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I'd be much more interested in the people who look like they were there with intent - like the one stepping across seats (in a gallery?) carrying a bunch of restraints and wearing tactical gear, a very concealing mask, a hat with flaps completely covering his ears, etc. That's a person expecting and prepared for trouble and likely working to not be recognized (fully and concealingly masked with no identifying marks in the middle of a crowd of anti-maskers). I suspect if he had a phone with him it was turned off.

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Typically investigators will comb photos of the event for him and note additional identifying information and who he seems to be hanging around that they can identify.

If they haven’t already identified him by that point, they figure out where he came from and start combing through “Patriot” events in his area of origin.

He has got tons of identifying traits, he’s wearing fairly particular clothing items with patches in a certain configuration. These people tend to have their "event uniforms" and don’t change it up much.

He will be IDed. He probably has been already.

Edit: Upon another look, I missed the completely obvious on him. His Blue Lives Matter emblem is shaped like Tennessee. There we go.

That is, assuming anyone in law enforcement actually cares about identifying these people. Given that they could have simply not let them out and arrested them as was done with black protestors instead of politely showing them the door, that seems a bit unlikely.

> assuming anyone in law enforcement actually cares about identifying these people

Law enforcement is hardly a homogenous group. We're not talking about a State Trooper deciding whether or not to go after him here. We're talking about the Secret Service and FBI who probably feel accutely embarassed this happened on their watch, and are about to be run by allies of the man these protests were essentially targeting.

How homogeneous of a group they are is irrelevant when they are all driven by the same incentives. The first people that benefit from increases in Authoritarianism are the police. The insurrectionists they are supposed to persecute are the very ones fighting the people that are calling for limiting the influence of the police. Police unions almost universally support Trump. They have everything to gain and little to lose from this.

> The first people that benefit from increases in Authoritarianism are the police

This is not historical. Regular police are usually marginalized pretty quickly in favour of paramilitary goons, while still having to deal with the people, and then having to enforce very unpopular laws in the communities they're from. If you think being po-po in China, Russia, Iran, or Belarus is a high-status or job filled with perks, I have a bridge to sell you.

I'm sorry, where were you when the authoritarian shift from the "war on terror" and "war on drugs", spearheaded by the american right, balooned police budgets and was used to justify massively arming the police and giving them the right to stop and detain nearly anyone?

If you don't agree with that, I guess there's still the fact that the US left has vocally called for a major dismantling of the police and removal of many of their protections this summer. If you don't believe the scales were tipped long ago, that should definitely have done it.

> where were you when the authoritarian shift from the "war on terror" and "war on drugs"

In parts of the world where "authoritarianism" has a different meaning from where you are, apparently.

I like your extremely selective responses, just responding to a strawmanned half sentence.

Of course, it's only ever authoritarianism when the others do it.

Interestingly, the George Floyd protests actually caused an order of magnitude more deaths by police than the months of protests in Hong Kong. That isn't the whole picture of course, but it is enlightening how only one of these events is regularly described as authorization. Always the exception.

> but it is enlightening how only one of these events is regularly described as authoritarianism

That's because authoritarianism is:

"a form of government characterized by the rejection of political plurality, the use of a strong central power to preserve the political status quo, and reductions in the rule of law, separation of powers, and democratic voting"

Hong Kong has great police. The problem for Hong Kongers is that they're in service of an authoritarian government. The US has terrible police, but that's not because of authoritarianism.

Your comments belong on Reddit, no HN.

Trump has suggested that the FBI may have helped rig the election against him, and has generally been pretty critical of them for years. A lot of the insurrectionists think the FBI is part of the anti-Trump deep state that the insurrectionists want to tear down, at least judging from what I've seen from the talk on sites like Parler among people who were saying they were going to be going to the Washington event.

I doubt that the FBI is going to have any sympathy for the insurrectionists.

Ah, but the feds are involved, and arrests for this seems like a great way to win points with the majorities in Congress. Budget season is coming up, gotta pad your accomplishments!

That's a good point, the ideal strategy might be to do little to stop the events and then later start public high impact investigations and arrests for a few of the involved.

This is what will happen. Arresting them on the spot would have been a mistake for a few reasons (optics for a larger, volatile group, muddying the waters for condermnations of the invasion). Trump is still president for two weeks. I think we'll see action on this on January 21st.

> arrested them as was done with black protestors instead of politely showing them the door

If they had barely the means to repel them, what makes you think they could have arrested them?

Having insufficient means to repel people didn't seem to be an issue this summer.

I'll note that at this point one officer has died after apparently being beaten with a fire extinguisher.

Regardless of politics, I'm pretty sure just about everyone in law enforcement has strong feelings about cop killers and anyone associated with them.

To add to this: once the suspects are picked up, they will likely be given a long rap sheet and the potential for very long prison sentences. After a consultation with their lawyers and at some future date, the insurrectionists will likely be given plea deals in exchange for 'flipping' on other suspected co-insurrectionists. These deals will depend on the information and testimony quality they can provide. The networks built by social media and police work are likely to be exploited by prosecutors to build cases against the suspected insurrectionists that will result in long sentences for many people. Combined with ample digital evidence, the cases are likely to be very tough to beat.

Or they could have just been arrested on site.

While true, that may have made things worse by escalating the situation.

And here he is. Didn’t take long.

https://mobile.twitter.com/OpossumPress/status/1347735329109...

His phone was strapped to his chest with the camera facing out, presumably recording or streaming.

https://www.nxsttv.com/nmw/wp-content/uploads/sites/107/2021...

Could be a burner, or even without a sim card, recording only.

No SIM card is not a complete defense, but still makes detection and identification somehow harder. Flight mode also helps somehow.

Let's not forget that most of these bozos can be ID-ed by just drawing a geo-fence around their phone records.

No aerial surveillance was in the air at the time—at least, none of the typical aircraft that show up on OpenADSB during protests in D.C.—so one hopes that there are ground-level IMSI catchers or something similar in use around the Capitol.

> the people who look like they were there with intent

I've heard some of the interviews with them, and almost all of them claimed they were there to undo the stolen election, and some also mentioned wanting to hang all democrats... so it's not like their intentions were hidden.

https://twitter.com/holmescnn/status/1346987917273608194

Elizabeth from Knoxville, TN looking very sorry for herself for getting maced in her attempt to -- in her words -- "storm the Capitol, it's a revolution"

For reference, I was referring to this one:

> JOE: The people in this House who stole this election from us hanging from a gallow out here in this lawn for the whole world to see so it never happens again - that's what needs to happen, four by four by four hanging from a rope out here for treason.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/07/954324571/pro-trump-crowd-tur...

I want to know what accounts they're following online, who they might be taking direction from - and whether those people are domestic or foreign.

It's possible these things are entirely home grown, but it's also possible that there were foreign operatives in the crowd or operating behind the scenes.

This is what makes it infuriating that all of them were not immediately taken into custody.

Yes, some of the people entering did so systematically, like it was a trained operation. Also carrying zip ties, for hostages presumably.

He also appeared to have a handgun. Combined with the zip tie handcuffs, it sure looks like he wanted to execute people on live stream.

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