its data (data being the pics and videos). Just because the internet investigated, doesn't mean that the FBI wants the internet to investigate.

[DarrinS]

Not really new

[spursncowboys]

I remember myspace had a sa gang page. all these retards were going on there posting pictures of their guns, drugs. Even more helpful they were talking about friends/foes with names. If someone wanted to map out the gangs of sa which now are being manipulated by the prison gangs, they could have done so from that website alone. Now it's only intel. Nothing is a guaranteed fact of what they say but def helpful

[spursncowboys]

With the FBI's terrible record and increased control of other agencies since BHO, good for them for using all tools at their disposal!

[cheguevara]

With the FBI's terrible record and increased control of other agencies since BHO, good for them for using all tools at their disposal!

Let's take a look. This data "crunching" that needs to happen to get data from social media in a criminal investigation will not be performed by people. It is simply too much data and not realistic.

What investigation agencies are doing is developing software that will automatically "crunch" the data for you. There are major problems with this. One example of this are the warnings towards 911. One possibility of what happened there is investigators/agents let the "software" do the job and maybe got too lazy to manually look at data signs. What happened? The software missed all the 911 warnings.

Could the same thing happen in a criminal investigation like the Boston one? sure. Look up on stovepiping.

[ElNono]

With the FBI's terrible record and increased control of other agencies since BHO, good for them for using all tools at their disposal!

Out of curiosity, what's their terrible record?