Social Media, Connectivity, Crowdsourcing and the New Reality of Critical Incidents
First of a Four-Part Series
Over the course of five days in April 2013, it became clear law enforcement agencies responding to a terrorist or critical incident faced a new and unfamiliar reality. While the slow but unyielding progression of online connectivity and social media has been lamented and meticulously examined through academic and social science studies over the past decade, the true essence of how it has fundamentally changed the way we communicate and react to high-profile and high-stress events was not fully understood or evident to law enforcement until two bombs exploded in Boston. The public reaction to the Boston Marathon bombings and the subsequent five days, that ended with one subject killed in a violent confrontation and the other in custody, proved that, with little or no central coordination, private citizens and small groups of disparate individuals will use newly available technology to coalesce and cluster in small communities to create a desired outcome or common good. The entire city of Boston, much of the surrounding areas and, often the whole country, collected and exchanged information on the event, reacted to it, and attempted to determine the culprits nearly exclusively online.
This new online and socially-connected reaction and participation played havoc with the traditional response procedures of law enforcement and public safety agencies responding to the bombings. The response of the citizenry created completely unexpected challenges. However, an examination of the nature of the response and the problems that were faced, while overwhelming at the time, also shows there are positives to be gained and new opportunities to harness the power of technology and corresponding cultural shift.
In the first of this four-part series, I will use another high-profile event approximately a decade earlier, the Beltway Snipers, to compare the response and investigative shifts and to demonstrate the need for an evaluation of the way we respond to crises. After the brief background of both incidents, I will detail how bodies and equipment are no longer the panacea for responding to high-profile, high-pressure incidents. Lastly, I will identify the topics of future posts concerning this technological and cultural shift.
Background: Beltway Sniper Shootings, October 2002:
At approximately 6:30 p.m. on October 2, 2002, James Martin was shot in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse in Wheaton, Maryland. Over the course of the next twenty days, John Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo killed nine more victims and wounded three others. Throughout the twenty days Mohammed and Malvo were on the loose, every available resource available to local, state, and federal law enforcement was devoted to their capture. Round the clock media coverage was devoted for the entirety of the investigation. Near daily requests were made from local, state and federal agencies for any information available from witnesses to assist with the investigation. A steady stream of leads and information was provided by the public through telephone or personal interviews but at no time during the investigation did the amount of information overwhelm the investigative capacity of the local, state, and federal investigative agencies working to capture the subject.
The FBI devoted personnel from the Washington D.C. and Baltimore field offices and the national level assets from the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group (CIRG) were deployed to assist with operational efforts and to manage the information flow. As is the standard protocol for large-scale events, CIRG established several dedicated tip lines and staffed the lines with personnel from the Criminal Justice Information Center (CJIS) in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Daily press conferences were held with local, state and federal officials to relay investigative progress and operational activities. Multiple witness statements placed a white work van at the scene of several of the shootings. The public provided hundreds of erroneous leads on suspicious white vans and law enforcement officers took to pulling over and detaining all operators of white vans in the Maryland and Virginia suburbs. However, aside from occasional roadblocks and traffic problems, citizens of Washington, D.C. and the surrounding areas continued with their day-to-day lives.
While painstakingly slow, the investigation proceeded along logical lines and through investigations following up on a tip provided by a witness in Washington State, the identities of Mohammed and Malvo were discovered. On October 23, 2002, both Mohammed and Malvo were captured as they slept at a rest stop west of Frederick, Maryland. Montgomery Country Police Chief Charles Moose announced the arrest of Mohammed and Malvo over local television stations several hours later that day.
Boston Marathon Bombing, April 2013:
At approximately 2:39 on April 15, 2013, Patriot’s Day, two improvised explosive devices made from pressure cookers were command detonated close to the finish line of the annual Boston marathon. The bombs killed 3 spectators and injured 264 others. The FBI responded with investigators and other operational resources from the local Boston office along with assets and resources brought in by CIRG to provide additional investigative, operational, and information management capacity. The deployment package was nearly identical as the one deployed to support the Beltway Sniper attacks.
The multi-day investigation garnered round the clock coverage from television, radio, print and online media outlets. The FBI created tip lines and the lines were monitored by personnel from the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), an email address (boston@ic.fbi.gov) was established and information was posted on the FBI’s Facebook page and sent out via Twitter. Within the first two days, the FBI received thousands of videos and still photos from private citizens. The terabytes of data provided by the public roughly equated to the entire holdings of Wikipedia.
At around 5:00 p.m. on April 18, clear, high-quality photos were released to the public. Immediately following the release of the high-quality photos, the FBI received over 300,000 tips per minute from mainly online and social media channels. As throughout the investigation, online and social media sites such as Reddit and 4chan, and more traditional media outlets, immediately began speculating on the identities of the suspects and erroneously identifying the subjects on several occasions. As one chronicler stated at the conclusion of the investigation, “Law enforcement effectively lost control of the investigation and was reduced to performing the brute chore of apprehending the subjects. The media was rendered impotent, sometimes resorting to anonymous Twitter and youtube posts as sources”.
In the early morning of April 19, the two subjects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were identified through investigation. After killing an MIT police officer and carjacking a passerby a gun battle between the Tsarnaev brothers and law enforcement took place in the Boston suburb of Watertown, Massachusetts. In response to the violent confrontation in Watertown and Dzhohkar Tsarnaev still being at large, a shelter in place request was issued by Massachusetts’s governor Deval Patrick effectively bringing the entire city to a stand still. On the evening of April 19, Dzhohkar was captured. The capture of the younger Tsarnaev brother was instantaneously announced via the Boston Police Department’s Twitter feed, “CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody”.
So what?:
What lessons can be garnered by examining the way the public reacted to and participated in these very similar crises? What are the key underlying causes of the paradigm and cultural shift in responding to critical incidents and what must law enforcement and emergency response personnel plan for to be successful and build off the failures from Boston?
- Constant Connectivity: “More People Have Cell Phones Than Toilets, U.N. Study Shows”
Over the course of the decade between the Beltway Sniper shootings and the Boston bombings, the breadth and depth that cellular telephone and mobile computing connectivity have touched the lives of most citizens of the developed world cannot be overstated. The mobile computing industry has gone from its infancy and a novelty among computer aficionados to permeating every socioeconomic category and most age groups around the world. In 2002, there were approximately 1 billion cellular telephones worldwide with 140 million of those accounts in the United States and there was no such thing as a smart phone or a phone that could take and email photos. In 2013, there are roughly 6 billion cell phones in the world and 311.5 million in the U.S. alone. In the United States, 91 percent of American adults have personal cell phones and 82 percent of those cell phones can take and send a picture, 56 percent can access social media sites, and 50 percent can send an email. Currently, there are more cellphones in the U.S. than people and by 2014, the number of cellphones in the world will outstrip the world’s population.
Along with cellular networks, nearly every coffee shop, restaurant and store have publicly available WiFi networks. This means that, in most metropolitan areas, mobile computing users have multiple WiFi connections from which to choose at any time. Also aside from private WiFi networks 55 U.S. metropolitan areas have free citywide public WiFi (muni-wifi). This number is expected to grow due to tech companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google making deals with cities to build the networks in return for using their co-brand computer applications. Boston has started just such a project and has free public WiFi in areas around many of their historical and tourist sites but it was not yet active in the area of the attack.
As these statistics demonstrate, the availability of cellular phones and other mobile computing is nearly completely pervasive among the American public. This direct, immediate, and wide-spread connectivity between authorities and witnesses or victims of critical incidents allows for information to be provided quicker and in larger volumes than ever before. The downside of this connectivity, particularly via online means, is it is mainly one-sided. Citizens send information they deem to be important but the ability for follow-up with clarifying questions is often limited, at best. These small snippets of information mean that the picture remains the same size but the size of each individual piece is smaller. One intelligence analyst in the Boston field office stated, “It can be sometimes be a curse as well as a blessing, since the sheer volume of information coming in can generate a lot of time and aggravation investigating dead-end or repetitive leads.”
NEXT UP IN THE SERIES:
2) The New Social Capital: Is it what de Tocqueville envisioned?
3) What Happens When Investigations are Crowdsourced?
4) Recommendations for the FBI and Law Enforcement When Responding to the Next Terrorist Incident or Critical Incident.
