Comment by imjared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imjared | Hacker News Reader

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1) a "witch hunt" can be taken in the metaphorical sense to mean a hunt for any enemy/dissenter.[1] I think the term is used rather judiciously.

2) "It is likely" isn't good enough. You're hypothesizing. Could they have found them? Maybe. Could they have not found them? Maybe. All we know is they didn't find the bombers but instead slandered a number of individuals and family names in the process.

3) I'm not sure what your background is but I like to believe that our federal law enforcement (FBI, Police, SWAT Teams, etc.), while not perfect, is pretty well-trained and collectively has thousands upon thousand of YEARS MORE experience than I do in collecting evidence, timing its release, and generally fighting crime. As such, I imagine the timed release was not to delay or elongate the process but was very intentional.

I do agree with you that it seemed to take longer than is desirable to find the suspects (especially since once they were found, one got away) but a "better system" is by no means the hive mind of untrained "armchair investigators."

Perhaps in the future there will be a way to crowd source information but the responses of Reddit 4chan, and yes, even some here on HN were well-intentioned but harmful. An apology from Reddit seems perfectly acceptable.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt#Metaphorical_usage

>1) a "witch hunt" can be taken in the metaphorical sense to mean a hunt for any enemy/dissenter.[1] I think the term is used rather judiciously.

In this case, it is being used over judiciously which is why i take exception to it. The key to a witch hunt has to be a conviction and/or a hunt for a non-real cause. I'll even take a conviction to mean real harm (economic/physical etc.) not sanctioned by the government or sanctioned by he government. Reddit didn't result in this. He might have been nervous for a few hours, but he was not harmed. (That doesn't mean we don't need safeguards in place to prevent it).

>As such, I imagine the timed release was not to delay or elongate the process but was very intentional.

I agree that they used their past experience to set the delay, and I understand they probably had good logic for it. But, just because an organization made what they thought was the right decision, in this case it appears to not have been. As an outside observer it appears that their 1000s of years of experience failed them, and they need to explain why and issue an apology.

>I do agree with you that it seemed to take longer than is desirable to find the suspects (especially since once they were found, one got away) but a "better system" is by no means the hive mind of untrained "armchair investigators."

I agree that Reddit probably isn't the best system, but we do need to look at the potential use of crowds to solve cases like this more quickly. I read through all the reddit commentary and I didn't get the sense of hive mentality you describe, there was a lot of disagreement and people stating to be careful and not post their personal information etc. It wasn't perfect, but could have been effective had they had the right images.

>Perhaps in the future there will be a way to crowd source information but the responses of Reddit 4chan, and yes, even some here on HN were well-intentioned but harmful.

At worst they were "potentially" harmful, not actually harmful. Everyone is lucky nothing bad happened to those people whose pictures were circled, but we are equally lucky the attackers did not decide to bomb something in the 3 days after the incident.

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