I heard somebody on the news recently say that the
solving of the Boston Marathon bombing may be one of the first
crowd-sourced crime solutions. Technology along with a huge
amount of skill answered the question of who did the crime very
quickly.
The huge amount of skill came from the law enforcement
community in that they immediately called for the public's help.
In the case of large public events, there are now
thousands of amateur as well as professional photographic
operations going on and so these events get photographic
coverage which was unimaginable years ago.
The federal and local police asked for any pictures and
then not only began looking at them on a large scale, but began
running them through software programs that are built to
recognize faces or look for images of interest.
One of the things they looked for in the pictures taken
at the moment of the blasts was for anybody who didn't seemed to
be responding in the way everybody else was. They were also
looking for objects just before and after the explosions to see
basically what disappeared and or who set it down.
I believe this sort of effort was what first discovered
the two brothers who appear to have been behind the bombings.
One of the things these brothers did last week was to
steal a car at gun point (carjack) a fellow near the MIT campus
shortly after the murder of the MIT campus policeman. The victim
left his cell phone behind in the hijacked car and police were
able to track the brothers as they drove the stolen car around.
The older brother died when the police caught up with the stolen
car and there was an old-fashioned gun battle between the
brothers and the police.
The older brother was shot and then accidentally run
over by his younger brother who escaped for a while.
Finally, the way they caught the younger brother was
pure modern technology along with a bit of luck.
As you probably heard, the surviving brother hid in a
man's boat which was stored in plastic tarps in the man's back
yard.
The home owner had gone outside for a cigarette and
noticed his plastic covers were torn loose from the boat. He
looked in and saw blood and a man covered in blood lying in the
boat.
The boat owner immediately ran back in and called 911 at
which time a police helicopter equipped with FLIR came
overhead. FLIR stands for Forward-Looking Infrared." This is
really neat stuff. It is not terribly new but is always being
improved.
It is a video camera that sees wavelengths of light that
are below the threshold of humanly-visible red light.
We all glow in the dark at infrared and millimeter-wave
frequencies and the near infrared wavelengths behave enough like
regular light that one can see a nice sharp picture or at least
a pretty good picture if that light is translated in to ordinary
light that humans can see.
The suspect was hiding under the plastic tarps but the
FLIR overhead had a good enough view through the tarp to see
what the suspect was doing and he was radioing back to the
ground such things as "He's sitting up, now."
All of this allowed the police to take him in to custody
without any further trouble.
Boston is over 2000 miles from where I live, but I think
we all can breathe a sigh of relief that this first phase is
over. As to why they did it, that's another topic for other
lists and we'll probably never understand even if the surviving
brother tells us anything.
Martin
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