Explosion at the Boston Marathon.

No. Just no.

People purposefully targeting civilians for maximum shockeffect = Terrorists.
People trying to avoid killing civilians while fighting for freedom/basic human rights = Freedom fighters.
That puts people who bombed Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki,..... (fill in the blanks) in the terrorists' camp.
It seems to me that analysing and understanding the circumstances is important.
 
The chances of some crazy person stalking this kid is greatly magnified by the fact that his face was plastered worldwide, don't you think?
Good point. I'd better tell my kids to delete their Facebook accounts. Plastering their faces worldwide is just asking for crazy stalkers.

It's a wonder newspapers are allowed to publish recognizable pictures of people (often with NAMES attached!) since doing so greatly magnifies the danger that crazy stalkers will stalk them.

I hope that cat in your avatar is already dead, because otherwise I don't know how you can justify greatly magnifying the danger to which it is exposed.
 
Good point. I'd better tell my kids to delete their Facebook accounts. Plastering their faces worldwide is just asking for crazy stalkers.

It's a wonder newspapers are allowed to publish recognizable pictures of people (often with NAMES attached!) since doing so greatly magnifies the danger that crazy stalkers will stalk them.

I hope that cat in your avatar is already dead, because otherwise I don't know how you can justify greatly magnifying the danger to which it is exposed.

How many of your kids were blamed by major internet discussion forums and newspapers for committing a terrorist act that killed three people, including an 8 year old child, and wounding nearly 200 more?

If the answer is "zero", I suggest that perhaps your comparison is ever so slightly invalid.
 
I feel quite comfortable labeling him "terrorist". I doubt that any other conclusion will be reached.
How's that? There's no evidence whatsoever at this point that these dudes were politically motivated.

Can we even talk about terrorism at all when people don't claim responsibility for an attack? Especially when it's one isolated event.
 
How many of your kids were blamed by major internet discussion forums and newspapers for committing a terrorist act that killed three people, including an 8 year old child, and wounding nearly 200 more?

If the answer is "zero", I suggest that perhaps your comparison is ever so slightly invalid.
Look, people are posting pictures of themselves, pointing out the uncanny resemblance they have to Suspect #2. The idea that there is a credible threat to people who had their pictures taken with a backpack at the Boston Marathon is ludicrous, even if they did get some early play with no names attached. This guy's fifteen minutes of fame is over, it's time to move on.
 
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Good point. I'd better tell my kids to delete their Facebook accounts. Plastering their faces worldwide is just asking for crazy stalkers.

It's a wonder newspapers are allowed to publish recognizable pictures of people (often with NAMES attached!) since doing so greatly magnifies the danger that crazy stalkers will stalk them.

I hope that cat in your avatar is already dead, because otherwise I don't know how you can justify greatly magnifying the danger to which it is exposed.

I've already asked you, but you may have missed it, again - during smug declarations of how level-headed you are and everyone else is.

Can you please describe for us how you personally dealt with this same type of situation? I'm really interested in how you dealt with it. You seem to be speaking from experience.


Thanks.
 
Look, people are posting pictures of themselves, pointing out the uncanny resemblance they have to Suspect #2. The idea that there is a credible threat to people who had their pictures taken with a backpack at the Boston Marathon is ludicrous, even if they did get some early play with no names attached. This guy's fifteen minutes of fame is over, it's time to move on.

Tell that to Sammay Blackwell. I'm sure she was feeling pretty safe, a thousand miles away from Florida.
 
As I understand matters; If you do not Mirandize an arrestee, you cannot use anything he says subsequently to convict him.

It seems to be very unlikely that they need anything he says to get a conviction at this time.

So as long as they exclude anything he says from trial, his rights are not at all violated!
 
Yes, I'm not seeing that anything positive was achieved by the internet sleuths. It's not good enough to say, as some have, that errors can be corrected later. A lot of that stuff, especially the naming of names but also the singling out of "suspicious looking" people in the crowd, should never have been posted in the first place. *None* of the people singled out in the 4Chan photos as looking or behaving suspiciously had anything to do with bombing.

Some or all of these articles have been posted before, but bear reposting in one place for future reference:

All the Mistakenly Identified ‘Suspects’ in the Boston Bombing Investigation

It Wasn't Sunil Tripathi: The Anatomy of a Misinformation Disaster

The Internet's shameful false ID

ETA: Salah Eddin Barhoum, Boston Teen Stunned To Be Portrayed As Bombing Suspect

This is an excellent post; it deserves to be bumped.

Bump
 
There was never any intention of the public identifying the suspects using pictures. There was a request to the public to submit any and every photo, video, etc that they possibly had so that the FBI could use that data in their investigation to try to identify possible suspects.

They never asked the public to figure out who it was for them, but of course people are going to want to try to figure things out themselves.

Once again, this point needs to be emphasized, as the self-declared Internet sleuths here continue to pat themselves on the back.
 
You are correct. The same thing happened in 2007 when Steve Fossett's plane disappeared. Not only was crowd sourcing useless, it actually hindered the search because every amateur sleuth who thought they saw the plane took time away from legitimate leads.

Yup.

And this was exactly the concern that I, and many others here, brought up way back at the beginning of this fiasco.
 

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