Crowdsourcing, Critical Incident Response and Investigations (Help Whether You Want it or Not)
Part Three of a Four Part Series
This is part three in a four part series on the new realities of responding to critical incidents and managing their subsequent investigations.
The first two parts of this series can be found at:
Part One: https://medium.com/homeland-security/aeb2909f365b
Part Two: https://medium.com/homeland-security/e163a09b3246
Crowdsourcing: “…distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains.” –Jeff Howe, Wired Magazine, 2006
As documented in part one and two of this series, the nearly constant ability to connect via the ever expanding cellular network, the expansion of these networks to carry greater bandwidth, the exponential spread of WiFi networks, and the desire to exchange information and engage socially has led to the explosion of social media. This explosion of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube has been studied in exhaustive detail over the past few years. (The latest entrant is Google+).
This desire to form social bonds and to use these small or large geographically diverse communities to solve a common problem has led to the concept of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing as originally described by Wired editor Jeff Howe in 2006 as a way for businesses to harness the power of the online community to solve large or time consuming “human intelligence tasks”. Many businesses have evolved around the concept of using the cheap or sometimes free labor that can be recruited through social network sites to assist with labor-intensive work. Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online marketplace where individuals or business can hire online workforces to carry out whatever type of task that your business needs completed. The concept is that the additional labor is only needed in large doses for a very short duration or until a solution for a particularly troublesome problem is solved.
One of the often highlighted examples of the potential uses for Amazon Turk and crowdsourcing, in general, is scanning through photographs for desired images or actions. It is this very task that online communities began doing in support of the Boston investigation. The downside of this crowdsourcing action of scanning through the tens of thousands of photos and videos supplied to the FBI is that it was not being done by the FBI or other law enforcement but by private citizens. This online crowdsourced sleuthing created two dangerous outcomes: a race between law enforcement and the public to fully identify the subjects and, due to a rush for closure by online and media personnel, false identifications of the culprits based on grainy photos and speculation.
The concept of using information provided from the public is one of the most basic tenets of law enforcement and one as old as policing itself. Conducting proper interviews and soliciting relevant and accurate information from potential witnesses is something every law enforcement officer is taught and a skill they continue to hone throughout their career. Anyone who has watched a television interview of a police official discussing an open investigation is familiar with the phrase “I can’t discuss the details of an ongoing investigation.” The purpose is always two fold to not give away any advantage law enforcement may have in identifying the subject and to ensure that private citizens don’t take matters into their own hands. That wall was no longer there in Boston, the investigation was carrying on along two paths, sometimes parallel and sometimes divergent.
The instant and ubiquitous connectivity and crowdsourced collection of information led to citizen participation bordering on vigilantism. Online and traditional media outlets both criticized and fueled the overreactions. Traditional media posted stories such as “Hey Reddit, Enough Boston Bombing Vigilantism” and the Internet’s shameful false ID” while, at the same time, quoting unattributed Twitter feeds or Youtube posters as sources for dubious claims. One ugly side of the volunteer investigators was evident when several individuals were falsely accused by media outlets and these individuals were harassed and intimidated.
In the end, crowdsourcing accounted for many of the best photos used to identify “white hat and black hat” but it was traditional investigative work and luck that connected the persons in the photos as the Tsarnaev brothers.
Epilogue:
So what what does Ben Franklin have to do with the idea of crowdsourcing? Amazon’s workforce on demand (crowdsourcing) service, Mechanical Turk, is named after a chess playing “machine” from the late 18th century. The machine, named the Mechanical Turk or just Turk, was renowned through Europe during its time or its ability to beat chess masters. The machine even played, and beat, our founding father Ben Franklin while Franklin was serving in Paris.
Though the Turk played for decades, it was finally discovered that it was nothing more than a mannequin controlled by a cleverly secreted chess grand master.
It is evident that many within my agency are still seeing crowdsourcing and technological modernization as many saw the Turk. They believe the “magic” is in the machine. However, as the Turk showed us, the magic is never in the machine the machine is nothing more than a way to harness the abilities and creativity of our human capital in new and more effective ways.
