Explosion at the Boston Marathon.

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Glenn Beck doesn't want to let the Saudi dude go.

And he's got members of congress including the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee following his lead.

Sounds like much ado about nothing to me. He also accuses Janet Napolitano of "racism" because someone at Homeland Security briefly put him on a watch list and then removed him from the list once he had been cleared of wrongdoing. But wait, he's the one who refuses to let this go. He's all over the place. And then he suggests that the fact that they tried to delete this incorrect information is some kind of cover-up.
 
NoahFence said:
HA HA HA!!!

I do nothing BUT think for myself. That process includes getting all the facts, kiddo. Not making them up in your head.
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One thing I've learned is that we never have all the facts.
It is beneficial, therefore, to be able to reach tentative conclusions, and to discuss how much confidence we have in those conclusions, with some subset of facts, some of which may even later prove to be incorrect.

I reported a few days ago that the authorities were floating the theory that the M.I.T. guard had been shot because the brothers only had one gun, and wanted to acquire another.

Someone else posted a link (I believe it was to the New York Times) which I did not click because the person posting the link said it contained an account of the small arsenal which was recovered at the scene of the first shootout. Trusting the New York Times, and the person who summarized the article's content, I simply said that maybe the correct conclusion is that they wanted to acquire ANOTHER gun rather than a second gun as reported.

I'm still not confident I know how many guns they had when they shot the guard (except that it was at least one). Someone else has posted that the account of the "small arsenal" was just the one gun, and a cluster of IEDs. There is one report that Suspect #2 had a rifle when he was arrested, and another report that he was unarmed.

"Thinking for yourself" involves evaluating new facts in light of established facts, realizing that this may sometimes mean that the "established" facts need to be discarded. I still think the wound to Suspect #2's throat was self-inflicted shortly after he was surrounded in the boat. That's inconsistent with the "fact" that he was unarmed at the time of the arrest, and not terribly consistent with the "fact" that he was armed only with a rifle. My conclusion is thus tentative. In fact, all of my conclusions are tentative to one degree or another, simply because I realize I'll never have perfect information.

It's true these conclusions are "made up in my head", to use your term. To me, that's the thinking part. I have no idea what passes for thinking with you.
 
phiwum said:
No matter. As far as I understand it now, they've recovered only one handgun, not the two handguns, one BB pistol and one rifle previously reported.
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If that's the case, then my conclusion that his throat wound was self-inflicted is incorrect, as is the conclusion of the cadre of officers who fired on the boat because they considered themselves under fire.

I've seen the Boston police chief on TV after the arrest, saying that gunfire came from the boat, but it was impossible to tell what it was aimed at. To me, that seemed consistent with an attempted suicide when escape was impossible, and capture followed by lifelong incarceration was imminent.

If Suspect #2 was indeed unarmed, this would seem to be yet another instance in which "trained law enforcement" let their nerves get the better of them, and opened up with a volley of "return fire" when the initial shot was fired by one of their own. Kind of like that morning not long ago in Los Angeles, when unarmed civilians were the target of hundreds of rounds.

It's lucky that no one died in any of these "shootouts". At least I shouldn't have to revise that conclusion.
 
Dan O. said:
You should understand that the process I am going through to estimate the result is not the process that the police would use to identify the cell phone used. The police have access to the actual cell tower data. For them, it's only a matter of filtering that data to find the calls that begin and end at the same time as the suspect. Gathering the data may take time, especially if court orders are involved. But processing will take only seconds.

What I am doing is estimating how usefull the result will be without access to the actual data. For this, I need to find a set of numbers which I didn't know in advance if they had even been published. One of the numbers I initially suggested was to come from analyzing crowd photos to estimate how many people were using their phones at any instant. That would involve actual work so instead I found a comparable number in a study of pedestrians.

The next number I need is the distribution of call durations (what the industry calls CDD). I found this in a study conducted for a major network to characterize user profiles. From that study I picked up that 10% of calls last 17 seconds or less and the distribution is flat enough that for our estimation purpose we can use 0.5% per 1 second interval. That gives an estimated 50 calls from the entire crowd that will start and end on the same second as the suspect.

50 suspect phones is workable but the police would probably want to narrow it down a bit further. They could just walk down to the site with a signal meter and discover which cell tower cover that particular spot. I don't happen to have a signal meter (actually, I have several but not one for cell phones) and while there are apps available that turn cell phones into signal meters, I'm not in Boston so it won't help me. I do however know a couple of sites that have been mapping cell reception so I'll check to see if they have covered that part of Boston.

ETA: these guys provide some good links to cell tower information: http://www.tested.com/tech/295-how-to-find-your-nearest-cell-phone-tower-for-fun-and-profit/
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Oh, you're still fretting about that--I canardly believe it. :covereyes
 
Kestrel said:
Do the authorities have the cell phones used by the suspects on the day of the bombing?
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I think at this point it's reasonable to assume they have the records of all calls (ETA: and text messages) placed and received by the pair for as long as their carrier keeps records (and possibly beyond; the NSA is said to archive over a billion records a day).

It doesn't seem likely that the bombs were detonated by dialing a phone number, though it's possible they were detonated by cell phone via a Bluetooth connection, if RC cars are networked the same way RC quadcopters are. I doubt that either the carrier or the physical phone has a record of Bluetooth traffic, but I could be mistaken.

It may be that the phone records could only confirm whether or not they spoke to each other by phone around the time the bombs were detonated, which would hardly be incriminating.
 
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Morrigan said:
Wow, you sure showed her! What a brilliant, thorough and pertinent debunker you are. Applause. :rolleyes:
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I'm whith JihadJane on this one. Everyone was obviously an exaggeration but there was still an implication that the practice of accusing the missing boy of being the bomber was common place.

I think you'd find it hard to find an example of where somebody said that he is the bomber versus that he might be the bomber. And I don't even think that people suggesting he might be the bomber were all that common. Did anybody in this thread say he was the bomber? How many people in this thread suggested that he might be the bomber versus the number of people participating in this thread?

I think a lot of what is going on here is that some people are looking for justifications to back their view that internet sleuths were committing some kind of moral violation and exaggerating the nature of the claims and the frequency of the misidentifications by the internet sleuths is making them feel comfortable about their moral judgments.
 
davefoc said:
I'm whith JihadJane on this one. Everyone was obviously an exaggeration but there was still an implication that the practice of accusing the missing boy of being the bomber was common place.

I think you'd find it hard to find an example of where somebody said that he is the bomber versus that he might be the bomber. And I don't even think that people suggesting he might be the bomber were all that common. Did anybody in this thread say he was the bomber? How many people in this thread suggested that he might be the bomber versus the number of people participating in this thread?

I think a lot of what is going on here is that some people are looking for justifications to back their view that internet sleuths were committing some kind of moral violation and exaggerating the nature of the claims and the frequency of the misidentifications by the internet sleuths is making them feel comfortable about their moral judgments.
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On the contrary, I think Remie saw the news and thought that others would be interested in it. She tossed off a quick note to that effect, not realizing that there was an ongoing brouhaha over internet sleuths and their treatment of Tripathi in particular.

In a normal context, no one would bat an eye over her harmless and common hyperbole. If she had said, "Everyone thought that the Bruins would get Iginla," it would've been exactly the same kind of comment, and nobody (not even keen NHL trade deadline watchers) would make a big deal out of it.

Finally, just to be clear, if you think that I've been "looking for justifications to back [my] view that internet sleuths were committing some kind of moral violation and exaggerating the nature of the claims and the frequency of the misidentifications by the internet sleuths is making them feel comfortable about their moral judgments," feel free to point out where I've stepped over the line. Because, from my perspective, I've been reasonably careful in expressing my views.
 
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phiwum said:
On the contrary, I think Remie saw the news and thought that others would be interested in it. She tossed off a quick note to that effect, not realizing that there was an ongoing brouhaha over internet sleuths and their treatment of Tripathi in particular.
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Regardless of the intent of the poster that used the term, everyone, originally, the effect was to exaggerate the commonality of the practice and I didn't think JihadJane's reaction was unwarranted.

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Finally, just to be clear, if you think that I've been "looking for justifications to back [my] view that internet sleuths were committing some kind of moral violation and exaggerating the nature of the claims and the frequency of the misidentifications by the internet sleuths is making them feel comfortable about their moral judgments," feel free to point out where I've stepped over the line. Because, from my perspective, I've been reasonably careful in expressing my views.
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Actually, I thought you were one of the moderates on this issue. You might have said a few things that I disagreed with but I am too lazy to go back and ferret out which ones. Mostly I agreed with the sentiments in your comments.

My personal, view about all this is that I am happy when independent people make an effort to research what has gone on. It can help serve to validate the story authorities are telling which might be based on self interest biases. I share your view that the identification of any potential suspects needs to be done with extreme care. I don't share your apparent view that the potential for mistakes by internet sleuths is so great that they shouldn't engage in on-line speculation.

The internet sleuths helped to publicize the importance of the pictures with regard to the investigation and could have contributed to the review of pictures by people that had taken photographs that day for ones that might have been helpful to the authorities.

There is another issue here that is on the periphery of the internet sleuth issue. It looks to me like the authorities might have sat on important information, driven perhaps by their self interest biases in being able to independently bring the bad guys in. There were arguments for sitting on the information but I think they were outweighed by benefit of getting the pictures out and getting suspects identified as fast as possible. This is, of course uninformed speculation on my part, and I could easily change my mind if I became aware of more information on this. But to the degree that the internet sleuths drove the authorities to get the images out, I think they did, in net, a good thing.
 
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