Comment by natefinch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by natefinch | Hacker News Reader

I have a laptop backpack like that. On Monday it was 27ºF at 6:30am when I left for work, but it was supposed to be 55-ish during the day. So, I wore a light jacket under my warmer jacket. My work laptop is a 15" Dell and is somewhat heavy.

When I was going home, I stuffed my lighter jacket in my backpack with my laptop... and it looked exactly like that. In crowded areas, when I'm not going anywhere, I almost always take off my backpack and put it between my legs. It's the only way I can safely swivel my upper body to look around without knocking people over.

Don't jump to conclusions. It's a dude with a big black backpack. There's hundreds of thousands of those in Boston. I would be surprised if there weren't a picture of a guy with a big black backpack in that area. Lots of people work around there and lots of people don't get the day off... I didn't. I saw a ton of regulars on the Commuter Rail that morning that obviously also didn't get the day off.

I applaud the efforts of people to scan photos looking for the perpetrators... but saying they may have found the guys responsible is incendiary and dangerous.

>Don't jump to conclusions. It's a dude with a big black backpack. There's hundreds of thousands of those in Boston. //

Yes, but are there not only a limited number who were at the bombed locations around the time of the Marathon. Identifying those - if the evidence about the bombs being in black bags is sound - gives you leads to investigate.

>but saying they may have found the guys responsible is incendiary and dangerous. //

It's also true. They may [huge huge caveat] have found the people.

Personally I think the only real way the public can help is to identify themselves and their family/friends in images that others have handed over or they've sent to the officials investigating (Boston FBI presumably).

I'm assuming that the office based enquiries are based on using available imagery to build a profile of all movements and to list people who may need to be interviewed. I poured over a few images (in one reddit thread) of the area of the bomb outside 671 Marathon Place and it was quite easy to spot certain people hanging around - what surprised me was that there wasn't already more imagery available. There must be many video feeds, CCTV and such in the area, eg from the shops at the bomb sites.

> gives you leads to investigate.

Anonymous are not investigators. As altruistic as their intentions may be here people cannot forget that. Leave the investigating to the real investigators who do this for a living. Random people on the internet are not going to see something that agents from multiple federal agencies wont see.

Your point about people from the public identifying themselves in pictures is a great one. That was what I first thought when someone posted a "suspicious" photo of a guy in a blue bathrobe. If I were that guy, and had nothing to do with the attack, I'd call the police right now and say, "hey that's me and I didnt do anything."

> Random people on the internet are not going to see something that agents from multiple federal agencies wont see.

I think you overestimate people who do that for a living. I think that what 4chan did, analyzing all those pictures with such minutia, real investigator would never have done.

I'm no expert on image manipulation. The only project I've ever done involving it was an ASCII Art converter. So it's possible I have no idea what I'm talking about...

That being said, I would be absolutely shocked if they weren't scanning photos of the event programmatically for items resembling a black bag, and then the people who were carrying them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com