I’ve been checking the news sites regularly since the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers got underway, just like everyone else. I was skeptical that the perpetrators would be found via the Twitterverse or Facebook, although both were lit up with commenters and posters apparently following leads, collecting images on their own, and collating tiny bits of data.
When the official investigators sent out a call for images – anything from smart phone photos to home videos to broadcast footage, and surveillance camera tapes, I had pictures in my head of a bunch of red-eyed, sleep-deprived people hunching over computer monitors for weeks trying to find a needle in a haystack – a needle that might not even look like a needle. So I was amazed when images of two guys in caps carrying backpacks appeared on the news sites, in a flurry of progressive images that showed at least one of them first with, then without, a backpack.
There was one tragically sad image of the white-capped suspect leaving the area, and what the caption said might be the bomb-hiding package only a few feet from the 8-year old boy who would be killed. The boy, eyes wide, was standing with his feet on the metal barrier, as any young kid would do to get a little better view of the finish line.
Remember the Bourne books and movies, in which a grim CIA team hunts down our renegade hero, finding him by surveying images gathered from everywhere, the state-supported villains coming at him so fast that he never has time to breathe? That’s what the speed and character of this investigation so far suggests to me. Not the villainy but the world of smart phones, the increasing use of surveillance cameras to record public spaces, and the computer’s ability to catalog and refine images is advancing so quickly that the suspects could not run fast enough or hide well enough.
If only I were sure that this sophisticated way of finding people would always be used for good, I would be comfortable. Today, it may help prevent another bombing and the killing of innocent people. But, tomorrow, can we be sure? Remember the trackers in the Bourne movies. Some of them turned out to be Bad Hats too…
