f13.net

http://deadspin.com/explosions-reported-at-the-boston-marathon-473008941

Not good, not good at all.

Live cam at the finish line, though it looks like almost all the injured have been removed from the scene:

http://boston.cbslocal.com/2013-boston-marathon-finish-line/

Jesus that doesn't look good.

It sounds pretty grim for those closest to the blasts.

People are already starting to speculate it was natural gas, but based on the deadspin pictures I'd say, no.  Though I'm not sure how close to the actual site those pictures with all the blood were taken.

Channel 5 has pictures of one of the two actual explosions, it's not huge. I mean, it's bad, but it's more like a backpack or something, not a car.

It seems just a little unlikely to be a gas explosion. The fireball on the picture I'm looking at seems to be outside the building, not inside.

Being local this is a huge event. Is it really that well followed elsewhere?

No one knows yet, except that there were reportedly two explosions, possibly in trash cans, police are surrounding other likely spots including a report of bomb-squad activty at Mandarin hotel. It's just completely unconfirmed reports and some really graphic pictures of people missing limbs pulled from the finish line live webcam.

Fox are saying three dead at the moment. This is really sad.

NY Post has the tally up to 12 dead now apparently.

Starting the pool for how quickly Drudge blames this on either Muslim terrorists or a reason to glass N. Korea...

My thoughts exactly on the explosion size, location, etc.  Also, if it were a gas line a facade would be opened-up or there'd be a crater in the ground we'd have shots of. We don't.

As far as following, it's internationally-renowned.  It's always been well-covered here in Ohio. I remember coverage from High School right up through last year, including feeds on TV for a few hours the day of the race.

It's not Drudge, but several posters in the Reddit thread already made the N. Korea connection.

There's video being shown on the news. Obviously, the entire thing was televised. Here's one not especially graphic camera shot made into a gif.

http://i.imgur.com/UbUlIp5.gif

Nobody has apparently claimed responsibility yet, I find that a little weird.

Some source seem to say that the explosion came from a dustbin.

I thought anything really designed to hurt people (loaded pipebombs, anything that relies on fragmentation) usually doesn't produce a fireball?

Whatever, no sense in it. We'll have to wait and be vaguely terrified and depressed until they determine what the cause was. Likely/hopefully just some lone nut dropping homemade bombs in trashcans/postal drops.

In Boston on Tax Day does sort of make me lean towards the (hopefully) lone whacko theory.

I don't like any sort of violence on American soil whether accidental or otherwise because Homeland Security and the TSA always have a field day with it, no matter what the source. So this makes me sad.

Newyork Post is confirming it was an explosive device, and reporting 12 dead, up to twice as many injured.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/two_explosions_at_boston_marathon_iMR0LCkcwASg0RQfVsH1yI?utm_source=SFnewyorkpost&utm_medium=SFnewyorkpost

Also, a 3rd device was discovered, which is believed to have been (as of this time) detonated by Police in a controlled explosion for removal purposes.

Freaking Post they are the only ones saying that number, the police are saying 2 dead.

http://live.boston.com/Event/Live_blog_Explosion_in_Copley_Square

American Media is a pack of sensationalist idiots.

Yeah, I am figuring that the 12 figure is hopefully someone fatfingering a 2 and rushing it to the digital presses before it was thoroughly vetted by an editor.

Terrible news.   :heartbreak:

Incidentally everyone who works at the NYPost should have their fingers broken and never be allowed near a computer, typewriter, or TV camera ever again. They are a shitty newspaper staffed by terrible people.

AP is reporting two more devices found, the police are dismantling them at the moment apparently.

Also, it's Kim Il Sung's 101st birthday today

 :tinfoil:

It's also tax day.

Also don't read Drudge Report thanks.

I read Drudge Report so I know who is falsely reporting ;)

Twitter is both amazing and facepalmingly stupid when stuff like this happens. I first read it there, a decent amount of time before major news outlets picked it up - but now the overreaction and misinformation is ridiculously over the top.

AP and Reuters seem to be keeping it pretty factual on twitter, they're great feeds to follow. Zerohedge is also good.

Twitter has hurt media more than media has hurt media. But it's a pretty cyclical trash spin.

At the same time: 42 killed and 257 wounded after 19 car and 17 roadside bombs in Iraq (http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/15/world/meast/iraq-violence/index.html). People are speculating on North Korean involvement in the Boston incident, but this could be another line of investigation.

My thoughts are with victims of senseless bombings everywhere. On the weekend I was cheering a friend who ran his first marathon, so this Boston thing is shocking.

Smart money is on normal homegrown white guy crazy. I have literally no idea how anyone could draw a connection between this and North Korea that takes a special kind of retard.

NYpost still saying 12 dead and now a Saudi national has been identified as being involved.

Fuck the NY Post.

This. Tax day in Boston with a visible public event.

Those explosions look like something on the order of a pipe bomb, and not a very well-designed one (all concussion, not much shrapnel).  Could be a stick of dynamite or chunk of C-4, but somebody with access and skills for that could have made something considerably deadlier.

--Dave

EDIT: Taking that back, looking more carefully (and finding some better photos of the aftermath) I'd say exactly the opposite, those were very well-built, lots of shrapnel causing severe injuries across a wide area on at least one of the bombs.

People are not speculating on North Korea's involvement. That's some paranoid false flag bullshit and just dumber than nails. Anyone saying that should be punched square in the groin.

Check some of the pictures - *lots* of lower limb trauma, several folks with their legs blown off.  Reports of ball bearings being found at scene.  Smoke color/quantity points this towards a black powder based explosive. AQ's western-aimed online magazine thing has instructions on how to make one of these in its first issue :/

Yeah, I was fooled by the first pictures I saw, which didn't show much smoke and made it look like people comparatively close to the explosion weren't affected much.  Just a bad angle.  Overhead shots of the bomb sites make it clear there were injuries with severe bleeding spread over a 50 foot or more radius.  They're also reporting more devices that apparently failed, that both takes this out of the "lone nut" category and moves it towards "inexperienced".  Still not going to speculate on motives or identity, but I'd say they were not veterans of either side of Iraq/Afghanistan.

--Dave

EDIT: Controlled detonation (https://twitter.com/BostonDotCom/statuses/323886877746790402) of a device near the JFK library (doesn't specify, and the Boston Public Library is right on the finish line).

Some kind of mental survivalist, anti-government type, or fringe libertarian does seem like a far more plausible agent, aye.

They've already got a suspect in custody, he's in the hospital with the police, injured by shrapnel.  Saudi National, apparently there is video of him placing at least one of the bombs.

I suppose he *could* be one of them crazy, right-wing survivalist loner Saudi nationals tho.

I don't think it's correct (i.e. it's probably homegrown), but I don't think it's a retarded theory. It's the 101st anniversary of Kim Il Sung's death (North Korea's founder), they always do something on this day, they've been threatening to attack the US, they said they would do it today, and we've been expecting they would achieve something less than the nuclear attack they were threatening. A half-arsed kimchi restaurant terror cell sounds like just the thing.

Only the NY Post is reporting this, so... yeah. Waiting for a real news outlet to say something.

No dude. Just no. They didn't send over a unit of NK commandos to pipe bomb a fucking marathon finish line. Please stop.

Reports are about as scrambled as you'd expect, but it looks like at least one to as many as 4 additional devices have been found (2 may have been in the Mandarin and Lenox hotels. high-end places).  There was something happening at the JFK library (quite a distance away), but exactly what isn't clear, may just have been a coincidental fire.

I'm really tempted to speculate about an attack by well-read but inexperienced persons unknown involving multiple devices (and probably perps) on Tax Day in Boston.  But it's premature to do more than point at that aspect of the profile and say "Hmmm".

--Dave

EDIT: Boston Police are saying no arrests have been made.  The New York Post is full of shit, and everyone else with it is just linking them.

A bunch of NK commandos wearing turbans and carrying curvy swords for added effect no doubt...

Meanwhile, in NY:

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BH7CUZVCQAA8Gou.jpg:large)

Are they at the NY Post to arrest whoever is signing off on their bullshit?

That Saudi angle is starting to get picked up by other agencies now.  BPD denies they've got anyone in custody, but if I had to place money on it I'd bet they're "guarding" someone of Arab descent in a hospital whether it's for his own protection or as a suspect.  I wouldn't want to be a Muslim in Boston right now regardless of who's at fault.   :oh_i_see:   

You don't want to be a Muslim in Boston most days.

Photo surfacing of someone getting arrested on Boston Common (https://twitter.com/Eric_Twardzik/status/323913016229912577/) at 5:30 local, photographer says that he's wearing a white baseball cap and that truck belongs to the police.  Note that 5:30 was after the police spokesman denied having anyone in custody, IOW this is not a contradiction and has jack-shit to do with the NY Post's mysterious Arab.

--Dave

EDIT: Confirmation that there was an explosion at the JFK Library (http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/third_explosion_confirmed_at_jfk_library).

EDIT2: That story has changed since I first linked it, now says it might have been just a fire when before Boston PD were confirming it as an explosion.

FIFY

Guess its just a bad day to be in Boston.  Tax day (and all the Boston Tea Party stupidity associated with it), Crazy Anti-American Korean dictators birthday, Major international event....   :uhrr:

And no, there is no god damned way NK had anything to do with it, but kind of funny seeing how many anniversaries there are on this particular date after reading the conspiracy theories.

Between it being Boston on tax day, and a confirmed 3rd bomb at the JFK presidential library, I'm going with crazy right wing nutter.  As a further guess, probably some crazy libertarian time cube genius MIT student, but of course it could be one of many breeds.  I'm not seeing enough about the 'Saudi guy' in custody yet for me to believe it (only see NY Post as the most major news outlet reporting it).  Not saying there is no way this couldn't have been done by some Islamic terror group, but if so, then AQ has mastered a new level of Trolling by preforming terror attacks at dates and places other entirely different groups should be preforming them.

And once again we see why the age of twitter and live by-the-second coverage is actually more harmful to ANY sort of understanding of reality and fact-based reporting.

Definitely seems like crude shrapnel devices (ala pipe bomb) or Anti-personnal IED (re-used mines, etc) .  Saw that old runner in the video get taken out in the legs from 10yds.  The concussion doesn't seem that big a factor either.

Boston Globe has a video taken by a guy at the finish line that captures the explosions and every thing that happened afterwards for the next few minutes, if your in the mood to watch.

http://live.boston.com/Event/Live_blog_Explosion_in_Copley_Square

Edit:  Even though I was 100% sure they were all ok and it was totally stupid to even worry, its still a nice feeling to confirm that all my friends living in Boston are ok.

Edit 2:  Weird, the direct youtube version cuts out of the explosions.  Just go to that boston globe link and click on the first video.

Better video, possibly the one you were trying to link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=046MuD1pYJg

The JFK Library bomb moves theorizing about motives and identity out of "premature" and into "speculative".  Either we're talking Tea Party type right wingers, or someone trying very hard to make us think that they were.

--Dave

EDIT: NBC news citing "Federal officials":
So that might be an independent confirmation of the Post report.

EDIT2: And now CBS news is tweeting that the Boston Police are guarding a "Saudi National" that was injured in the blast, who is reported to be cooperative and denying involvement.  So barring better information it looks like we've got a victim that looked suspiciously Arab too close to an explosion.

EDIT3: The reason I'm so willing to entertain the Tea Party angle is that every year around April 19, I get nervous.  "Patriot Day" is either April 19 or the third Monday in April, depending on which definition you're using, but April 19 has been the usual day for incidents.  IOW, Patriot Day is either this Friday or...today.

Being they found several more devices this will help some to track down whoever did this. Judging from the amount of people injured it looks like this was a shock and awe type of event. Several smaller explosives spread throughout the crowd. And seriously New York Post WTF? Judging from the coverage so far from them they are REALLY pushing the fear to get eyeballs on them.

From a Rupert Murdoch rag?  Say it ain't so!

Sad event. Funny, first place I looked on f13 was politics.

We're still reacting to new events. Give it a day to wind up in politics or the den.

ditto

I have a cousin who regularly runs the Boston marathon with her husband but they had already reached the finish and were relaxing in a park by the time the bomb went off. Apparently the city is in chaos and they predict it will be impossible to drive anywhere for at least a week.

NSFW:
Here's a VERY graphic (ogrish levels of graphic) img. of a man who's lost both his legs.  It looks like the guy who was laying down on the ground (on his side) in the Boston Globe video.  Witnesses are saying they had limbs flying past their heads.

Here are some conspiracy theory pics (guy on roof and misc. detained arab in the commons):

My facebook feed is about 80% "Oh, damn, is there any way to help?" about 10% "The only reason I have faith in humanity was the sheer number of people running TOWARDS the explosions to help" and 10% "Obama didn't call it terrorism".

Given how many devices there were and at least one of them was set off deliberately by the police, I'm guessing they'll have some actual leads since they probably have some good photos and some scrap. (And who knows, some reports say one failed to go off -- they may have a whole device).

Boston Marathon's a big deal, lots of people -- can see lots of groups happy to blow that up to make a point.

However, JFK library is a little different. And no one has taken credit.

Sounds more homegrown nut than foreign terrorist. Hopefully the police will find the guy that did it quickly before crazy speculation hits peak hysteria.

Library was just an electrical fire. Had nothing to do with this.

Yep. For awhile, I was trying to parse that. Four(?) IED style devices by the marathon and one at the... library?

This sucks. Very curious how this goes. Doubt it's domestic. No real logic, just a feeling that any domestic group with that much of a beef would pick a political or police/FBI target. Also curious nobody's claimed credit. You'd figure they'd be out there right now, unless the claims are being suppressed by the MSM (which wouldn't suprise me, and which I wouldn't blame our government for doing while they chase it down). Some Yemeni AQ group maybe?

Thankfully some partners in the Boston area were all in their offices on the other side of the city. One girl lives a few blocks from Copley, and thankfully didn't choose to be home today.

MSNBC reports that law enforcement is denying claims of any other devices. The others (5?) that were detonated were just suspicious packages they weren't taking any chances with, and after examination weren't malicious. And, the library was an electrical fire, as was noted above.

Oh, well that's good to know. So then the two initial devices only?

Looks like.

This just reminds me how much I hate the NYPost.

Edit: Also I haven't looked to see what he said since fuck him, but for what I imagine he IS saying I think it'd be pretty awesome if Alex Jones somehow got thrown out of a C-130. It'd be fitting.

I'd guess not right wing extremists protesting tax day, if only because RWE (and most LWEs I can think of) tend to attack government buildings more than random collections of people standing around.   Large public attacks in the US so far this century have involved either lone psychos or what the press calls Muslim Extremists.

I wanted to make some snarky comment alluding to Tea Partiers following through on their second amendment threats, but that doesn't seem right.  This is just fucked up.  I'm avoiding the cable news because it's just repeating wild gossip with nothing backed up.  Maybe I'm biased but the media almost seems gleeful something this juicy happened.

We can be a bit like soldiers being stupidly gleeful about going to war. It's what we trained for. Then the reality sets in.

Aside from the Russian meteor and the Pope shenanigans, nothing much had happened this year.

The Boston Marathon doesn't feel right for homegrown nutcases (at least the right-wing type), although Boston and April 15th do. The total lack of anyone taking credit doesn't sound like foreign terrorists, as taking credit is part of the whole 'terrorist' thing. Can't really see tax-protester nutcase hitting a marathon, and the only other big thing the right-wing nuts are all up in arms about is gun-control which doesn't really scream 'bombing'

Can't see any reason a left-wing nutcase would pick Boston or a marathon, and frankly they're more likely to be off killing people to rescue lab animals or chaining themselves to things or whatnot.

Two devices only maybe could be done by one guy. So lone nutcase with a grudge? Crazy man? Seriously PTSD guy? Lone terrorist who got caught or is lying low?

It seemed a pretty well thought-out device, it seems like a homemade claymore. I bet it'll be one fucked-up dude with a crazy agenda, unabomber-style. There's probably a badly typed letter already in the mail.

Runner's head-camera view of first blast (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIHnpHZpFcw) (warning - it's very loud).

Tell that to McVeigh (to the extent he had a particular motivating incident, it was the ATF assault on Waco).  As for why they'd hit a marathon:

The special mile marker was 26 stars at the 26 mile mark.  That should put it pretty close to the second explosion.  I might add that random public events is *not* outside the profile of right-wing attacks (Atlanta Olympics).

--Dave

EDIT: Nor is it outside the profile of Islamic terrorism, although they've had little success at hitting such events in the US, there have been several serious attempts.  We don't have enough information to draw any conclusions, but purely on the target profile and bomb design I'd lean towards home-grown right-wing crazies.  The weapon was designed to cause maximum injuries, especially amputations, and few deaths (only 3 reported, while at least a couple of dozen lost legs).  That's pretty sophisticated and way outside of the norm for Islamic terrorism or Iraq/Afghan IED's.

McVeigh hit a federal building, quite a bit different from a marathon.
There were a lot of reports earlier about an undetonated bomb roughly the same distance in the opposite direction from the second, if true, it's apparently a fairly common AQ style kill box setup.  One bomb in the middle scatters everyone, bombs along the egress path detonates on survivors.  Whatever it is, we may never know.

In a word, crap.  The timing was wrong, the placement was wrong, and the bomb type was wrong, for somebody trying for maximum deaths.  IED-style placement would have had the second bomb just far enough to not get blown by the first, then exploded to take out the people rushing in to help.  The same bombs a couple of feet higher would have killed dozens, this was a surprisingly sophisticated design, a Bouncing Betty without the bounce (the shrapnel went out in a tight plane, at knee height).

Hell, it might have been the real thing, an M16A2 or equivalent (the radius is about right), but that should have jumped to chest height before blowing.

--Dave

EDIT: Reading up to refresh my vague memories, the M16A2 (and most of the foreign equivalents) can be adjusted for detonation height between 1 foot and 5 feet.  So this could have been the real deal.

Don't think so. The flame was orange and there was a lot of smoke and little shock wave. This was most likely Low Explosive from either black powder or flash powder. Both of these are easily home made and don't require a true detonator, only heat.

IED's and other high explosive devices typically have a more yellow flame color and an obvious shock wave and require a detonation device the average joe doesn't have access to. (the camera shooting the video would have moved more).

My bet is on a home grown nutcase or cases. We will know in time, but I don't expect to learn much detail until after the guy(s) are dead or going to trial.

Actually...the M16A2 uses Tetryl for the primary detonation, which has a yellow-orange explosion and produces a lot of white smoke (and leaves behind a lot of nitric acid, should smell a lot like standard black powder).  Black powder would not have produce a plane of shrapnel so intense it sheered a man's legs off right below the knee and so precise it didn't even tear his shirt.

And there was a quite intense shockwave, at the height of the barricades, but not at the height of the flags on the poles.  We'll know more soon, but I'm leaning towards Bouncing Betties that disappeared out of Army or National Guard armories.

--Dave

How exactly does the bouncing betty function inside of a package?  Arent they supposed to eject before exploding?  If a bouncing betty, it was simply ignited w/o "bouncing."

They're designed to be buried under a few inches of dirt and use a launching charge to get into the air, punching their way out of a cardboard box or light backpack wouldn't be a problem.

--Dave

EDIT: It's the picture of that guy without his legs that makes me zero in on the Bouncing Betty.  It takes very sophisticated design and manufacture to make a bomb act like that, I find a stolen military weapon a lot more probable than a wizard Mad Bomber that could whip that up in his garage.

What a weird, scary, and cruel day.

Update on the old guy whose legs buckled under him (seen in the videos and pics near the first blast). He is 78. He was okay, got up and finished the marathon, second in his division. (http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20130415/NEWS01/704159868#Lake-Steven-runner-just-feet-from-blast-in-Boston)

Edit: also, could be anything, but he says this...

Really wished I hadn't watched some of that footage. I never thought I would see this bullshit outside of a market in Kandahar, but there it is. There very first thing I thought when I heard about this was, 'please don't let any kids be hurt by this', but of course, one of the dead is an 8 year old kid. Fuck's sakes.

My bet is it's a RWE, probably a tea party nut. They don't really need much of a reason, it's a marathon and ligerals like to run in marathons.

The same batch of people who claimed Sandy Hook was fake/false flag are already claiming this was more of the same. Complete with photos of people missing legs and people who sort of look like them who had amputations before the marathon. Too much blood, the blood looks fake, why didn't people with two blown off legs bleed to death in minutes, etc. It's super classy.

Cops have searched an apartment in Revere. (http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/04/boston_cops_feds_descend_on_revere_buildings)

What a thing to wake up to this morning.  So weird.

It could be a lone nutjob, but I wouldn't do too much knee-jerking on any Tea Party affiliation.  A lone psycho can be moved by any cause.  For all that I loathe the Tea Party, this seems like exactly the sort of thing they would not be doing, certainly not in any sort of organized fashion.  They would go after something governmental, that is for certain, or potentially something clearly racially motivated.  My gut says that this is done be some foreign entity, simply due to the symbolic nature of the target selected.  The goddamn Boston Marathon.  Even a lone psycho on tax day would be more likely to target a government institution, would he not?

Fuck, who knows.  Can't bring myself to watch any of the graphic stuff.  8 year-old boy.  I have a boy that age.

F13, here's hoping none of you ever get blown up.

Bunch of photos from boston.com's Big Picture. (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2013/04/terror_at_the_boston_marathon.html)

I wouldn't be so sure about the "government target" business. Eric Rudolph (anti-abortion lone-wolf nutbag) targeted the Olympics Plaza with a similar device with eerily similar results (in number of fatalities/injured).   AQ type groups also tend to claim responsibility because they want the pub, while domestic assholes don't.

The Marathon is actually pretty international in aspect which makes me think a foreign group wouldn't target it although I don't really have anything specific to base that on.

Not sure at all, I just think that it is more likely.  It really could be just about anyone at this point.  Also, the Marathon may be technically an international event, but it is still one of those apple pie-like events in America.  Pretty fucking symbolic.

I keep thinking back to the NY Marathon and how certain groups of people were realllllllllllly fucking pissed it was going off because Staten Island and wherever needed all the everything post Sandy. I doubt that has any connection but I think subconsciously it was one of the reasons I've been thinking home grown white guy this whole time.

I can't help but think that it is going to be some sick asshole like the shooter in Aurora Colorado; a psychopath that is in it more for their own twisted glorification than for a political agenda. Then again, I've been way off as of late.

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/boston-police-say-no-suspect-in-custody


Stay classy new york post.

Actually the Post's story was corroborated somewhat on CNN:

In essence yah, they have some brown people they're looking at but they're not calling suspects.

This is the most important thing I've seen today and it will break you: interview with the guy in the cowboy hat who was pictured helping the man whose legs were blown off (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWHHWB3Jr60).

There's an article about him here (http://gawker.com/5994736/cowboy-hat+wearing-hero-of-boston-bombings-is-famed-peace-activist). And the NYT profile of him from 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/nyregion/01father.html?_r=0).

He lost one son in Iraq. When Marines officers arrived to inform him, he smashed up their car and tried to self-immolate inside it, and they pulled him out of the fire. Later, his other son committed suicide out of grief.

He became a travelling anti-war activist. He was handing out flags at the Boston Marathon, and he still has one in his hand, covered in the amputee's blood, as his body shakes like he's going into shock... and he's just trying to head home. Nobody is looking after him.

CNN picked it up because the New York Post kept pushing it, so CNN figured that the NYT knew something it didn't and reported it like every other daft rumour. The Chief of police just said it was 100% wrong so that's good enough for me.

I regret being able to say now that I can count myself as having experienced a terror attack. Maybe eventually I get to sleep, too.

There's a few good things to share. One's a quote by Mr. Rogers. One is a moving article by Patton Oswalt. One is the story of Carlos Arredondo. One is the extraordinary amount of help that was so immediately and unquestionably provided by scores of people on scene. There's a few bad things to share. One is Alex Jones calling this a false flag attack. One the New York Post being a pile of garbage that claimed that a Saudi national had been apprehended as a suspect — making sure that we didn't need even a nonfictional initial suspect to get right to our national pasttime of distrusting brown people as a gut response to a bombing. One is that one of the dead is an eight year old boy. One is that he wasn't the only casualty. One is that there will be very many amputees. One is that we don't want or need to be more scared or paranoid or militant or vengeful or distrustful of already maligned groups, but that things like this can successfully push us in dark directions.

Hope you're okay. Thinking of you and yours.

Sam, don't take my detached analysis for a lack of empathy.  More of a protective mechanism, really.  I was posting in this thread in between trying to locate friends I knew were in the Boston area.  Glad you're okay, hope that those dear to you are as well.

This is what an M16A2 looks like before it goes off:
(http://a2.ec-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/69/a1156c65c36c4f79bb5c1ab69e99c807/l.jpg)

It pops up to the detonation height comparatively slowly, it's not unusual to catch a glimpse of it right before the bang.

--Dave

Dave, check out the guy's description of the explosion in the interview I posted above (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWHHWB3Jr60). English isn't his first language and he's going into shock, and he was a responder not a victim, but he describes something going upwards.

This is my feeling as well.  No really good reason for right wing twits, no claim from international groups.  Lone wacko wanting attention or bodycount seems the most likely to me.

All the people that are claiming this and sandy hook false need to be taken out of the goddamn gene pool.

And the  WBC wants to picket the funerals of victims (http://www.inquisitr.com/620514/westboro-baptist-church-to-picket-boston-marathon-explosions-victims-funerals/). :facepalm:

They tweeted “God sent the Boston Marathon Bombs for the sin of Massachusetts passing same-sex marriage!”. Margie Phelps, the daughter of the church head tweeted “You marry f*gs, God sends mayhem,”.

If you were looking for the kind of hate-filled, sub-human detritus capable of this kind of atrocity you could do worse than start with the WBC.

Just from memory, there's been a couple of low rent skinheads who've had bombing plots in Boston in the last couple of years, one was some bridge and the other was the bronze of the Mass 54th.

Dave worries me a bit.

I think I remember that:

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Mooninite2.jpg)



 :why_so_serious:

You have to watch those mooninites carefully!

On a more related note, the bombings yesterday struck me as very similar to the foiled bombing attempt of the Spokane MLK parade in 2011. (http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2011/1220/Failed-Martin-Luther-King-Day-parade-bomber-gets-32-year-sentence)

Bin bombs are sadly a fairly easy way to target civilians in the west.  

Not that it matters but I'd guess it's an amateur (though skilled as both bombs worked), a professional would have made both go off together, or had the 2nd along the evacuation route from the 1st.  My thoughts are with those who's lives have been permanently changed, I'm pretty sure they will catch the guy fairly soon.

Shutting down the city over the Moonites and a month later doing a controlled detonation on a traffic counter doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the BPD bomb squad.

Reading this thread is a perfect documentation of why not to pay attention to 90% of the information that becomes available in the 24-hour cycle following an incident like this. As if we didn't have plenty of documentation to that effect already. I think 21st Century good citizenship has to involve every single person becoming a good steward of information. Don't link to sources that are known for unreliability unless it's in a for-the-lulz thread--that 24-hour period is when we need all the information to be high reliability, because it's when emotions are high and opinions are malleable.

And hence, all the shit information out there. There's a decent number of bad actors with an agenda to push and that's the best time to do it.

That said, NYC is remarkably low-key for such a nice day today and it's obvious it's because people are avoiding crowded spaces.

That is a good point Khaldun. As things become more and more connected and instant "news" becomes more pervasive the situation will only get worse.

The Boston globes big picture linked above is heart wrenching and disturbing. I have always been impressed with them and the photo series they do.

Just my two cents.

Fuck the NY Post so hard their mothers bleed. Piece of shit hatemongering cunt lickspittles. Why can't the crazies ever target them?

The 8-year old fatality. Mike and Mike were reporting today that he had just come out of the stands to hug his father who had finished the race, then walked back to the stands to return to his family. He's dead. His sister lost a leg. His mother was seriously wounded. I'm kind of choking up just thinking about that.

And then there's the rage thinking about what kind of subhuman waste of vaguely human DNA would want to perpetrate that on anybody's family, whether in Khandahar or South Central, Boston or Johannesburg. What makes you think you and your ideas or aggrandizement is so important you'd want to do that to a goddamn 8-year old beaming with pride at the dad who had just accomplished something and who now has to bury one kid and tell another how to live without a fucking leg?

Sometimes, we just don't deserve this life.

I don't see what the problem is fast unreliable info (should have learned to filter by now) is or what the alternative is?

Journalists doing journalism?

If you run the stats on Revere (the town of the apartment the FBI raided last night) you'll see it's predominantly middle-class white, with Hispanics being next most represented.  Ran a Google search and the most skinhead activity I could find there was them attending an Oi Band concert by "Cocksparrers."  I've been through there once by car and despite it being on the beach it's not the most picturesque place for sure.
http://www.myfoxboston.com/story/21986273/large-police-presence-in-revere-connected-to-boston-bombing

New news:  evidently victims/family of NewTown were in the VIP section across from the 1st blast.   :facepalm:  Could you imagine??  Losing your kid in a mass school shooting only to attend the Marathon (in your honor) and then get almost blown to smithereens.  And if this ends up some gun-toting, freedom of arms, white-supremacy thing then... just wow.  If that shit happened to me I'd turn into The Punisher; not joking.

Of course we'd just solve it by making it easier to get guns and weapons.   :oh_i_see:

Makes me think of that little girl who was born on 9/11 who died in Gabby Gifford shooting.

So how are going to force every mouth-breather with internet connection to be responsible journalist?

Right wing "extremists" and tea partiers being blamed in this thread. What complete bullshit. If we stopped for 5 seconds and listened to each other instead of making mustache twirling villainous characterizations of those who have opposing views to our own maybe we'd get something fucking done in this country.

In the meantime, I hope they find whatever psychopath, sociopath, whomever that did this shit and quick. I'm sick to my stomach thinking of just how fucking awful this is. The thought of that 8 year old kid and his sister... their family... Fuck. But the last thing I'm doing is blaming my political opposites. I may disagree with them, but I don't jump to the conclusion that they're such dickwads that they'd blow up innocent bystanders just to make some political point.

I think you need to read this thread a little more closely if that's what you took away from it.

Every political opposite, no matter your view, has blown up innocent bystanders just to make their point.
Also, as for extremists, your govt. has been put on alert since 2008 for domestic terrorism, to the point of disbursing "what to do's" to the public.  Not saying you're wrong but we've been way past just "listening to eachother' for a while.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/headslap.gif)

Gonna find some joy in this thread, not shit it up.

I am a Bruins fan, I hate the Montreal Canadiens.  Not so much anymore  (http://video.nhl.com/videocenter/console?catid=35&id=239257)

Ben Revere had 'Pray for Boston' on his glove... When he made this catch  (http://www.the700level.com/baseball-philadelphia-phillies/news/Video-Ben-Revere-Makes-Ridiculously-Awes?blockID=837859&feedID=8510)

To the doctors who went straight from running the marathon to their hospitals to work on the wounded.

Carlos Arrendondo.

 Front page of the Chicago Tribune Sports section.  (http://www.usatoday.com/story/gameon/2013/04/16/chicago-tribune-sports-front-page-boston-marathon/2087355/)

Come on guys, be fair. The Tea Party was mentioned a few times and I am directly saying it was a right wing extremist / Tea Party guy. Not as an organized group, but an individual who's a big fan. Mostly because this is the sort of shit that those people have been making veiled or outright threats about doing for years. Also, except for the failed WTC attempt and the successful WTC attempt every reported bombing has been done by that sort. Even guys reported on the local news who got caught making pipe bombs just to make them. This isn't some arab/muslim plot, the thing is all wrong for that. If it was, it would have been a lot cruder, a much bigger explosion, and with lots more people outright dead. A a home made bouncing betty or even a real bouncing betty that's been modded to only bounce knee high screams right wing weapon fetishist.

I'm probably one of the most pre-disposed to blaming the right wing, and even I am not doing it in this thread.  I'm speculating on the possibilities , and in a profile analysis you have to put RWE at the top of the list, with lone psycho second (actual crazy people can use bombs as a way to commit suicide with a splash), Islamic terrorists a distant third.

You can pretty much discard the ELF/ALF, as *nothing* about the profile fits them, and that's the only left-wing terrorists going in the US these days.

Right now, the profile is all we've got, the target and the method.  So we can't draw any firm conclusions, especially since the best information (analysis of bomb remnants and all the threat assessments in the FBI files) is not public information.

--Dave

Well, 4 pages before a politics move looms, that's not bad I guess.

I really have nothing of substance to say about this right now.  Sister in law was due there this Friday.  She says she's still going.  I think that's a bit mental.

Nobody has any clue who did it yet.  Why speculate?

This seems a decent enough list of shit-we-actually-know to distract us from the bomb composition sperging:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/15/us/boston-marathon-things-we-know/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

It's probably the safest it gets in Boston right now. Tons of cops about, plus the whole thing about lightning not striking twice. Unless you're saying that just coming to the states is mental, in which case I agree. Go someplace nice. Fucking Boston? Eh, I guess it's as close to a historical city as we've got. Hmmmm, who was that developer from the UK who's apartment was built onto part of the city wall and was 300 years older than our country? Anyone remember?

Because we're human.

And yeah, Boston's fine other than probably traffic and stuff like that being a PITA.

I remember friends telling me to cancel my trip to Scotland back in 07 because of that idiot who tried to blow himself up at the Glasgow airport.   While I wouldn't rush to plan a trip to some of the more active parts of the world, it would take more than what is most likely a one off event in a fairly sane country to make me cancel.

She's Canadian, so it's not such a big hop.  Also, it's not a fear for her life (please God, get her off this planet) more the fact that it's probably going to be a bit disrupted.

AHhahahah.  No-one should have cancelled anything cause of that idiot.  Smeaton dunted him and that was the end of it.

That's not it. You need to train journalists not to take the twitter feeds from the mouth-breathers as story facts. You should know what you are getting into when you troll the internet, but things are different when you focus on what the established news outlets - or at least they should be. Sadly, it is now about the best selling headline rather than what happened based on the facts.

Can we start a new thread when they actually learn who did it so I can check back? Or maybe change the title. The rest of this thread past the information on the first page is the usual trash speculation.

Thanks.

How do you think journalists got stories before the internet?  The only thing that's changed is that people are now smart enough to know the first things they hear might be crap.

Obviously the journalists haven't caught on. Or maybe that's just the NYPost people.

And yes, journalists went out and interviewed people and got a bunch of tape and notes from what lots of people said - not the 'let's take the most outrageous tweet we can find and run with it.'

The Post is in the business of drumming up outrage, anything they did was deliberate and can't be lumped in with journalists not "learning" anything. They've learned too well.

I found it somewhat bizarre this happened the same day as the Boston attacks:  Oregon men injured in homemade explosives detonation. (http://www.kivitv.com/news/local/203112151.html)

Guy makes homemade explosives, they detonate, contacts relative who rushes him and another man to the hospital.  Police investigate his property, and find he's made more explosives.

CNN reports (on the ticker) the Saudi man was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that house in Revere was his.  So essentially, expect a racial-profiling suit after the dust settles.   :oh_i_see:  This is of course assuming that report holds up.  Reports seem to come in and then get refuted an hour later even from respectable sources.

As for the bomb, they've also said one of them was essentially an improvised APM.  Explosive laden pressure cooker (literally) full of nails, BB's, etc.  Though, whomever made the report might not even know anything about a Bouncing Betty, so it's possible they just got the two confused and we're still looking at a simple Army Surplus device.

Bunch of outlets are now reporting the detonator appears to be a timer, not remote. That pushes it more towards domestic I'd guess.

You're right, it was never brought up. My bad.

nuh-uh! I don't take it that way at all. Pretty much everything here is the living breathing banter and human openness which always will (and should) be our outlets to these crappy events. I like the measured analyses being a big part of them, because they usually provide the best antidote to stupid crazy media and conspiracy cycles. alongside how pretty much everyone here wants the barking false-flag shitholes to go get fucked in the ear. horray!

His name was Martin Richard, he was 8.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/martin-richard-8-loved-playing-with-sister-friends/2013/04/16/1e5c123c-a698-11e2-b029-8fb7e977ef71_story.html


Now stop being cunts.

Bomb as described just now by investigators: nails and birdshot (BB) in some kind of pressure cooker.

From that link:


Which means either they were using something that wasn't easily detected or they were placed there during the race. It also says the bombs were possibly placed in pressure cookers - are those things easily transportable without people asking where you are going with a crock pot?

Supposedly they were hidden in backpacks (http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/16/us/boston-marathon-explosions/index.html?hpt=hp_inthenews).

If you're gonna quote people, you'd be better off not quoting shit that contradicts your point too.

Just sayin'

UK Government blast resistant bin guidelines (http://www.cpni.gov.uk/documents/publications/2008/2008052-hosdb_guidance_note_12_blast-resistant_litterbins.pdf)

I thought this was interesting.

Which one contradicts my point? The one that straight up bets that it's a tea party member? The one that says that it is or someone's trying to make it look like it is (which I have no idea what that means since there's no examples of tea partiers blowing up innocent people ... or anyone for that matter)? Or the one that tries to say it without saying it but then feels guilty about it?

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/angryowl.jpg)

edit: Drop it and move on.  Thanks.

Threads like these seem like mostly a way for people to offer up theories that conform to whatever they'd like to believe.

You mean the culprit was probably someone who wants Raven-3L's nerfed ?

I can see that.

That would be one way to get the requisite pressure out of black powder without being limited to the cross-section of threaded pipe (probably safer to work with, too).  Getting the directionality could have been managed by embedding the shrapnel in putty of some sort and covering the inner wall with it.  Pour in your powder, wire your detonator through the safety valve hole, clamp down the lid....

Yeah, the physics make sense.  Bigger bang than a pipe bomb, planar shrapnel like a Bouncing Betty, actually easier and safer than your typical homebrew (sealing it up is when it usually goes wrong).  Somebody put some significant thought and research into it, if that's how it went.

--Dave

After being used to terrorist organisations falling over each other for the chance to be the first one to claim they did it it irks me that so far nobody has stepped forward and claimed responsibility.

Al Quaida's response was that while they approve of the attack they are not reponsible for it and other organisations have been silent as well. Usually by now some organisation has claimed to be responsible even if they were not.

It's as if most major terrorist organisations themselves were surprised by the attack.

This leads me to believe that it might be something other than organised terrorism. Those guys are usually keen on telling you that they did it and why they did it.

That's pretty much why I'm leaning towards some domestic nutcase. Foreign groups would be, well, counting coup and bragging about it.

If it's domestic, I'm actually hoping we see some sort of crazy laden 'manifesto' in the next few days. No manifesto, then it's someone planning to do it again -- and smart and sane enough to, you know, maximize his chances.

I will agree that the false flag people need to be slapped so hard they lose the power of speech.

They are everywhere in the comments. Yeah, I know, don't read them. But they're always the first one.

The quickest way to undo the faith in humanity anyone gained by watching people run towards the blasts is to read anything from the Westboro Baptist tax evaders, Glenn Beck, or any of the bullshit conspiracy sites. They don't know shit, they won't know it first, they won't know it last, and most of them exist to spread their angry to the easily angered. Freedom of speech is fine, but fuck all of them.

I'm with Jeff Kelly in my surprise nobody's stepped forward and with Morat in my hope someone does soon.

Sad anniversary season.

Virginia Tech massacre April 16
Waco assault April 19
Oklahoma City bombing April 19
Columbine school shooting April 20

Those guys are so consistent it doesn't even bother me anymore. What's really made me lose faith if the pictures of people finishing the marathon through the disaster site and then getting a picture taken while they pose with it in the background. Some may see that as carrying on and not letting the bad guy win, but I think we all know better.

Well, you're a great guide to the soaring heights of the human spirit, so please let me know where to subscribe to your newsletter.

Or maybe we could just keep this thread to actual news.

If we keep to "actual news" this thread would be 3, maybe 4 posts long.

I know these guys have been cleared, but jeez this is such a shady interview (language barrier issues likely):
http://www.cnn.com/video/?hpt=hp_t2#/video/us/2013/04/16/intvw-boston-revere-roommate.whdh

Really? That's curious - because they stopped the race pretty much immediately and the best part of 7000 runners didn't get to finish. Or are you talking about people who finished at 4:08 and were taking photos while the bomb went off? Even watching videos of the event, there weren't many people carrying on through the finish line because of the sheer number of police pulling down barricades and officials rushing over to help people who had collapsed.

Still, whatever - to counter that, this is the spirit shown by one runner who'd already finished and there are many more stories like it:


As an aside, there's going to be a moment of silence at the London Marathon (http://lrn.london-marathon.com/london-marathon-observe-period-silence/) this weekend as a mark of respect and runners are being given a black ribbon in their race pack.

Language barriers, and the fact that he was going somewhere and the reporters penned him in and essentially accused him of being in some way responsible for the bombings.  I would have told them to fuck off and get the hell out of my way.

BTW, dumbasses, you don't sign search warrants, you sign a "consent to search" when you're letting them search even though they don't have a warrant and they're being *really* paranoid about making sure anything they find is admissible.

--Dave

That sounds like me.

Don't worry, I for one KNOW it isn't a tea party sentient being.  Reason?  They TALK about doing this kind of shit all the time.  They talk about armed revolt a'comin.  They talk about retaliation for being treaded on.  But they don't do shit because they're kind of worthless. 

Hope this helps!

4chan hard at work solving this thing (http://imgur.com/a/sUrnA)
 :uhrr:

Shit, I used my cell phone that day too...and I had a backpack!  And I would've run away from the scene of the explosion with my clothing shredded, so there's the psychological angle.  Granted, I was in Los Angeles, but we can't be to careful here.

OTOH, that bearded dude with the blue shirt looks kind of Ted Kaczynski-ish.

This is being tweeted around the idio-sphere

DailyMail:


you can read it here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2310110/Obama-administration-SLASHED-budget-domestic-bombing-prevention-45-cent-says-Homeland-Security-Assistant-Secretary.html


And a reminder:

DKos:




more: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/08/06/1117242/-Remember-the-DHS-Right-Wing-Extremist-Report

I'm not suggesting that the bomber was an American right wing extremist. I'm just suggesting that the right wing neutered the agency.

Seems worth a shot to me. /shrug

4chan is more likely to solve something through pictures and pirated copies of Photoshop CS3 or something than the Boston PD or Fox News.

Frankly 4chan probably has a good a chance as any to figure things out, so good luck to them.

The MS Senator and the White House getting ricin-laced letters (http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/16/us/tainted-letter-intercepted/index.html?hpt=hp_inthenews) right on the heels of the marathon bombing seems almost too coincidental.  Am I crazy for thinking that since the Senator's letter was post-marked in Nashville, and Nashville is in between Boston and Mississippi(at least northern MS), that the same crazy person is responsible for both attacks?  Yeah, that sounds too tinfoil when I write it out.  It's hard to wait for the details to slowly come to light.

It's like the anthrax letters in 2001.  Are we scared yet?   :oh_i_see:

Illuminati plot to ratchet up the fear before Senator Palpatine we blow up Iran or Korea?

Some progress, it seems:

Boston Globe link (http://www.bostonglobe.com/2013/04/17/boston-medical-center-reports-five-year-old-boy-critical-condition-victims-treated-from-boston-marathon-bombings/UiktKly60y4m8UVHeNu8NP/story.html)

CNN is reporting that an arrest has been made.  (http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/17/us/boston-blasts/index.html?hpt=hp_t1)

Yep: here's an article from the Associated Press:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fbi-appeals-help-solving-marathon-bombings

And the "Days Since CNN Had to Walk Back a Breaking News Story" sign is reset to "Zero" (stolen ruthlessly from Twitter).

Moakley Federal Courthouse being evacuated. Supposdly.
hrrm.

The library where I work is taking this opportunity to implement a zero-tolerance policy on unattended bags.

Wow.  A good friend of mine who has run the past 2 Boston Marathons got lucky and had to do something else this year instead.  Her family stood in the exact same place that the first bomb went off waiting for her to finish both years. 

This. If it's anyone in the 4chan pics, it's him.

The suspect they are officially looking for matches the guy with the puffy coat and white baseball cap.  Some indications that they brought in *someone* under extremely tight security, if true that would indicate that they think it was a group and they don't want the others to know someone was busted, because they'll rabbit.

--Dave

Judging by the pics of the bomb fragments (the Tenergy battery, circuit board, and Zhongzeng wire), and now commentary on the news... my suspicions on the detonation device are near confirmed.  It's likely a remote detonation device derived from an R/C model.  None of the trigger mechanism components are necessarily off-the-shelf items... they're fairly niche, so easy to track.  I used to be pretty heavy into R/C (I've spent many thousands in those hobbies) and the folk in those forums are leaning towards an R/C Helicopter receiver/motor-controller.  Right now they're working on placing the system, but leaning towards a chinese "clone" model helicopter (clone being a chinese company copying a popular/more-expensive american model), due to the batt, wire, and board.

Essentially it'd work like this:
The big Tenergy batts would provide voltage to the motor controller and receiver (if the receiver didnt have its own supply).  The entire setup would likely be laid INSIDE of the metallic pressure cooker with the receiver antenna soldered to the pressure-cooker housing.  This allows the whole thing to stay sealed w/o having to putty a hole closed, and the cooker itself acts towards reception.  The guy(s) walk away with the transmitter (likely up to 1/2 mile away max) and hit the throttle, engaging the receiver in telling the the motor controller to "apply voltage" to the system; instead of being connected to an electric R/C motor, the two wires are simply left with an air gap next to the accelerant (the powder).  And boom.  Note: you can make a HELLUVA spark with an electric-powered RC rig; enough for a sustained stream of hot plasma until you shorted the batts.  So the thing sparks and sets it off.  Each bomb would have a discrete frequency for each receiver, to which one receiver could switch to or two receivers could engage separately.  If one receiver, it'd take just about the amount of time between blasts to switch xmitter crystals for the 2nd bomb.

Anyways, just more armchair sleuthing.

Also, back to some  :tinfoil: stuff.  Guy on the site the below img is hosted picked up 4chan's work and figured out those two guys in the pic are likely private merc/security contractors from Craft Intl (obvious from the garb they're wearing - the hat is clearly a Craft hat, both wear matching military gear, etc.)  They have their gear before and after the attack, but are pretty much the most suspicious guys in those series' of pics.  My guess is they were simply hired by the BAA to watch the marathon and failed to notice the bomb placed right in front of their faces.  Either that or they were backup to a larger plot.  Queue x-files music.

(http://willyloman.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/boston-19.jpg)

I also do now have unedited pics of the aftermath, but really... I can't post them.

update (forgive the external links):
Here's the batt. pack:
(http://www.sfairsoft.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/11eb1874b66611ba8443adcd92fb4639/n/i/nimh9.6v1600f_1.jpg)
(http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/pb-130417-boston-evidence-nj-06.photoblog900.jpg)

Here's the motor controller:
(http://i01.i.aliimg.com/wsphoto/v0/671392841/2x-RC-ESC-10A-Brushed-Motor-Speed-Controller-1-16-24-for-Car-Boat-Tank-W.jpg)
(http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/pb-130417-boston-evidence-nj-05.photoblog900.jpg)

There's a third board that's likely the broken remnants of the receiver board. Experienced RCers always take their boards out of the casings btw.:
(http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/pb-130417-boston-evidence-nj-09.photoblog900.jpg)

Well, the Ricin stuff is strangely bipartisan. (Obama and at least one Republican Senator, I believe).

If the Ricin stuff is connected, I'm gonna say "Domestic" almost certainly. Foreign groups would send something a lot worse than Ricin, and not to the people whose mail is screened so thoroughly that there's no damn way it's getting through.

I pissed off American angry? More likely.

It's been saddening to watch the coverage, though. Some pundit mentioned there are two types of "news scoops". One is when you figure out, through hard work and informants and all that newspapery stuff, something big that no one else knows. The second is where you report something everyone knows, but first.

The former is the actual important type. The latter is what the TV news media (and to a closer extent, the paper media -- but only their online segments) is obsessed with. It's also the fucking stupidest. "Oh look, we reported X thirty seconds before CNN! I'm sure millions of viewers will now tune into us first from now on, because THIRTY SECONDS FASTER".

It is, of course, also the most likely to get screwed up. Hence things like "OMG< arrested Saudi in hospital!" stuff from day one (or the amusing "Supreme Court rules ACA unconstitutional" from last year)

I'm with you on the parts, but that battery was not inside the pressure vessel, nor was what you identify as the receiver board.  Look at them, the batttery and what remains of the casing are damned near pristine, unburnt.  The motor board on the other hand looks pretty toasted.

The RC angle makes this spring to mind: Mysterious drone spotted near JFK airport (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2288436/Mystery-drone-sighting-near-JFK-Airport-sparks-FAA-investigation.html).

--Dave

EDIT: Also, you can buy that stuff over the counter at some specialty RC shops, and fairly anonymously straight from the manufacturers in China.

The Republican Senator that got the ricin letter (Roger Wicker, from Mississippi) is one of the guys who voted to end the gun control filibuster. Only particularly controversial thing I could find about him, other than the usual Republican stuff  - but there were 15 other Republicans who did the same and weren't targeted, so maybe nothing to do with it.

It's morbidly fascinating to watch this unfold in the age of information. 9/11 was before everyone had smartphones, before news was constant and all-encompassing so we didn't get this sort of depth. I almost wonder if committing such a crime now is impossible to do without being caught and make no mistake the person(s) responsible for this will be found sooner than later because quite frankly you can't be "under the radar" in this country anymore.

Good points, but remember the only thing of the pack we've seen is 1 or 2 cells - the rest of it could be toast.  And we've only got an img. of about 1/3 of the receiver board.  It's pretty obvious the ESC (motor controller) was right up next to the accelerant though.  Look at the burnt leads where normally the motor would attach.  Maybe they puttied between there and the ESC and left it outside the cooker (leaving the leads inside), but still seems more likely the whole thing was just layin in there.  If that's the case, then how did the entire ESC survive though?  It's possible those remnants simple made it through.  But eh, you're probably right.

Simple putty wouldn't be enough though. They likely used a 2-part epoxy putty or some such.  Rock solid.  However, I see no indication of remnants... so maybe just regular filling material was used.  Regardless, it's damned obvious those leads by the ESC were very near the point of ignition.


There's nothing morbid about it.  If you have special knowledge in these situations, you're almost morally obligated to share.  It saves lives and prevents loss later on.  I used to be a mere "interested non-entity" until hurricane Katrina hit, wherein I learned amateurs can make extreme differences; moreso in later storms.  Similar happenings on a less somber front, during the Cassini-Huygens mission - wherein amateurs chunked the data quicker than the ESA... which is why the project managers on big projects like Curiosity make special efforts to give us the .RAWS and datasets when they come down.

The govt isnt as stupidly closed-minded like they used to be.  Which is smart.

Think about it: What you don't want is a premature detonation while you're building or carrying it, you need it to be inert but easily armed.  So: Shrapnel matrix around the inner wall, detonator assembly surrounded by gunpowder in the center, wires through the pressure valve hole (on the lid), battery and receiver assembly attached to the outside, the pot is roofed over with epoxy or something with wires to the motor/detonator sticking out (so that nothing shifts and you don't have to worry about loose powder when you're putting on the lid).  You use Molex connectors or something like that on the ends of all the wires.

You connect the wires from your detonator to your passthrough and seal the lid, duct-tape your receiver/battery assembly to the outside but don't connect the wires, carry it to the site, connect the wires, repeat at the second location (or have an accomplice).  Walk to a safe distance, find a spot you'll be unobserved, and then follow your sequence (turn on transmitter, throttle up, change frequencies, repeat).

--Dave

EDIT: And being at the center of a black powder "explosion" is being at the center of a very fast, hot fire, no blast wave to shred the board.  Bet there was a model rocket igniter between those wires, which initiated the black powder and smoked itself in the process.

EDIT2: If you zoom in on the motor board pic, you can see the connector on the end of the wires.  And I think those fat wads *are* the igniters, they used two of them to be sure.

The hat looks like the Punisher symbol to me.

Craft International:
(http://co-store.com/images/Products/0358/product358147.jpg)

Here's a third one of em (carrying something too big to be a cell phone):
(http://americanlivewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/finishline1.jpg)

This part of the saga is less about who's at fault and more about who didnt do their job.  There were THREE (3) highly trained operatives within 20 yds of the 1st device and they couldn't prevent it.  Especially so if there was a "perceived threat" or "clear and present danger (someone called in a bomb threat, etc.)" explaining why they were there; aside from the known bomb-squad drills they were running earlier in the day.

Anyway, the point to this sperging over the design of the bomb is that this was probably not anyone with explosives training or experience, this was a "Wizard Mad Bomber" with a background in RC vehicles.  Apparently the black-powder pressure cooker was something used for IED's in Iraq, so maybe a vet (most soldiers don't get real explosives training).

If I was with the FBI I'd be running down known RC enthusiasts in the Northeast, and checking every shop for someone who normally buys RC stuff but recently bought some rocket igniters.  And having Customs peering over the declarations for small shipments from China and flagging any adresses that hit the trifecta (boards, battery case, igniters)

--Dave

EDIT: Or it could be a rocket ethusiast who dabbles in RC, there's some overlap and they are complimentary skillsets

One needs to be a very special kind of stupid to think you can mail the President that kind of thing and expect a) to succeed; and, b) not be discovered. I'm sure we'll find out the guy they picked up has a "history of..." blah blah blah.

I like ya'alls theorycrafting here. It's cathartic :-)


This.

I'm more surprised someone thought they could mail a letter address to the President and expect him to be the one to open it.

I'm curious if over-the-counter powder (muzzleloader stuff) would be able to pull off this kind of explosion - the smoke looks right though.  I suppose so in a pressure cooker type vessel, but if it's not really sealed tight the reaction wont move fast enough to make much effect.  It's possible this guy is already registered somewhere to purchase real black powder, as you'd have to be to acquire the stuff outside of gun ammo (yup, ammo is exempt of course).  The ATF would have that on file.  The best igniters would have to be hand-made (with aforementioned black powder), as again, you can't just purchase/sell them retail w/o being on a watchlist.  Your run-of-the-mill ESTES igniter isnt quite the same thing, but you can get moderately better on-the-shelf with something like an Aerotech kit at any hobby store.  They're hit or miss though unless you've got a really easy burning accelerant.  Given the voltages they were likely using it probably wouldn't matter; it's plenty.

As a Tripoli lvl 1 high-powered rocketeer, I'm unfortunately flagged for sure.  But I never got far enough into the black powder to have to deal with direct background checks.  I stuck strictly with hybrids (NOS+rubber).  If I needed igniters (mostly for the recovery stage) I'd get them from fellow hobbyists.  

It IS possible they made a resistive igniter from a muzzleloader shot; you'd buy the slugs off the shelf, wrap it in wire with a resistor in the circuit, then overload the circuit.  That in turn sets off the main charge.  You do this twice, just like in the ESC pic of the two burnt leads.

Still think we dont need firearm background checks in this country?  Ludicrous how the Senate failed to legislate even that today.

They didn't. They were sending a message: I've got Ricin and I'm prepared to use it.  Putting it in a letter is a lousy way to deliver it if you want it to be fatal, but it catches their attention.

--Dave

Even though I know the internet is a power resource for information on how to do just about anything, it still scares the shit out of me that some of you are all too knowledgeable in the arena of bomb making.

Really, effective bomb making is one or two steps away from 2/3rds of the nerd hobbies that aren't watching TV. Frankly I'd be more surprised if most of us haven't at least tried to make some sort of explosive device in our lives. Especially as teenagers. It's not a batshit crazy thing, it's an american teenage boy thing. Or at least it used to be. Like firecrackers, but boomier.

Bombs are just "Chemistry + Physics = Bang", and the electronics is pretty basic (as Ghambit pointed out, you can buy it off the shelf).  Anybody reasonably bright can learn the theory, actually doing it without blowing yourself up, that's the hard part.  I grew out of it as a teenager before I had done any worse than burning a hole through the concrete floor of a garage with home-made thermite, but the same curiousity that pushes someone to know how their computer *really* works can apply to weapons.

--Dave

Massive explosion and fire right now in Waco. (http://www.news.com.au/world-news/explosion-at-fertiliser-plant-near-waco-texas/story-fndir2ev-1226623333230)

Seems like a fertiliser plant blew up. But seriously... timing.

The anti-shitting up part of this thread...

The National Anthem at tonight's Bruins game...
Found here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzMsagY7oRs)

It makes me want to delete my posts in the thread lest I get caught in the sweep that picks these people up.  :why_so_serious:

Good on them.

I'm waiting until at least page 10 before I turn this over to the authorities.  You've got time.

Same people turn threads about shootings into which gun is best.

My gf yells constantly at me for my hobbies, postings, studies, etc. for fear some Men In Black will break down my door; but I'm at the "fuckit" stage of my life at this point in those regards.   In all seriousness though, I'm already on some watchlists w/o a doubt (for a variety of perfectly legal reasons).  I could care less.  Gotta carry on as normal.  Plus when Underverse come the muggles will be licking my boots for help.   :why_so_serious:

If they wanted to watch someone, though, they should watch the bumfuck gun-toting rednecks and punks in my neighborhood.

I'm sure I'm already on a few watch lists with an annotation of "Mostly Harmless".

--Dave

EDIT: Seriously paranoid bastard that I am, if I had any thoughts of ever using this knowledge, you'd never see me talking about it.  It's the stuff I know that I'm silently holding in reserve you need to worry about.

That plant explosion is a bad one. I would anticipate a fair number of deaths there.

Someone caught the blast ob camera. Its around the 29 second mark. It was massive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA)

Cops and firefighters were at the fire when the explosion happened. Getting reports of 70 dead.

In all seriousness, watchlist or not, there are combinations of things you can't buy w/o someone knocking at your door or at least keeping a close eye.  Even with regards to simple electronics.

Mostly just lurking, but have to point out that you want "cue", not "queue" here.  The former being a prompt to do something or the action of starting something in a performance, the latter being a line of people or a sequence.

Well, you don't want to buy a saw, contractor bags, and cleaning supplies at the same store regardless of what you're planning.

--Dave

Depends on what we're talking about.  I can make practically anything I want and have access to all sorts of electrical parts drawers at work.  No one has ever questioned anything we buy.

Buying things already done from hobby shops that can be combined is a bigger red flag than a few Digikey and Mouser orders.

Just because you haven't been questioned doesn't mean you're not being watched.  As Dave says, typically it's as simple as "that dork is harmless."

Pressure cooker bombs occur "almost daily" in Pakistan (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-south-asia-bombs-20130418,0,4450804.story).

All this internet detective shit going on with circles drawn round faces in photos is going to lead to a LOT of completely innocent people getting labelled as suspicious.

How would you feel if you were at an event like this and got your face plastered all over 4chan or Reddit because you'd taken your backpack off or you had brown skin and were looking the other way to everyone else in a photo?

I don't see any way to stop this happening but I think it's highly likely something really bad will happen to someone as a result of it sometime.

I agree.

I don't seeem to give a shit about theorycrafting bomb components but, strangely, find myself wondering if Jeffrey Bauman, the 24 year old who was pictured with both his feet missing, will ever choose to race again, either with prosthetics or wheelchair. I also wonder if, like Martine Wright (who lost both her legs in the London 7/7 bombing and ended up competing for Team GB sitting Volleyball team in the Paralympics last year) he might overcome adversity and that, pehaps,  we'll hear his name again in 3-7 years in either Rio or Istanbul/Tokyo/Madrid.

Because I think that would be a Good Thing.

I'm in agreement with the flailing frog.

Ask that Jewell guy from Atlanta.

I think I read they did make an arrest in the ricin case. Seems lone whacko, unconnected with Boston.

The evening they found the letter some congresswoman was saying it was a guy who often sent letters in to that member of Congress.  So yeah, I can't imagine they wouldn't have made an arrest.

I was just about to post that.  Oh well, I'll do it anyway: His name was Richard Jewell (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell).  Yeah, we should totally leave baseless accusations up to the cops and journalists, they are so good at it.

4-chan can't do any worse than the media, and they have more eyeballs than the cops to go through the thousands of images.

--Dave

You can sue the media for getting things wrong though (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell#Libel_cases). People can get fired for making incorrect allegations.

You don't have that defence against 4chan.

I would imagine hitting the media for libel is near impossible these days otherwise Fox News wouldn't even exist anymore. (Do they even count as "media" /groan)

Fox won that lawsuit that said they were allowed to make shit up.

Which is all you need to know.

It would have to be a lot easier to sue some random 4chan guys than a real media outlet.  Don't know what lawyer would take the case since the most you could recover from your typical 4chan user would be his anime collection, a computer riddled with viruses and possibly a mint in box TMNT action figure.

I like how that ricin guy used his real initials in the poison letters.  I wonder if he's just really dumb or if he wanted to get caught.

Not mutually exclusive. 

If you're a witness to an offense such as this (or fit a close description), then you can expect to minimally be thoroughly questioned by an authority.  Whining that your head has a circle over it on 4chan is clownshoes.  Matter of fact, if you were that close, it's your fuckin duty to goto the police/FBI in the first place.  Not wait for your face to be plastered all over reddit.

Look at it like this, people/authorities will waste countless amounts of time researching your dumbarse because you failed to come in even though an APB for a guy with a black bag, white hat, and so forth is all over every goddamned station in the world.  But since you'd rather not be fuckin bothered to pick up a phone in between DoTa rounds, you get labeled a suspect and put up and studied on 4chan.

So yah, no sympathy here.  Carry on redditers, carry on.  Minimally, the public can speed up the investigation by helping to rule people out quicker - if you're one of those people that have to be ruled-out, for the love of Mike dont whine about it. Srysly?  That Arab in blue trackclothes with one of the black backpack carriers actually showed up at the courthouse to give his statement, w/o any call from any authority.  He saw he was being publicly probed and immediately took action (not waste precious time) to clarify and give a statement on what he saw. 

That's good work, no matter how you spin it.  None of that would've happened with any speed w/o armchair sleuths.

(http://i.imgur.com/E6VA73u.jpg)

 :rimshot:

Yep, I have no love for these internet vigilantes. How did they get a hang of security footage anyway?

Regarding media, thats what libel/media/privacy laws are there for.

Sometimes it seems to me your 1st amendment  is some almost as much a fetish as the 2nd.At the same time right to privacy doesn't have a fancy x th number, so it's not important or something.

Meh, you waive your right to privacy when you're an idiot.

P.S. I legit have no clue who that is.

He got half a million out of NBC, probably because Tom Brokaw was actually capable of shame.  The rest stiff-armed him until he died.  I still have more confidence in the judgement and empathy of the guys that brought us Two Girls, One Cup than in the current crop of 'journalists,.

--Dave

(http://i.imgur.com/Wg2Mck9.jpg)

I think it's the guy on the right, I don't really have strong feelings either way, the public are going to look for all kinds of stuff in photos so there's no point trying to stop them.  The press are a bit different, especially if that headline is wrong.

Nah dude, it has to be the Kaczynski looking guy who was carrying around his backpack.  I mean, look at him!

Bleh, its hard.  I see both sides of the argument, since they've highlighted a number of suspects, and some of them (if not all) have to be innocent.  Having your face posted across the internet as the guy who possibly blew up an 8 year old is not cool.  However, there is absolutely no way to stop this now.  The internet is here, everybody has a camera on hand now, and social networking is legion.  This is the new norm, better get use to it.  Taking that into account, there is a real chance that crowd sourcing the investigation of all the pictures at such a huge media event like this could very well work out to catch the criminals far better than the police going it alone.  Sucks for all the innocents, but with the fact that I can see no way to stop it, may as well make the best of it.

One way to curb it would be for shitstains like the New York Post to stop posting goddamn headlines like that pictured above. No, it wouldn't stop the Internet Detectives, but it might make some glory seekers among them a bit less inclined to waste manhours being Internet Detectives. Also, FUCK THE NY POST IN ITS EARHOLE.

If you were there, and you don't immediately go to the authorities to tell them what you saw in an effort to help, even if you saw nothing you think of consequence, you are doing yourself no favors.

Good old reliable victim blaming.

They were present at an event where kids were raining down on people.  It'd be quite normal for them to be too freaked out to think about what's most helpful to the police.

Victim blame, best blame.

The best bit is some of the photos were from a couple of hours before anything happened, so potentially anyone in Boston that day had best report in to the nearest police station.

The victims are the people with lost limbs, in the hospital, or in the ground.

Hardly accurate, any one touched negatively by the event is a victim.

The point is that anyone who was there is a potential suspect, because the one thing we can say with absolute certainty about the perp is that he was there.  Everything else is conjecture.  And there are literally thousands upon thousands of images to go through, and only so many eyeballs in law enforcement to go through them.  *Eventually* they will go through all of them, but what would take them months the Internet Detectives can do in hours through sheer force of numbers.

And I wouldn't blame Internet Detectives for the NY Post front page.  They're obviously casting about for scary brown people to blame.  Supposedly, they got their tip from the Feds, who were passing the photo around wanting to talk to the guy.  So "Internet Detectives" may have saved a few LEO hours that would otherwise have been wasted tracking down someone with nothing useful to contribute to the case as if he were a suspect.  That's not nothing.

--Dave

People falsely accused of crimes are also victims of something.

The whole point of "terrorism" is that it's not just the people who are actually injured who are victims. It's to traumatize and create fear among everyone in the society or group targeted.

As much fun as a semantics battle over what a victim can be, I think it diminishes the fact that people are dead and/or won't be walking away from this.

FBI has released photos and video of the suspects: http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multiple-explosions-in-boston/photos

I think you crashed the FBI's servers.

DOH

Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M80DXI932OE and one of the photos:

(http://i.imgur.com/mmNwvUU.jpg)

Now, anyone want to make a bet that by midnight, the lolinternetdetectives will have found higher resolution pictures of these guys?

--Dave

No bet.

(http://i.imgur.com/BAl5ZzP.jpg)

You know what ?

A lot of things go quicker and better with crowdsourcing.

Justice has really never been one of them.  I'm entirely uneasy by this whole thing.

I thought they could just scan these things into a computer to make them high resolution then run them against a database of faces for a couple minutes to find a match.

Do you think people taking it upon themselves to deliver swift justice at an event where thousands of pictures were taken to be any more crowdsourcing than having 10s (100s?) of researchers at the FBI doing the same thing?

Let's be honest here, this isn't justice. This is unconventional research for an unconventional crime.

I think the first attempt was a shot in the dark, worth trying but very difficult, not something I'd be interested in, but with focused information from the FBI of who to look for there's a very real chance of getting a break in the case very quickly.  The alternative was releasing the photos/video in 6 months when the public will have lost interest.  I like puzzles so I'm scanning photos, tens of thousands of other people will be too.

I'm seeing a lot of fuck stupidity attached to these pictures as they get passed around social media.

Sorry, but I'm still uneasy.

As am I. Basically, anyone around that area that day who had a black backpack is under suspicion now. I know we have this innocent until proven guilty ideal, but in practice, it is far different.

It has always been the case that Big Brother watches using our eyes.

It's the internet stupidity comes pre-attached, that one photo found so far might give them a direction, time stamp, something that leads to something else.  Plus one of the guys is clearly white, so that helps.

Certainly caution is warranted, the danger is that people will take it on themselves to do more than just analyze.  So please, when someone starts shouting THIS IS THE GUY, HERE'S HIS ADDRESS, SOMEBODY GO GET HIM!, tell them to sit down and shut the fuck up.  But looking through all the pictures is both something you can't possibly stop, and the place where the sheer numbers give the advantage to the Internet Detective Squad.

This is the world we live in now.  You're on camera, all the time, and especially when you're near something interesting.

--Dave

These two suspects remind me of the Columbine shooters.

I was thinking the same thing. Hair too long for a nazi, skin too white for a "muslin". They look like snotty suburban kids.

I've seen some (already deleted) local news article comments that they look Jewish herpaderp Israeli false flag Mossad something something JEWS.  :oh_i_see:

Same as they did with "Saudi suspect in custody" just after the blasts. Maintaining racial profiling in readers'/viewers' minds at every opportunity.

Jooz did it.

We have a Congressman explaining how Muslims are using Hispanics to beat our Mad Profiling Skills and we should BUILD A FENCE.

At least the morons at the NY Post aren't actually running a government.

I think the logical progression is Arabs, Jews, Deranged Loner White Guy

No. They're smarter than the people that run large swathes of the country.

The fucker we want is in the white cap on the left hand side of this photo.  Notice, no bag anymore; as it's just exploded in the face of an 8-yr-old.  His friend is behind possibly; the man in khakis next to the woman in purple.
(http://i.imgur.com/I1dF69f.jpg)

I know you guys dont like net-detectives but I've been lurking 4chan/reddit and the victims are literally in there asking for help, uploading vids/photos (that they have), etc.  It's a tough sell to sit on your hands when a woman who can no longer feel her legs asks you to do a few webcrawls.   :oh_i_see:

Anyways, they've already got the clothing pegged, even possibly where they may have bought them.  Some of their gear isnt very common (polo hat, golf hat, high-end fancy hoodie, etc.).  And now that they have suspects, more pics are flooding in (like above) with better views.

I'm going to up the stakes: By midnight (Pacific, after all it's already almost 10 in Boston), they'll have this guys name, home address, and third grade teacher.  If I were him, I'd be running to the nearest cop.

Yeah, the "flesh hunt" has social dangers.  But the cops might have screwed around looking for these guys for weeks, now they'll have them by morning.

--Dave

EDIT: I might add my own intuition and theory says this is a false lead.  But the FBI thinks it's their best lead, which makes it important to run it down *especially* if it's a dead end.  Randolph wouldn't have gotten away if they hadn't fixated on Jewell.  Find these guys, send the cops to them or them to the cops, and see where it goes from there.

Huzzah!

The guy behind has a red coat, different hat and no glasses on. Don't think it is #1.

This. They wouldn't be near each other at this point anyway, if the other guy did the other bomb.

I'd wager east guy places east bomb, walks east. West guy places west bomb, walks west.  Boom. Both continue on those directions and meet up later.

Random speculation of the day: I'm getting a bit of a Washington Sniper vibe with the white-hat guy (who looks slightly physically disabled in how he walks) being the sub of the pair (he is less concealed, walks behind, appears younger).

Gunshots reported at MIT. Officer down, says police chief.

I'm wondering if this is a confrontation with the bomber(s)?

http://www.policymic.com/articles/36357/mit-shooter-gunman-at-large-after-police-officer-shot

Can we just like, get to fucking May already?

There's a thread for that: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=23187.0

MIT area has cops responding to:

1. this cop shot dead
2. lobby fire at nearby address
3. carjacking nearby by two armed men

See @MichaelPageWx (https://twitter.com/MichaelPageWx) on Twitter. Editing as he tweets:

- the carjacked black Mercedes with the two armed men is being tracked in Watertown.
- Shots fired near Dexter Ave. and Laurel.
- Explosions reported by cops on scanner.
- White male with white T-shirt. Running near Mt. Auburn St. Still firing their weapons

Still wondering if you'll have to merge this back into the bombing thread. Suspects are student age, and this is a trail of destruction starting at MIT. Can't tell.

Area scanners: http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/1221

They're in a stolen state police SUV now.  Go to the twitter feed, people, this is insane.

--Dave

EDIT: Explosions confirmed, police are talking about dynamite.  We can officially call this related to the bombings, I think, common carjackers don't use explosives.  Seriously, go to the twitter feed, I'm not going to keep echoing it

2) Scanner feed overloaded, CNN live feed shut down, MSNBC doing some "healing boston" filler piece.

3) Suspects in custody, one on the way to the hospital, and every mainstream news site is still not showing a damned thing.  Seriously, guys?  Instant reporting of every half-assed piece of bullshit, and something real happens and you're all on a smoke break?

4) I am officially done with cable TV news.  Fuck, you can give me breaking coverage of Kim Kardashian going to yoga, but this happens and all you've got is news of the first shooting, posted on your websites 1 to 2 hours after it happened by interns that copy-pasted the AP report?  While your "24 Hour News Network" gives me Wolf Blitzer, Nancy Grace, and Bill O'Reilly re-runs?  Fuck you guys.

And kudoes, Tale.  Australian news scoops the billion-dollar "infotainment" colossus, and thank you for cluing us in.

5) Even Google News is still two hours in the past.  I'm told you can't drive near the courthouse or the bombing site for news vans, hotels all over the city booked up with crews, and the only guy actually being a fucking journalist is the god-damned *weatherman* on Twitter?  Just give it up, burn your press cards, tear up your "communications" degrees, and fuck right off.

And they have dynamite.  :ye_gods:

Dark sideways video said to be of suspects in shootout: http://twitter.yfrog.com/1fu2xpnryybxwjqpdtnynwdaz

Similar clothing to bombers.

There is just some sort of crazy cosmic shit that attaches to this week of the year.

Ya, listening to the scanner and they are still looking for a guy.

MIT & Watertown may be two separate things.

When was the last time you heard of carjackers with pipe bombs/dynamite?

--Dave

EDIT: Or are you saying there may be a third person still at large?

Could this be the bombing suspect with the black cap and sunglasses?

(http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BIMRi7vCQAEvhGk.jpg)

They also got this guy:

(http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2013/04/19/1226624/520933-boston-suspect.jpg)

(http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2013/04/19/1226624/523647-suspect-on-the-ground.jpg)

Guy laying down was apparently let go. Wrong place wrong time nothing to do with it.

The one guy who had to strip down before being taken into custody is thought (by a reporter) to possibly be the darker skinned bomber.
The other guy that was on the ground (in the cnn video) didn't look much like the gimpy-legged bomber, but it's tough to tell with his face on the concrete and no hat on.  It's possible; hair color was right but it didnt seem curly enough.  Then again, maybe he was an accomplice.

Fuck this scanner feed, every tom dick and harry in the country is listening in.  Is there a mirror feed somewhere?

edit: and u beat me to the pix

Description of guy at large was "light skin, hat".

Making entry into a house with a Tac squad.

Resident's video of gunfire and shouting (http://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=10152778880075249)


I just happened to be following the right Boston reporters, who in turn followed and retweeted the right people. It didn't much help me in my job, other than passing the right tweets on to my co-workers, as I'm not working on this story.


You mean "in every country" :)

This guy has a pretty badass twitter feed.  He's fairly certain they're the bombers from his language.
https://twitter.com/akitz

Boston Globe says they have officially been told one Marathon bombing suspect has been caught, and another is on the loose in Watertown after a firefight with police.

New FBI close up photos and they don't look anything like the guy they have bent over the car.

http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multiple-explosions-in-boston/updates-on-investigation-into-multiple-explosions-in-boston

Found the bomb drop pic (8-yr old martin on the rail with his father btw):
(http://i.imgur.com/CbotmNk.jpg)

never mind

I'm listening here which is the main Boston scanner feed:

http://tunein.com/station/?StationId=146109

I am listening to the same Boston Scanner feed as Abagadro

The New York Times has a good story (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/explosives-detonated-in-massachusetts-standoff.html?hp&_r=1&) after talking to @akitz (linked above), the Twitter user living across the street from the gunfire (he's now tweeting pics of bullet holes in his furniture).

Theory (if it's them):
Some vigilant MIT student reported the bombers to campus PD, PD responded, got shot and killed, and from that point the bombers went on the run.

Very clear call of the description they are looking for: White Male, Black Curly Hair, Grey Hoodie, armed with assault rifle and possible explosive.

This is them.

Yup, dispatch just said "it's the guy in the white hat from the photo."

BPD scanner has identified the names : Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi. Suspect 2 is the missing Brown University student from Providence, if this info is correct.

Can't get any of the scanners to come up for me, listening to WBZ News Radio (http://tunein.com/radio/WBZ-NewsRadio-1030-s27704/).

--Dave

reddit 6 hours ago: http://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cn9ga/is_missing_student_sunil_tripathi_marathon_bomber/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cn9ga/is_missing_student_sunil_tripathi_marathon_bomber/)

--Dave

Foot pursuit. Calling for SWAT assets to assist.

Friend of Sunil Tripathi: https://twitter.com/kmattio

https://twitter.com/findingsunny/status/323775164775022592

This is some surreal shit.  Maybe merge the threads?

Can I just take a moment to comment how amazing it is I am sitting in Utah, listening to a police scanner in Mass. in real time, looking at a photo taken by a satellite in space to see the locations they are referring to?

I also have the cable TV news on next to me and it is sooooo embarrassing how far behind they are and how they are focusing on stuff that has been completely debunked. They come off as completely clownshoes if you are following this shit in real time.

Even just following this thread from work is a bit surreal.  Good job, all of youse.

There's a story about the finding of homemade explosives at Hanover, Massachusetts, last month (http://www.wickedlocal.com/hanover/news/x1037527396/Explosives-cause-concern-in-Hanover#axzz2Qs2alxxx). Witnesses saw two separate explosions and several unexploded devices were found.

And the police officer to contact is called Officer Moar. Moar investigation!

The story goes a 4channer had Sunil pegged over 4 hours ago once the FBI released the images, reddit then picked it up, then it got plastered on the news shortly after the scanner feed verified the subject's name.  Unreal.  This is why you dont keep fuckin info. from the public unless you absolutely have to.

Check out this video, kinda sad (a video for finding Sunil):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t12tfTJ10bU

Holy shit. They are basically setting up a perimeter, doing an exterior search, telling people to shelter in place, waiting for daylight, then going house by house and evacing people until the find the guy.

It's pretty impressive how fast this happened, I'm just very sorry to learn a policeman has been killed.


(http://i.imgur.com/3Bh7rkc.gif)

His facebook page was the last thing I looked about before going to bed last night, over 8 hours ago, because of this post on SA (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3544157&pagenumber=231&perpage=40#post414577495).

100 Town Park?  Motion sensors tripping in a closed structure.  Perimeter set.   :popcorn:
This guy is apparently depressed and suicidal; he's not goin down w/o a fight.

100 Talcott Ave.  Pull up the google sat picture and you can follow where all this is going.

SA has some shit on their face in that thread.

How in the fuck did Sunil make it out of there in a car?  What a useless roadblock they had.   He's been separated from most of his arsenal though; bombsquad disposing of the stuff now.

Yeah, lots of stupid on show there.

Commissioner just confirmed that other suspect died at hospital.

Yah, that's Mulegeta... he left the cover of the car they were using in the gunfight and went out in a blaze of 'glory.'  He hit a cop in doing-so, officer is now in critical condition.

Police summary of what has happened so far: click here (http://www.cambridgema.gov/cpd/Alerts/citizenalerts/policedainvestigatingfatalshooting.aspx)

They released this pic of the guy at large:

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BIMy1gtCUAAK7f4.jpg:large)

(Edit: I'm signing out now, hope they catch him.)

The pages where they slowly realize that "Holy shit, 4chan/reddit were right about everything we've spent 300 pages making fun of them about" are textbook cognitive dissonance.

--Dave

Holy fuck. Radio chatter says that dude that died when being taken had an explosive device on his chest that detonated. Explains the slow roll ambo that has been on the cable news.  Guy was clearly DOA on scene.

Mental.

I guess I am hoping they catch the other guy alive.  Somebody needs to stand trial for the death of an 8 year-old boy, not to mention all the other injuries and deaths.  That way he can stew in his own worthless misery for a while.

This is just bloody insane.  Came up for air after an evening of gaming and holy crap.  Now I'm listening to the scanner feed and trying to catch up on what's been going on over the past few hours.

Christ.

Been watching the video feed from these guys (muted, they have subs up) with the scanner in the background: http://livewire.wcvb.com/Event/117th_Running_of_Boston_Marathon

I keep meaning to turn it off and call it a night and then I hear something like "put your hands over your head and get down on your knees" shouted over the scanner feed, then nothing, then a minute or two of somebody trying to get back in contact with the guy who shouted that and he finally comes back on the channel and says all is okay.

Bloody hell.

Been following the reddit feed as well:

http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1co395/live_updates_of_boston_situation_part_2/

Last thing posted said that second suspect is dead, but only seeing the media confirming the first one so far.

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=200082141349599835237.0004daaf434ba5147dce8&msa=0&iwloc=A

Here's a good link for showing how people counted 4chan out too quickly: Venture Beat thinks 4chan sucks (http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/18/4chan-strikes-out-in-its-attempt-to-crowdsource-boston-marathon-bombing-investigation/).
Almost as they were putting up that article, the destined-to-be-famous reddit/4chan post identifying Sunil as suspect #2 was going up, the high-res pictures found, and the picture and video of Sunil dropping the backpack was isolated.  All things that the FBI would have done eventually, in a few more days or weeks, but it happened in hours.

The FBI identified them by their behavior, while 4chan was distracted by guys who didn't look normal because they were security the FBI knew who those guys were from the beginning.  Sunil *was* on the radar at 4chan, while he wasn't at the FBI even though they were *also* investigating his disappearance, *and* what is now obviously the test runs in Hanover.  4chan had those pieces put together, as one of many theories.

That's what crowdsourcing does, it pursues *all* possible avenues and as better facts become available it homes in on the ones that fit them.  And it does it incredibly fast.  Even if the fact that 4chan/reddit was right on their ass had nothing to do with bringing on the endgame (and I will not be at all surprised to find out it did), 4chan/reddit had leaped ahead in the investigation to get exactly where the FBI would have wound up...in a few weeks, probably after more bombings (they obviously had quite a few bombs ready to go, they weren't planning on laying low and waiting for people to get complacent, they were going to strike again *soon*).  Somebody at 4chan/reddit would have convinced somebody at the FBI to take a serious look at Sunil, and the wheels would have been set in motion well ahead of schedule.

If they really did bring things to a head early, 4chan and reddit may have saved dozens of lives, because I'm pretty damned sure there would have been a bombing this weekend.  Score one for the good guys, the Internet Detective Squad.  Maybe next time the FBI won't put out the information in little dribs and drabs that send them off into blind alleys.

--Dave

I'm not arguing with any of that.

The two suspects have not been 100% positively identified as yet, I think it's safe to say the FBI press briefing generated a lot of interest and useful information but if it turns out what we currently think is wrong, that happens too.

I take it there's been fuck all about motive as yet ?  Or am I missing something ?

You can't have Law Enforcement Officers trolling unrelated internet boards for clues. For that one right 4chan guess there would have likely been hundreds that were wrong all over the Internet.

The other side of the Internet Hero story, of course:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2311248/Sala-Barhoum-track-star-teenager-denies-involvement-Boston-Marathon-bombing-picture-widely-circulated.html#ixzz2QtykVSr5%20

What the hell did I just wake up to?  Boston sounds like a fucking warzone right now  :ye_gods:

lol at the cop on scanner "that's why they call me Kevin 'in and out' Brennah"  immortalized forever to the world.

"All available units into Charles Circle"

"Yeah we've got him.  He's in custody right now."

...

"We got a boston cab 375"

"As of right now they're all on the deck outside the car.  We haven't checked the trunk yet."

"Don't check the trunk.  Don't do it yourself."

...

then lost the scanner to an announcement that pubtrans is shut down and people should stay at home and not open their doors except to police

...

No clue what's going on now.

A cop pulled over a suspicious cab.  (Guessing not related)

I notice that the Mail leaves out one major salient point: The NYP sticking the picture on the front page and claiming that the FBI was circulating it as suspects.  They even use the same shot without the NYP's "BAGMEN!" overlay (and it's not one of the shots that 4chan was using, so where did the Mail get it?).  That might have carried a little more weight in making him recognizable around town than 4chan.

--Dave

Yeah, sounds like they found the red backpack guy somebody called in trying to flag down a cab earlier.  Guess he wasn't their guy.

Twitter guy who lives on Laurel Street is posting several pictures of bomb disposal droids and SWAT teams. (https://twitter.com/AKitz) Also, this:

(http://pbs.twimg.com/media/BIMaYJICcAA_SWv.jpg:large)

"Bullet hole through our wall and the chair #mitshooting #mit #boston"

EDIT: just noticed Ghambit posted this link on page 1 - sorry for the BW

I don't know why, but whenever news gets all "breaking" and uppity, this theme pops into my head (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WL4SGO85Uk).

And maybe all those Internet heroes were just flat out wrong:

The Associated Press @AP
BREAKING: AP sources: Boston bomb suspects from Russia region near Chechnya, lived in US at least 1 year. -SS
5:39am · 19 Apr 13 · SocialFlow

Can't stay up any later.

EDIT: One last tidbit:

The Associated Press ‏@AP 1m
BREAKING: AP: Surviving Boston bomb suspect identified as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, Mass. -SS

So much for the triumph of 4chan. (Unless this turns out to be BS too of course.)

What the hell?  The Russians don't have a dog in this terroristic fight.  ...or do they?   :ye_gods:

Considering how far behind the curve the AP has been running, and that I haven't heard from our scanner-listeners that the police have changed who they're looking for, I'm going to take it with a huge grain of salt.

They've had what should have been Mulegeta's body for hours, you would think they'd tell the cops in the field they're no longer looking for a South Asian, but a Chechen.

--Dave

Chechnya is predominantly Muslim and fought two very bitter and nasty wars with Russia which produced a lot of Islamic militants.

Reminds me of a tom clancy novel.

http://vk.com/id160300242

 :headscratch:

Comparing this pic to the surveillance shot up there, and that to Sunil, I'm starting to think I'm going to look really stupid in a few hours.

--Dave

http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_23060124/police-converge-neighborhood-outside-boston

Chechnyans

Heard on the radio that the suspects are brothers.

Yeah, cause we're so not covering this already in the newer explosions thread  :why_so_serious:

Hadn't read that one yet when I posted.

They conducted a fair number of large scale bombings and hostage takings.

http://www.cfr.org/terrorism/chechen-terrorism-russia-chechnya-separatist/p9181#p6

http://johanneshirn.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/Will-Box-For-Passport/G0000VQW7v6xWA7o/I0000LluvfoSaW5Q

 :headscratch:

Compared to that LAPD manhunt recently, the cops in Boston have (as far as I can tell) managed to not gun down any noninvolved persons.

EDIT: typo

He looks a lot more like Suspect One than Mulugeta ever did.  I could delete my pompous pronouncements above before people wake up and see them...but I won't.  If it's a failure on my part, I'll own it.

--Dave

Don't worry, this is f13, no-one will rub your face in it or bring any snark.

In possibly unrelated news, reddit is being DDoSed at the moment.

I feel bad for the family of the missing guy, because if they haven't found him after the whole internet & FBI looking, it's probably not good news.

Must be serious if Breakingnews.com just retweeted it.  Although I doubt it's an 'actual' attack, rather it's thousands of Redditors F5ing like mad men.

The reddit tech support twitter responded to that and said that it was malicious, not a DDoS of love.

http://spotcrime.com/crime/5748198-4e235631fcb0dc07e75e0cf62ef5001b

What, you mean these aren't random RC enthusiasts like this thread was convinced of  :oh_i_see:

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=1642;type=avatar)

From the Guardian live blog (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/19/boston-mit-police-dead-watertown)

That might be the quote of the day right there

Perhaps their plan did not extend much beyond the marathon bombing, and then they improvised... badly...

https://twitter.com/Dzhokhar_A

Most likely fake, if not pretty crazy.

Once everyone in the world has your picture, I think you probably just go for setting off a bunch of mayhem and going out in a blaze of glory.

I'm thinking Grief title...  :grin:

More form the Guardian

Yes, I too should know better than to copy/paste things from twitter in the heat of the moment.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=417287098368653&l=55bda423e6

They're Chechen?  We have but one choice:  Invade Venezuela!

I woke up and it sounds like a fucking Michael Bay movie happened.

Gunfights? Car chases? Tossed explosives? Fucking Russian terrorists?

Jesus Christ.

On a semi-related note: Actually quite relieved it was apparently a foreign nutcase, no matter his motivation, than a local crazy.

Not sure I follow that logic.

Why?

Because international crazies mean we lock-down immigration more.  National crazies mean Patriot Act^(TeaParty^1976)

The reaction of the right wing is predictable; literally crowing that the guys appear to be Islamic/Jihadis, but literally refusing to speak on how white these guys look.

If they're Muslim then they must be brown.

Now that we know they were Chechen, take a look around the net at what is being said about these "obviously Muslim" fellows.  I realize you weren't defending anyone, and trying to be objective, but there is a major victory dance being performed today by the racist islamophobes.  The green light for being openly hateful towards Muslims has been reset today.

Well both these threads are heading quickly to the politics forum.

There's a big issue with throwing brute force at a problem. Sometimes it ends up fitting square pegs in round holes.

The other issue is the What You See Is All There Is issue i.e. only the information in front of you matters. Redditers acted as if all they needed to do was look at videos and photos and they'd find enough evidence to 'prove' the bomber(s), and maybe if someone was shooting the right footage at the right time then someone might have seen something. But that's a lot of ifs. 

Reddit also didn't have access to the continuous video feeds from security cameras, or mobile phone records, or interviews with the wounded (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-19/boston-bombing-victim-in-iconic-photo-helped-identify-attackers.html), or a whole heap of other information that law enforcement did. They might have had more collective human hours to throw at the problem, but they are using much cruder instruments.

There's a case for online action to have scared a number of people of interest out there (who suddenly found they were people of interest because 4chan declared it so) into police stations to clear their name, but there's no evidence yet that law enforcement was even interested in any of these people. Such things may have been a waste of police resources.

This is going to end up a very interesting case study for a number of reasons. Top of that list will be how law enforcement can do any investigating when the Internet Justice Posse is potentially listening to the police scanner, entering a groupthink about suspects and loudly pointing the finger at the wrong people which then gets repeated by the media.

Crisis over; business resumes as normal.

That business being a call for blood.  Maybe we'll be buddies with Putin again, united by the common enemy of Chechnya.  I sure hope not, but our track record almost dictates it.

On a tangenital, soon to be found in Politics note, an interesting article about the London Marathon in the wake of this weeks events in Boston (http://www.sportsonearth.com/article/45177882).

http://gawker.com/5994999/is-the-new-york-post-edited-by-a-bigoted-drunk-who-fucks-pigs

That escalated quickly.

If they're blowing shit up, I don't care what race or religion they are.

https://twitter.com/J_tsar

So wow, it's now likley Sunil isnt the guy eh?  Disappointing.  The Scanner had all but verified him.  Oh well.  Moving on. 
It's been said Tsarnaev has a laptop with him and might be posting, but good luck sifting through the fakes.

Woke up to said Michael Bay movie and was like WTF?

Then heard the bombers were Chechen and was even more like WTF? X 7. However, the Chechen independence movement has never been very logical. They tend to blow shit up and expect the attention given the explosions will make people give a shit about their independence from Russia when in reality it just makes people not give a shit about their independence at all. They are brutal, vicious motherfuckers. They are like Koreans on Lineage.

I always thought it was a bit of weak sauce for an AQ operation (especially since they denied involvement) so I'm going to make a wild ass speculation and say these guys probably didn't have a lot of AQ/institutional backing on this. Since only 2 of the 5 bombs went off, it was sophisticated but not necessarily professional. It sounds a lot more like the idiot attempts that the FBI has been foiling since 9/11 - the Times Square van, the shoe bombers and such. Random, pissed off guys who are already here but don't have a lot of connection to the main leadership of AQ.

Also, these guys are about as brown as me, so the right wing brown hating machine can go fuck itself.

US people fear/distrust Muslims. The implied connotation is that they are brown. The reality is often something else. Not all Muslims are brown, and not all browns are Muslims.

But anybody that blows up innocent bystander civilians deserves to be skullfucked in Hell by whatever set of deities you claimed backed this mess.

I prefer we get to skullfuck him on Earth for a few years first, but I'm totally behind this.

You want sympathy for your oppression by the Russians? Blowing up 8-year old boys is not the fucking way to do it.

Listening to an MIT political science professor this morning on the local AM station in Boston (WBZ 1030 AM), he did say that there are strong links between AQ and Chechen separatists. AQ specifically tries to recruit them because Chechens aren't 'brown' and get through security with greater ease.

I don't think this is about Chechnya. I think this is about AQ. Chechens, although ignored by the US, have no reason to antagonize the west, since it has tried, half-heartedly, to show the brutality of the Russian oppression of the Chechen nation. I remember listening to very sympathetic reports on Chechen rebels as far back as 1992.

Now that Chechnya is largely forgotten by the west, it seems that it has become fertile soil  for AQ.

I doubt this is about getting attention/sympathy for a cause and more coming from alienation and revenge for some perceived injustice.

The market for the NYP has been the Tea Party demographic since between before there was a Tea Party. It has always made the NY Daily News look like the NW Times.

Their fuckstupid retrograde appraoch only occasionally gets national attention. But that never affects how they do things, because their audience doesn't change. They in fact probably like that their brand of thinking gets the exposure "it deserves".

He's a smart kid who just got radicalized it seems.

Here's a working scanner link:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ma-rt-9-window-cam

I would be totally astounded if this guy doesn't take his own life.

Clicked on that link, got an advert for the Mormons - totally trolled!  :awesome_for_real:

Just reading some profiles (guardian.co.uk and others) of the younger brother. Born in July 1993, they moved to the US 7 or 8 years ago. So when he was a 11/12 year old kid. Since then he got a stipendium, won some wrestling tournaments and even registered to vote. What drives someone to throw that all way, become a psychopathic murderer and probably never live beyond 19?

Middle Class terrorism, it's quite common.

Yes, maybe. But what's the point?

Ya, England's been handling that for a while now. I think we in the US thought we were more immune to that because of our perceived greater tolerance of religious groups. Naturally, teh crezy doesn't happen simply because some hicks or chavs are mean to you in high school. It probably started at home, with ultra conservative upbringing along with later exposure to all sorts of propaganda.

Possible hostage situation in progress http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ma-rt-9-window-cam

"Oh well?"

You (and the internet) accused the guy of murdering three people and wounding a hundred more.

"Oh. Well?"

There is none, they are clueless cunts latching onto to an excuse to give their pointless lives meaning.

Listening to this police scanner is so confusing. The codes they use make it unclear what's going on. Sometimes you hear something that should be like OMGWTF (hostage situation alluded to earlier) and then minutes pass and suddenly someone's saying to someone else 'go off duty and take some downtime'. Both on what seems to be the same channel.

Speaking of, I thought this was a pretty interesting post on SA (http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=414570428#post414570428):

Is CNN really that prevalent outside the US?

Yep, I don't care about why they did what they did. It's always brutal and stupid.

200m households and hotels in 200 countries.

I'm sure that its received by a bunch of households, but is it really that unopposed by other sources?

Sure is, and it does indeed beat the shit out of the US version.  I would think it is dominant on a total international level, but i am sure it gets clobbered in local markets on an individual basis.

If they run radios like we do (and I think most departments have a fairly standard set-up), every police radio call goes through the same channel. So you will hear about high priority and calls about shift changes or illegally parked cars.  Only when they go tactical will it switch it to a secured channel.  My guess is that the real stuff is going on over on the secured tactical channel that isn't coming through on any publicly available scanner.   Last night a lot of that stuff was going over the open channel because it was  rapid situation with multiple agencies. I imagine they have set up a patch to get everyone on a tac channel by this point.

I only know about this stuff because we are redoing our dispatch/radio set up so I have been much more deeply involved lately.

It's all over Poland.  Came with my basic cable package.

^^

It's a damn shame that Tripathi's family - who have been harrassed *heavily* by people since the Internet decided he did it - can't really seek any kind of restitution from the reddit/4chan/whatever denizens who did it to them. What a shit sandwich this has to be for them.

It's the only international news channel that is available for free on terrestrial TV in Germany.

Guys...this is embarrassing. I was going to catch up on this thread then post about how weird it is to be reading about this stuff when I'm very familiar with all the names and locations since I lived in Cambridge for quite a while.

Instead I see a thread in which excitable morons are convinced that someone who is missing and likely dead is the culprit, how 4chan ran circles around the FBI with their crack analysis and other inane shit.

You know when you guys post about how some idiot said something stupid on your Facebook and you facepalmed? Today you guys are those idiots!

I was going to post something after someone in the marathon thread said that someone was getting arrested on the Boston Common and could be the suspect. Guys - people get arrested on the Boston Common every fucking hour! (Usually someone drunk or smoking weed.)

For all your bitching about bad info coming from news media a lot of you have been as bad or worse.

This would probably be a good point to stop and reflect about how spazzing out like a chicken with your head cut off is not the best approach in these situations.

Sorry to be so blunt but it's somewhat infuriating to read people castigating the NY Post for printing dumb shit then two seconds later be ranting about the power of 4Chan and their briliant "pick a name at random" approach to crime solving.


Who gives a shit what you think? Sorry to be blunt but you know zero. It could be about Chechnya, it could be about AQ, it could be about two disaffected loners. You have no basis to believe any one over the other. Whatever you think is in no way informed.

I'm just waiting for Fox et. al to begin tacking the word "Liberal" on to descriptions of these guys.

"The Liberal Muslim extremist..."

"Chechnyan Liberal extremists.... "

He's blunt, but he has a point.

I'm not defending any individual, but looking kooky on the internet is not even in the same galaxy as what the media has been doing.

1. Reddit, 4Chan, etc is not a source for breaking news. Nor are they an informed source that should be relied on for figuring things out. "Said Reddit" is nothing any media outlet should ever, ever say or type.
2. CNN and NYP are media outlets. Granted one is WAY shittier than the other, but they both look like total buffoons. The internet looking like buffoons just makes it the internet.
3. Internet.
4. Internet.

Weird. Call going out the guy may be in a vehicle. Would be pretty wild if he escaped that perimeter.

EDIT: Vehicle is actually "at the scene." BOLO canceled.

A guy who is most likely a murder or suicide victim himself. But hey, he had a funny name and it fit the narrative of the magic of crowd-sourcing and the internet saving the day.

Edit: Haven't you guys ever seen that Twilight Zone episode where the power goes out and people all start blaming each other for nonsense reasons? Or the million other movies and TV shows based on the same premise?

People are stupid, panicky idiots in a crisis. Everyone having a global mouthpiece at that time doesn't create warm fuzzies.

While I understand that you're caught up in the rage about slander against Sunil, you need to take a step back because you're just being an jerk here.

Speculative thoughts on the possible motives behind a Chechen national committing a terrorist attack doesn't hurt anyone. I'm not falsely accusing anyone, or impugning on the sterling reputation of Al Qaeda by saying that the nationalities of the bombers may not have as much to do with their nation as it does to an umbrella terror group.

Get it? We were talking about the motives of a Chechen terror attack in the US being tied to global terror rather than a protest against the Russian oppression of Chechnya. That, er, is common sense.

Is a Chechnya terror attack like a Muslim terror attack?

Only if the Chechens are Muslim.  :oh_i_see:

In this sentence alone you've jumped to a couple conclusions that you really shouldn't have.

- You called it a "Chechen terror attack", as if we know for sure that their country of origin is relevant to their decision to do this.
- You present 'tied to global terror' or 'protest against Russia' as the only options, when it could just be two disaffected kids going Columbine.

And ask any Chechen dudes who get harrassed over the next few weeks just how harmless speculation like that is. I'd bet even money that some *Czech* people get shit on, because the names are kind of similar. The first thing I think of when the speculation machine goes into overtime, is how credulous a lot of people are, and how bad shit happens when they're looking for someone to blame.

Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi (https://www.facebook.com/pages/Help-Us-Find-Sunil-Tripathi/403275636436466)

It's back online if you want to give them some support, their guy is still missing even if the Media has moved on.

BOLO out for a minivan now.

My whole POINT is that you can't attribute motives to their nationality. That them being from Chechnya isn't sufficient of a motive. That a professor of MIT said AQ has had a presence in Chechnya and Chechens have trained in AQ camps. This isn't speculation, that's just facts. Therefore the nationalities of the boys in question isn't as critical to looking at motive as it may seem.

My intent was to dissuade jumping to conclusions by talking, in a general sense, of the possibilities from what we know. We know that Chechens have trained with AQ. We also know that Malaysians and Saudis have. So what?

I know you all want to beat up on Ghambit right now, and I'm sorry he isn't here to yell at, but lay the fuck off already.

The guy that's still out there has made many postings about Chechen freedom so it's not a totally wild ass assumption that it might be related to the Chechen independence.

Its not like you guys weren't greasing your palms at the prospect of a teaparty affiliated pyscho. Titt for tatt my felow douches, titt for tatt.

Memoirs of a troll, you say ?

 :oh_i_see:

Engels, I meant what I said quite literally: why should anyone care what you think when what you think is purely supposition?

You think it's isn't about Chechnya. Cool. There's absolutely no reason to believe that though other than blind faith. You might be right, you might be wrong, but your completely uneducated speculation is pointless.

You are the one jumping to conclusions by claiming it's not about Chechnya. How the hell do you know?

Edit: Maybe I'm picking on you a little, but I'm tired of "here's what I think" followed by someone offering whatever narrative they're most invested in. The fact is it could be related to Chechnya and you have no rational reason to believe otherwise. There's no reason to think one way or the other.

I think I speak for basically everyone sane in saying "We hoped it was any white person, reasons/affiliations are irrelevant."

For me personally, the reason I was hoping it was some right wing (or single issue or anti-globalization anarchist or whatever) lone nutso is that the consequences - for just about everyone - are much less terrible. When white Americans go bad, nobody beats white gas station owners to death. No countries get invaded. No reporters get kidnapped and beheaded. And so on. It isn't about 'ha ha we caught the other side doing something bad', or at least it isn't for me.

What he said. White assholes doing bad things don't have nearly the far reaching consequences of ZOMGBROWNMENACE!

You need to stop reading the fucking Internet then, dude. This thread would be pretty bare without speculation that has nothing to do with nothing.

I wanted it to be a random crazy white American because I am both tired of and ashamed of, our seemingly national crusade against brown people.

Seriously. It's an f13 thread.

There is a large difference between "here is a likely possibility" and "here is what I think happened."

Cancelling Red Sox and Bruins games again now lol this is getting pretty silly a city of 4 million in a state of martial law cuz one single fugitive is running around? This is unprecedentedly wimpish behaviour. L.A. didn't do this when Chris Dorner was on the loose.

 I was hoping for some homegrown crazy. Now that things calmed down a bit I was hoping to serve a few years in the army considering my chances of being sent to a -stan relatively low. Not so unlikely now.

In the meantime I'm sure white fundies will live up to your expectations in a hundred years. You know from the perspective of a person of color everyones white guilt gives me a decent amount of  :awesome_for_real:

LA did a pretty shitty job with the whole Dorner thing, so holding that up as a counter-example for how to do things isn't really effective.

M-e-m-o-i-r-s, by the way.

When bombers targeting large crowds are loose in your city canceling events that would invite large crowds seems wise. Before and after Red Sox games the surrounding streets are packed full of people. It would be extremely easy to put a bomb in a backpack somewhere in that area and blow some people up.

Dorner was not a bomber targeting packs of people. Completely different situation.

Edit:


Is this a date where any awkward silence has to be avoided at all costs? If the thread was shorter and lacked all that Sunil stuff I'm not sure how anyone would be worse off.

Miss spelling it ensures I wont have to name it memoirsofatroll2007

And what exactly is your fucking point? This is an Internet thread of mostly friendly geeks talking shit about anything that comes to mind. Wild speculation is what we do. We aren't going to get picked up on CNN. We're just sitting around shooting the shit. What got your fucking tits in a wringer?

Well, we don't know that one of us isn't one of the death threat senders.  :tinfoil:

There's a difference between an opinion about what is more likely and a hope about what's happening. Small scale, Boston, Patriots Day, and tax day were all pretty solid indications in one direction. Just like Chechnyan Islamic background is a pretty solid indication in another.

No, if it was from F13 it would have been poisoned natchos and a 300-page manifesto about DIKUs.

I think the term is stop hyperboling about things I don't find funny.

My point is that this thread (and the other one) is full of idiotic embarrassing nonsense.

Topics merged.

Funny how both threads were heading down similar paths...or circling the drain maybe.

Canceling the games probably has as much to do with not having the public safety manpower to staff them as anything.

Have we found out what they thought of the Raven-3L yet ?

Also, clearly these guys were fairly dangerous. The authorities still don't know for sure if there were others involved in the plot so I think taking precautions like this is probably a good thing.

There would probably also be about a thousand reports of suspicious people, bags left unattended, etc. Landsdowne is a total mess during Red Sox games.

I tried searching the younger one and WoW but my heart wasn't in it when I didn't get an easy find.  the last twitter feed I posted is his real one I believe, depressingly sad.

Sky is blue. Film at fucking 11.

Panic is a helluva drug.

Margalis, you need to chill a tad.  Firstly, the internets only speculated on who the perps might be (Mulegeta and Sunil).  After said speculation, the media hyped it, it was heard on police scanners, and even Sunil's friends thought it was him.  So... really, I'm struggling at this point to find any validity for the flames shooting from your nostrils.  Unless people react to their hypotheses, it's a fool's errand whining about it.  Those folk that trolled his family's FB/twitter w/o more firmly verified info?? Yah, those folks should eat a shit sandwich.

The medium does its job better than any other human form of communication in our history.  It sifts and parses information.  For all you know the FBI themselves thought it was Sunil, etc. and the fact it got parsed on the nets simply sped up the process... more photos were released, suspects were narrowed, etc.

Lastly, without net-based intelligence, it's likely this fuck would still be walking around UMass campus with his smug smile he has plastered all over his face.  (He's been already verified as going to school even after the bombings).  Once his face was plastered, he flushed himself out and now we are where we are; and know this for sure, as Dave said, by midnite his ass would've been found by amateurs regardless of the 2nd round of photos.  The dumps were that dynamic and that quick.

There's no doubt this doesnt happen in a pre-arpanet society.  Anyways, that's my last argument on the matter.  Not gonna stop digging up info. regardless.  

I'm helping by looking at things on the internet. You would be lost with out us!





 :oh_i_see:

The internet is just as likely to say the cookie monster did it than discover any valuable info.

Internet Comes Up With 8.5 Million Leads On Potential Boston Bombing Suspect (http://www.theonion.com/articles/internet-comes-up-with-85-million-leads-on-potenti,32095/)

 :why_so_serious:

Careful what you say on the internet folks.  Some retarded people might take it seriously and shoot people/things.  Then you're responsible for cancer.

I thought the Onion was a parody paper, but they're beginning to be more and more like the Daily Show...

Yeah that's not a good thing in my mind, either.

To quote Costello:

I really like the *idea* that the internet detective squad could get ahead of the FBI.  Unfortunately, random people on the internet have no filter and are just as capable of getting caught up in a narrative and ignoring contradictory evidence as any other assemblage of people (they just do it really *fast*).  Looking back, there were two huge problems with the ID: Sunil's hair growing 5 inches in a month (can be explained away as a disguise) and his friend Mike Mulugeta gaining about 50 pounds and 8 inches of height while losing most of his melanin (little harder to explain).

I look like an idiot, which is okay because I feel like an idiot, which is because I *was* an idiot.  Worst is that Sunil's family is being so damned *nice* about having had their son's name trashed and painted as a mad bomber, when they were scared to death for his safety before any of that.  Still trying to figure out how to work off that karma (liking the page doesn't cut it, I'm 3500 miles away, and they aren't asking for donations).

--Dave

Uneasy.

wow... :ye_gods:

(http://www.godlikeproductions.com/sm/custom/f9fbaaefd7.jpg)
(http://www.godlikeproductions.com/sm/custom/2d66cf099d.jpg)

All they wanted was information on the suspects, more photos (from which they could learn route, time), better photos for id and the normal response of "hey I know that guy he's....", they got all that extremely fast.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/04/boston-marathon-friday-suspect-killed/64381/


It was a success, sure people fingered the wrong guy but that was happening before the FBI briefing anyway so *shrug*, such a big news story I don't think that could have been prevented.

Wow. Looks like he got away. Crazy.

Yes, but I personally take that as the risk of crowd-sourcing anything. Opinions are not seperate from personalities, as the latter drives the delivery style of the former. To me there isn't a lot of difference between someone who starts a post with "In my opinion" from someone who starts with "this is what happened". It's all in the gray area of opinion as far as I'm concerned.

I don't blame 4chan for getting it wrong. I would blame the FBI if they did, but only because I expect them to have access to a lot more information than a bunch of non-security personnel. This is of course why the FBI isn't the one posting "here's the guy/1/1/!!!" all over the place like everyone from 4chan up through print publications.

It feels like this got personal for you because of roots in that area. I totally get it. I wasn't around these parts during 9/11, but felt exactly the same way on the boards I was at. That shit hit home closer than anything before and since. But at the same time, I'd rather have the largely mature group here lacing their insights with personality than the saber-ratting from reactionary immature sites or the silence of the "wait until they tell us what to think" crowd.

It's not clean. But such things really can't be.

Indeed crazy that he was able to get away with so much force looking for him.

Yes, you did look like an idiot, but now you don't. People make mistakes but not everyone owns up to it, so kudos to you.


Crowd-sourcing for information and leads can be a double-edged sword but there's nothing wrong with the idea of using internet crowds to gather a lot of info fast. The problem is that the "wisdom of crowds" is really about volume more than wisdom. The internet is really good for getting a bunch of people to say "hey, I think I recognize this guy." It's really bad at expert-level analysis.

When you have a mass of people looking at pictures you are going to get a lot of false leads. That's just the nature of false positives when you have a single set of culprits. You are going to get a lot of people who plausibly look like they could be the bad guys but aren't.

That said, how did they identify these guys anyway? Just from the robbery?

Some of it (or maybe most of it), came from one of the victims after he regained consciousness.

See : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-19/boston-bombing-victim-in-iconic-photo-helped-identify-attackers.html

Saying now that they didn't do the robbery which is weird because of that security cam footage that was floating around.  Names seemed to come out after they had one of them in their hands (deceased) so I imagine it flowed from that.

Probably found the dead one's fingerprints in AFIS (contrary to CSI, it takes hours even if you jump the queue), and everything went from there.

--Dave

Or just his ID in his wallet.

I don't think that would have taken as long as it did.

--Dave

Again, if you want to follow the chase, use this ustream (there will be some adverts):
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ma-rt-9-window-cam

(you can also listen to earlier recordings)

DO NOT report this anywhere else though pls (or we'll lose the feed).

As of now, they've got someone lying prone in the cockpit of a boat and they're laying perimeter, armor, etc.  I posit they've shot at this dude and that's what they've heard on the news.  At a small marina a few blocks away.    Boat is trailered in a backyard.

Vague and unconfirmed reports of police actions related to a boat. If you want to keep an eye on it: http://live.boston.com/Event/Live_blog_Explosion_in_Copley_Square

EDIT: Sounds like they think he's in a tarp-covered boat in a backyard. They're evacuating people nearby.

Channel 5 has 2 separate reports of multiple shots

Ya, they have a visual on him in the boat.

http://www.mzv.cz/washington/en/czech_u_s_relations/news/statement_of_the_ambassador_of_the_czech.html

 :oh_i_see:

Love how the reports are about him "not moving" while the radio calls from the heli keep talking about him "just sitting up" and "moving to the back of the boat".

Haha, that dude is totally all like, "Since I know how stupid the people are in the U.S. I'm going to take this opportunity to make sure that you stupid fucks don't cause problems for us considering we aren't even remotely related to what you all are talking about."

Fire on the boat apparently.

EDIT: Shooting flash-bang now.

Getting ready to fire a flashbang into the boat, even though there's 20gals of gasoline in the cockpit.

This sure takes longer to play out than it does on TV.

This is where he is at:

http://goo.gl/maps/q57C6

You can see the trailer that currently has the boat he is hiding in.

Negotiator moving in.

They are cutting the heli downlink so it can't come over the scanner.

The internet has played with Google Maps to post these pics of the boat/area. Apparently the owner came home from work, went out to the yard, noticed blood around the boat and called it in. Great on him. This is from various sources, but, well: internet.

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BIQKNn3CIAAjTbL.jpg:large) (http://www.darniaq.com/Images/BIQN5rDCcAEI3XS.jpg)

Edit: cropped and rehosted the second image to remove the homeowner's address. It's all over the web but, well, I'll do what I can.

Idiot media members compromising the scene.

What's crazy is if you look at the timeline, if these idiots didn't release the guy they carjacked so close to the area (in front of a gas station that almost always have cameras none-the-less) they could very well be out of Mass. and probably would not have been identified as fast (Looking back it really sounds like they were ID'ed when they ID'd the dead brother).

Why cant they just hit him with a tranq shot and then go in?  This guy is gonna bleed out before they can question him.

My guess is line of sight issues, possibly range. Various reports of first flash bangs and then gas thrown in, also likely related to line of sight.

After they cut the link it's all been second hand reporting from the few media personnel able to get a word or two out.

SUSPECT IN CUSTODY!!!!

and "medic" shouted immediately after. Also, eyes on a black bag they found...

That bag is somewhere else.

Boston Globe tweeted (https://twitter.com/BostonGlobe/status/325406279000535040) three other people in New Bedford, MA (https://maps.google.com/maps?q=new+bedford,+ma&hl=en&ll=41.832735,-71.078796&spn=1.565511,2.164307&sll=41.728024,-71.324806&sspn=0.196013,0.270538&hnear=New+Bedford,+Bristol,+Massachusetts&t=m&z=9) taken into custody related to this. Continually looking for the article they'll post.

Edit: Suspect #2 in custody on Boston Globe (http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/18/mit-police-officer-hit-gunfire-cambridge-police-dispatcher-says/4UeCClOVeLr8PHLvDa99zK/story.html)

I'd expect they'll shut down he and his brother's Twitter/FB/youtube feeds now (it's been eerie staring at them still up)... unless they're hoping accomplices may post there.  Subject#1's youtube feed is enough to get arrested in most states.  Seriously, it's pretty fucked up; they alluded to this on the news as well, wondering why he fell through the cracks when he came back to the states.

Thing I've been curious about is (and maybe this has been covered?) whether the younger brother was recruited by the older. Seems like the younger one was kinda well put together while the elder was something of a screwup. Wonder if we're looking at another DC Shooter situation here (role model elder with impressionable younger, iirc).

Had the same thought re DC Sniper.

Because we've been focused on middle-eastern and African (brown, IOW) Muslims, not white ones (literally Caucasian).

--Dave

Made that comment a few pages back right after the video was released based upon their body language.

/self high-five!

I read somewhere, forgot where, that they caught him because of a tip from the houseowner.  Citizen arrest just about.  Huzzah!
Also realized, hospitalized victims now have to have the bomber in the room nextdoor.   :uhrr:

Reddit et al are now news sources - either directly (i.e. you go and read them yourself) or filtered through other sites / sources. They shouldn't be relied upon, but when something on them starts drawing eyeballs other sites will start focusing on the same story. The site becomes the story.

The problem with shrugging and going, "Internet" is that the Internet has real world effects. Real people can get their lives changed for better or worse. Right now I'm sure there are a host of online writers who have had to shelve their "How Reddit Solved The Boston Bombing" articles and if things had worked out differently there would have been a lot of self-congratulatory backpatting on these sites. Crowdsourcing advocates would have been dancing with glee.

I can't accept the lop-sidedness of if the Internet got it right then it's all sunshine and rainbows and who needs the old establishment anyway (not saying that's your personal view Schild, but that's the vibe from threads like these), but now because the Internet Justice Posse got it wrong then it's just, "Well, it's the internet - what do you expect?". It's dodging responsibility.

Well, there's the desire for narrative by industry. The MSM is all set to always mock any sort of post-print/TV coverage as faux journalism when the entire concept of print journalism derived from a similar leap in tech. Meanwhile, online groups split between those desiring equivalent relevance (look we're important too!) and the anti-establishment independents who sneer at the "oligarcs".

In other words, everyone's got a story they want to believe in.

Up to level headed people to keep the balance until our behavior informs how these businesses evolve.


Explains why I was having deja vu while writing that then. Only took me a few pages to catch up :-)

Daily Caller: "Pot Head, Obama Supporter. Younger bombing suspect called 'normal pot head.' Older brother was father of three-year-old girl"

:oh_i_see:

The Feds would not agree with a single negative overall assessment of using public info. assets to help a case.  We can bitch about it till the cows come home, they're still gonna use "us" with this new medium to ultimately get the job done.  #1 Recruitment effort right now is for IT for god's sake.

As said also, at every major point in this effort has been citizen assistance.
-parsing/providing the images
-parsing/providing possible suspects
-Calling MIT PD for initial disturbance (causing the manhunt)
-Reporting initial standoff (twitter, video) and verifying suspect
-Finding the suspect in the end (in the boat)

As for the ending, I'm suspicious that the homeowner didnt come packed and open fire on his own.  The police have left out what really happened when the guy lifted the flap and saw #2 lying in there.  No way someone goes out there w/o packing heat.

Honestly? Because I don't want to believe domestic politics have gotten that bad.

I mean, obviously it has -- there's ricin mailings and militias and shit like the Oklahoma bombings, but....*shrug*. I'd like to live in denial.

This? Hand to god, based on absolutely nothing except the fact that these chuckleheads apparently never expected to get caught (and thus panicked, raided a 7-11, and stole a car) -- I don't think it's terrorism. Or Islam. Or anything really, but basically just a sociopathic kid who thinks he's way the fuck smarter than everyone. (Honestly, I figure one of the brothers manipulates the other like a damn puppet. Probably the one that didn't die last night).

I think this is basically a spree killing. A school shooting by a guy who wanted to keep going. Sorta like the Beltway snipers. "Because I can and the idiot sheep won't catch me and also I'm fucking narcissistic as shit, lack the ability to empathize, and am a sociopath". (Or Psychopath. Fuck if I can keep them straight. There's a charming type that sees other people as not real, tools for enjoyment).

Fuck the bullshit Islam crap. I don't buy it. I think this is just a creepy little spree killer who was getting his jollies, not some fucking strike against the Great Satan. (Although he'd probably like everyone to think so, because that'd be just further proof he's smarter than everyone).

Here's a fun thing.

Erick Son of Erick: Cowards? Really? (http://www.redstate.com/2013/04/19/cowards-really/)


Now what he said isn't interesting. He's correct technically. What's strange is that it seems to have disappeared off of the front page and no one else has posted about it past the first 5 people.

The problem is that when the internet fails who is held accountable? Nobody. That's the problem. At least when the FBI or the Police fuck up we can hang someone for it.

Didn't Bill Maher get fired from ABC for saying something similar about the 9/11 hijackers?

Nah, what's interesting is he said it, and at way the wrong fucking time.

These kids were cowards not because of what they did, but how they did it. Random targeting for god-only-knows-what reason and seemingly shocked how quickly they had to go on the run from the manhunt (just going by what was covered, they didn't seem to have an escape plan, which implies they thought they'd get away with this for some time... I think someone else mentioned this a few pages back).

That's cowardice: "I'm pissed, but I'm not going to tell anyone why nor try and identify the root cause and figure out a way to fix. I'm going to just blow some shit up like it's fucking GTA."


I hope you're right. Maybe the three taken into custody in New Bedford are just being brought in for questioning. Local news is reporting it as "arrest" but that's only from neighbors' accounts, nothing official. Given the week this has been, I can't blame anyone who thinks Cops show up + people going away with them = arrest.

Wasn't there a 3rd suspect they saw the two men talking to at the marathon?

And my FB feed is already full of my conservative peeps crying that Obama is parading out on to TV in prime time to either A) claim the victory was because of him or B) that he used a script instead of speaking from the heart   :uhrr:

Re the mistaken identity earlier. I didn't post it, but I don't blame anyone for posting it. Sunil looked like the FBI suspect. They had a similar nose, hairline and eyebrows. He was missing from the same area. It was quite a coincidence.

Even one of Sunil's college friends, who had long been involved in the search for him, tweeted "OMG it is Sunil". I would have put that fact in a story.

Do they have a good legal case against the kid?

Beck gives Obama till Monday, or else (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PODZaaMTwfg)   :why_so_serious:

Or else what?

Or else he'll keep doing his talk show?

Is Beck still shilling gold?

As to the whole marathon thing -- surprised at how quickly this ended up moving. I figured there was a good chance we'd never have any idea who did it unless they kept doing it -- or started writing in badly worded manifestos.

I wanna know wtf they were thinking not having an exit strategy.  I'm thinking either they planned on becoming suicide bombers or they really thought they wouldn't get caught.

My supposition is that the "mastermind" of this was the older brother whose sole qualification seems to be being able to get punched in the head.  He influences his smarter, younger, susceptible brother into building the devices and carrying out the plan but that's about as far as the "planning" went.

As I said before, there is no way that this "crowdsourced investigation" can be stopped now. This is going to happen forever now. We can huff and puff about whether it's a good idea or not until we go blue in the face, it's not going to change.

The danger is when someone innocent is accused by the crowd mob another time that something far more serious will happen to them. When this develops into full-blown vigilantism and brown people with backpacks are getting strung up from lampposts then the world will have taken another step towards chaos and barbarism.

Couple of other things that I find disturbing about this whole event. Firstly, and this isn't new of course but I've not really thought about it before, the accusations at the start from the right that this was a "false flag". Clearly there's a double standard there since now that the suspects have been identified as foreign and brown those claims have disappeared. But just the fact that you have a sizable minority who are so disenfranchised by government and so misinformed by media that they genuinely believe that their government would fake terrorist attacks on it's own population is very worrying. Dismissing them as crazies strikes me as lazy. Sure, some of the people posting shit like that on Twitter may well be clinically mentally ill, but not all of them by a long shot.

Secondly there's a serious double standard being expressed by pretty much everyone talking about it, even on this board and in the liberal media, and that's the way that white, American suspects are referred to as "lone wolves" and foreign suspects are referred to simply by group - "muslim", "Chechen", etc. The implication is that if the perpetrators had been white Americans then nothing much would have happened as a result. The individuals responsible would have been caught, tried, vilified (or more likely just killed by police etc) and that would have been that. If however, as it seems is the case, they were brown or foreign or both then the entire religion or country from which they originated would be targeted - possibly militarily, at least there would have been strong pressure for that to happen.

First off no it did not look like him. Sunil has a hooked nose and the bomber does not. You saw the noses as similar because you wanted to see the noses as similar.

Second off no it was retarded. Full on motherfucking retarded that Sunil was a bomber. The reasons are obvious if anyone actually bothered to look at sunil's case. Sunil's disappearance was mysterious in a way that was sure to attract attention and the fact they he left his wallet would have made carrying out the bombing harder.

Basically in order for the Sunil story to make sense Sunil would have had to decided to act in such a way as to create law enforcement manhunts for him only weeks before he planned to bomb a major sporting event. Anyone should have seen that and said "not credible" just like the "guy on the roof" and the other 8.5 million suspects reddit identified

So are they enemy combatants who get waterboarded in gitmo or do they go to trial in a three ring circus?

Yes.  But that was about brown people not Caucasians so it wasn't acceptable.

Congrats on getting them both, shutting down an entire city, just to get someone who has fucked with you is something I approve of, it might even make future idiots think twice.

Now they'll want to know why they did it and that's much less interesting.

Pretty sure Obama's said civilian trial, which is good for a number of reason including the lack of 'glamour' i.e. effectively saying to the surviving bomber "no, you're not an enemy of the state that needs to be locked up in a special extra-judicial prison camp, you're a murderer".

Have a nice, legal, public trial, find him guilty, and lock him up in Supermax for the rest of his natural.

Getting wind of an Australian angle, actually. Our newses tonight went nuts for the fact Tamerlan Tsarnaev's apparent YouTube account reveals he was into sermons by controversial Sydney cleric Sheikh Feiz Mohamed (http://www.news.com.au/world-news/north-america/us-authorities-probe-youtube-playlist-with-aussie-sheik-that-may-be-dead-suspects/story-fnh81jut-1226624852207). Nobody knows where the Sheikh (Aussie born and raised) is at the moment.

And now apparently Fox News is claiming that apart from the Russian government referring Tamerlan to the USA for something, the Australian government did too, two years ago. Not sure why that would be the case, but our spy agency ASIO was reported to have briefed our Prime Minister earlier (I'd have thought that's just standard procedure, not about an Australian link). Not the best of sources so far...

He is getting a civilian trial because the kids an American citizen.  No deliberate message there, if he gets tried and the family still gives a shit to afford him a lawyer, he'll get a few years for resisting arrrest, probably served in a pysch ward. He'll see the sun light when he is 30 or 25.

Not a chance. If there's any evidence linking him to the bombing then he'll get charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism and he'll never see the outside of a cell again.

Even if they can't link him to the bombing, he's going to get life for killing a cop. The only way this kid is going to avoid spending the rest of his life in Walpole is if he dies in hospital or the feds take over the case and give him the needle.

Or if they pin the blame on his brother. 15 years tops.

They better fucking not. I'm anti death penalty at the best of times but particularly so in this case because it'll be the easy way out. He needs to live so that he can spend the rest of his wretched life coming to terms with what he did.

He won't get life.

That's an odd opinion to hold.

Domestic terrorism is punished extremely harshly everywhere in the world, especially if it takes place on "home soil".  Plus a future amnesty or peace deal with anyone aligned with these guys looks remote as US policy would more likely involve massive retaliation.

Someone else who will point to the 'facts' will be Alan Jones, who was proven part right in his ugly stereotyping (http://www.theage.com.au/national/alan-jones-suggests-leftwing-radical-students-link-to-boston-bombing-20130417-2hz8y.html):

If you say something three times on the internet it comes true, or so I hear.  :oh_i_see:

Called that one.

Agree. It's always stupid and pointless reasoning. The fact that people have a sick obsession with killers makes it even more depressing.

So I agree with this, but I also don't know why some consider this a big deal. Sure, the magnitude of information provided and dissected was bigger than usual. But they've been crowd-sourcing this kind of thing since they started posting missing pictures on telephone poles. So I don't know if we saw any sort of quantum shift in the way some people are talking about it.

Maybe it's just as that Wired article said: it's that law enforcement is more open to accepting citizen submissions?

And sorry to derail here, but this is one of the few things I do feel strongly about:
I respectfully disagree :-)

Why do I need to pay for that? Guy's broken. He's not going to become an upstanding mortgage holder soccer dad except by divine intervention. So now he gets indoctrinated into the social rules of whatever prison he ends up and eventually accepts that that is all there is in life on my dime?

Fuck that.

When we can actually turn people like that around successfully and consistently, then I'll be opposed to the death penalty. For now, I'm fine with that being what we've got for the truly busted people.

Life without parole is generally cheaper than the average death sentence (http://www.economist.com/node/13279051).

You don't know how conspiracy charges work do you?

That is quite literally the sound of man who should be covered in his own feces while wandering about with dazed eyes on the subway.

It is an act for the news entertainment crowd. Fox News Commentary or whatever they call it is the WWE of the news world.

WWE has more facts.

You've removed all context from around the words you've quoted me as saying. Ironic when your post is about reporting stuff.

It is a fact that one of the "find Sunil" people (a college friend of his - tweet now hidden) believed she recognised him, posting "OMG it is Sunil". That's the specific fact I said would have been worthy of a mention, perhaps in a liveblog at the time - that someone who knew him thought she recognised him. This does not make me Alan Jones.

Americans are fond of saying that our way is more civilized than others'. An eye for an eye is the law of the tribe; vengeance is the law of despots and anarchists. In other countries, he wouldn't have been taken alive, never mind put on trial.

If you think we're better than than them, put your money where your mouth is. Let the boy live.

If my taxes had to go up to keep him alive and safely incarcerated, I would be perfectly serene with that - because every dollar spent is a dollar that proves we are better than the tribes, despots, and anarchists.

Sorry, preachy. I have many friends in Boston and spent the whole week on the edges of chairs. I've seen enough death.

If he confesses, they will likely let him live. If he goes full whacko and tries to defend his actions with some sort of McVeigh defense, they'll kill him.

No, its much more likely that she believed the motherfucking lies that redditors parroted about the scanners saying it was Sunil (which of course, just like the idea it was him in the first place, doesn't make any sense) and got repeated so many times by "reputable news organizations" that people thought it was true when it almost certainly was not.

Except every time, it turns out to be a lie.

There have been definitive improvements in some areas, Boston used to be a major focal point for raising funds for terrorism.  I don't think it's a question of being "more civilized" or not, maybe just not being so incredibly naive.  Though thinking about it, having the death penalty at all is pretty barbaric.

Those costs are mostly the courts, not the process of execution itself. Meanwhile, at least in MA, it's $44k a year (http://www.cjpc.org/doc_doc_stats.htm) to keep someone in jail. I'd rather put that into a scholarship for kids affected by this thing.

This isn't just about the costs though, it's about the logic. Keeping a broken person in jail for the rest of their lives does absolutely nothing. Whatever initial pain caused by incarceration dulls over time. How can it not? 20 years? 30? How long does it take for someone to acclimate to whatever situation they're in and won't ever change? I'm sure there's tomes written about this psychology all over the place. I can't imagine anything wakes up in their 40th year in jail saying "man this sucks" with the same heat they did on day 2.

So acclimation into some combination of familiarity and inculturation over that 40 years cost taxpayers $1.7mm. To me, life in prison with no chance of parole just means a boon to whoever owns the prison.

This is world's different from intending to parole someone of course.

We dont have the death penalty, so that takes care of that. Plus our prison system was last updated when Lincoln was President so dont worry that he's getting some kind of leniency. Walpole is a hellhole.

 :roll:

I don't suppose anybody wakes up the day after their execution regretting their actions, either.

--Dave

Hey, you wanna convince me that you're Number One, find me something good you're number one at.

I'll wait.

Fat chicks?

"Tell him what he's won, Johnny!"

You can rent and apartment and eat 3 normal meals a day in Boston for less than that!

I get that security and stuff costs money but even so, seems crazy high. Not saying it's wrong, I'm just saying that number is crazy.

I doubt this guy is going to be prosecuted in the state system, so the death penalty is still very much a possibility. He also would end up in one of the federal supermax prisons if convicted.

Seen the plates on the car pics Dzhokhar tweeted (http://twitter.com/J_Tsar) last month?

(http://i34.tinypic.com/15g8303.jpg)

(http://i33.tinypic.com/2wnnsb4.jpg)

Shit that's real?


Depends where they end up after they're dead. But that's another thread  :drill:

Edit: Interesting thermal imaging shot (after they trained the FLIR on the boat based on the 911 call from the owner). Source (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17830076-secret-weapon-how-thermal-imaging-helped-catch-bomb-suspect?lite). More on TPM (http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/police-release-photos-showing-bombing-suspect-in-boat?ref=fpb).

(http://m.static.newsvine.com/servista/imagesizer?file=boyle8DFDB2A0-B4FC-1C08-B36F-EF6564D139DF.jpg&width=600)

Yes. @J_Tsar is real. There are some "his twitter is fake" warnings around, but they are about @Dzhokhar_ which was wrongly said to be his.

Lots of people are reading the plate as TERRORISTS #1 but it seems it's TeRRORISTa #1. Not sure who it belonged to. They were into cars. Could have been just someone they met one night.

Edit: the car reportedly (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312123/Boston-latest-Terrorista-1-license-plate-friends-Boston-bomber-arrested-female.html) belongs to one of the three detained acquaintances of the suspects. Might be just a Harlem Shake reference.

(http://i36.tinypic.com/10mknb5.jpg)

Court costs for executions are not going to go down. So it doesn't matter where the costs are accrued in the process-- it still costs more to execute someone that keeping him in jail for life.

Neither here nor there, but I'm already tired of hearing about this.

It's going to descend into politics from this point on anyway. We're already edging around the death penalty debate, and the inevitable clusterfuck that comes from that.

Con control should be coming along fairly soon too.

What about a compare/contrast with the hunt for this guy and that LA cop? :)

 :why_so_serious:

Anyone else find this OpEd from the Guardian a bit offensive? (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/21/boston-marathon-bombs-us-gun-law)

Not trying to stir the pot here, but how does this shit even get past screening?

Since this is going into the Politics forum eventually, i don't particularly find it offensive, and agree with most of its points (although not all).  We americans like to be hypocritical over what deaths we want to sympathize with and what deaths we shrug off.

*edit* Also, I haven't seen many articles about actually how much died or the aftermath in general of the Texas explosion (which last I heard from a thread in here, 70 died instead of 3) because the news has spent more time covering the boston bombing.  Hell the front page of USA today has a lot of articles on the Boston bomber getting caught (from all angles!) and I'm not sure where to actually find what's going on in Texas now.

I'm just surprised that someone is so myopic about the difference between daily routine violence and a terrorist attack. Yes, sure the US should have better gun regulation. No question. But terrorists are an unknown quantity, capable of a single shooting spree to knocking down skyscrapers. I don't think it was disproportionate at all to lock down Boston to find these guys because there is no way of knowing the extent of a terrorist plan. It could have been, and probably was, a Columbine type affair of two kids with delirious ideas of anti-US 'heroism' or it could be an activated cell. That's the nature of terrorism, and frankly, I would have expected a Brit, more than just about anyone else, to know this.

It's the Guardian, the fact the individual points are valid doesn't mean that overall thrust of article is right.  You shut down a city to get one guy, I think that's a great way to deal with terrorism and something we in the UK never tried.  The Guardian thinks it's an overreaction, fuck em, you completely eradicated one cell and negated the impact from the bombing event faster than most would have thought possible.  

You guys love your guns and I agree with everything they said on getting wise on that, but it's still a different subject entirely.

Thank you AP, I feel a little bit more sane now. I know its the Guardian, but I tend to LIKE the Guardian, by and large. I must admit I haven't read their editorials much.

*dons apologist hat* CiF is a bit of a crapshoot at times, and doesn't necessarily reflect the overall editorial direction of the paper. It's intended to throw up a mix of controversy and sober comment. You win some, you lose some.

Personally I feel that this could probably have waited a week or two before being published but otherwise there's nothing substantially wrong with it. It would probably have been written better if it was more general; it's not just Americans who are terrible at assessing the risks associated with black swan events like terrorism, all humans are like that. The sorry state of American gun-control just offers a convenient point to spin a contrast around.

YMMV

To be honest, I think the article makes good and reasonable points.  What it doesn't do, however, is have any fucking sense of timing or of NOT using a tragedy as a springboard to make those points.  Poor taste.

               

Everyone in the media or politics uses tragedy to push their agenda. This will be no different. Nor will the next one.

In other news, facial recognition technology didn't help find the suspects (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/04/boston-police-chief-facial-recognition-tech-didnt-help-find-bombing-suspects/)

They also mentioned the only reason they released official photos was to try and stop social media from pinning the wrong people

If they think the population will sit around and wait for a large, ponderous, multi-agency task force to make a decision and act on it, they're sorely mistaken.  This whole thing was fuckin botched by the Feds from the get-go anyways; sorry if that stings, but that's the reality... and they've essentially done nothing but clean up the messes from two-steps behind.

Riddle me this.  If these guys were such a damned "danger" to the population, why'd it take them 3 days to release any usable information?  That's way too long.  Fuckin kid went back to class, with an arsenal of explosives at home mind you, like it never happened.  That's just not gonna cut it, sorry... also goes against most procedures local PD's use to find someone - e.g. they want to catch someone, they put out an APB immediately using whatever resources they have.  They dont get "cute" about it as it's not worth the risk.

The guardian article was interesting to me because it analyzes the fine line between "normal" violence and "terrorism."  In normal violence, public safety typically does whatever it can as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat.  In "terrorism" however, federal agencies are more interested in the larger picture - and take their time.  Fuck that.  Violence is violence and they should be addressed the same once committed.

That ars technica article just confirms what most people have thought, that the govt. essentially sat on useful information with a couple of very dangerous people running around lose.  That pisses me off to no end.  So if it takes next-gen media to get them off their arses, more power to the media.  Carry on.

Yeah, if you look further, author is US citizen living in US, writes


in a British paper which sure seems like it was written to imply it was British opinion, I suspect he wrote it just to fuel the US gun debate and further his own ego.

Edit to add, as might not make the news in the US, British Public opinion on events in Boston http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22236946

If they had rushed info out that was wrong, it could have been worse.  Misidentifying the suspect can be worse than not identifying it as the resources get diverted and an innocent person could end up being arrested/killed.

The "social media" did fuck-all in this whole thing except put out misinformation and muck things up.  It's a reality of today's world, but your continued pimping of it is pretty stupid in light of how incorrect it was on pretty much everything.

I am sorry, are you retarded? The FBI and local police were the only ones who did anything. Social Media wasn't "two steps ahead" they were "twenty steps in the wrong fucking direction, indicting innocent people and potentially causing more violence"

Fuck that noise.


It does seem kind of offensive. The situation revolving around their capture wasn't something that could easily be contained and, if it had gotten out of hand, would have involved many many deaths.

I mean London shut down after the bus/subway bombings right? Well this was basically at a point where we were chasing suspects who had the capability to do something like that if things got out of hand. Of course the city shut down. Its not worth him getting to a subway and blowing it up in rush hour.

No. Having lived safely and freely into my 40s in the UK and Australia where guns and shootings are extremely rare, I do not find it offensive. I feel we should ask exactly this about the USA after this event. I find it bizarre that you find it offensive. I am not trying to rile you up, I am answering your question from the point of view of someone who would read a British newspaper.

[edit: typo, need new keyboard]

To be frank, terrorism is non-discriminating violence, while 99% of gun violence is discriminating. When someone dies to a gun, most of the time, they were the target or living in a crime infested neighborhood to begin with. "Middle Class" americans take great pains to avoid such neighborhoods, and thus no one cares how many people die due to guns unless someone decides to open fire where people feel safe. Same with terrorism, most peoples basic defense of getting as far away from the ghetto as possible generally doesn't work all too well when some nutcase wants to prove a point by targeting where you feel safe.

Offensive, but appropo.  :why_so_serious:

It's like Ghambit lives in some sort of alternate reality where events played out exactly the opposite as they did in ours.

Edit: As far as "why freak out about terrorism and not guns" the answers are pretty obvious if you think for a few seconds, and the question is no more interesting than "why freak out about guns instead of AIDS in Africa?"

That sums up everything right there.

"I reject your reality and substitute my own."   :grin:

I think you guys are misunderstanding my point.  I'm not saying social media is some kind of better solution to anything we've got now, I'm not even saying it should be used directly (that'd just be outright assinine).  What I AM saying is there are many cases where Public Safety needs to disseminate information quicker and more definitively, both so the public can react safely, AND to curtail false assumption from the hive mind.

Frankly I'm a bit surprised you guys can just sit here and take your medicine given the facts of how things went down.  I see a slew of problems and places for improvement.  So I'm not all like 'Murica fuck yah this time, though it ended on a relatively positive note.

How things went down?

The FBI had a suspect within 3 days and had apprehended them on the 4th.

That being said, the FBI doesn't seem to have known who they were until they had one of them on the slab.  The key is in how/why that MIT campus cop got shot, since that's what set off the dominoes.  If they hadn't been throwing bombs/grenades out the window, we might still be looking for the identity of the bombers.

--Dave

But why would they be expected to?

The article was an opportunistic self-aggrandizement using the age old method of false equivalency.

This was particularly dumb:
We shut a whole city down for a day and threw 9,000+ security types at this. This isn't "willingly cowed". This is "fuck you, we're all in this together".

The freakout happened because we thought it was another 9/11. It only turned out to be two kids possibly indoctrinated or possibly just amping up Columbine. But we didn't know that on Monday or Tuesday. And whose to say all of the things that went into finding these kids would have happened without all the rest of the ancillary things that went on?

I don't criticize the need for a full accounting of all events. Everyone including the boat owner (you see blood on the boat and walk towards it?!) will be analyzing this every which way. I'm just critizing self-serving articles like the above that in the pursuit of trying to ask a question, end up asking the wrong ones, and not caring.

They walked up to his car and shot him.   They then carjacked a guy, flat out told him they were the bombers, let him go (huh?), then drove around with the guy's cellphone still on and in the car.  They were tracked and when engaged all hell broke loose.

These guys were not exactly master criminals.

Shutting a city down is not "Fuck you,we're all in this together." There is literally no argument that could be made to say that shutting down the city is a rational response. There is no argument that can be made that says they thought it was another 9/11. Shutting down a city is in fact the definition of being cowed by terrorism and paranoid that the worst has yet to come.

I might agree with that if it had been the response to the bombing, but the only thing they cancelled in response to the bombing was the baseball games.  It was the active manhunt for a guy that had already escaped from pursuit three times that triggered the lockdown.  Nobody wanted to be the one that said "he got away because we didn't want to X".

--Dave

There was a guy on the loose who did not have any inhibitions against throwing/placing bombs into crowded places. Its not like the city shut down because there was some amorphous threat.

I'm also pretty sure the goal of terrorism wasn't to shut down a city for a few hours while the guys who did it were caught. The effect would have been infinitely more terrifying if they were still at large.

If you are referring to the Boston lockdown though (which is the course of the thread atm), when Boston was locked down it wasn't because they thought it was another 9/11.  The lockdown happened *after* they knew it was just two kids, one of which was already dead

Fixed that for ya. That article is pretty much shit through and through. Its not all wrong but its not interesting or illuminating in any way.

People are bitching about the lockdown? Forget that the real question is how the fuck did the younger one get away from the giant fucking shoot out? Anyone have any idea because that was always the real mindfuck. They unloaded 20 rounds and bombs were thrown and he what, got back into the car and ran over his brother and got away???

It was dark, the cops weren't quite sure who they were looking for, and the brother's suicide charge was probably intended to give him a chance to escape.  They grabbed up the random guy and thought they had both, and by the time they figured out they didn't the kid was out of the net.

--Dave

To some, the only thing better than a tragedy is arm-chair quarterbacking the response.

So over a decade of massive expenditure on law enforcement, counter-terrorism and surveillance and multiple laws enacted in the war on terrorism and it all fails to stop a couple of teenagers with some pressure cookers?

30,000 gun deaths every year and your politicians fail to enact even the most timid, basic laws to check the backgrounds of people wanting to buy guns?

And you're offended by an article in The Guardian pointing out your national cognitive dissonance? You people are mentally damaged and no longer capable of rational thought. Your gun lobby, media and politicians have irreparably harmed your mental processes.

It's an excuse to write an article about gun control, there's an obvious case for US gun control that stands on it's own merits, it's really stupid to call an effective anti-terrorist operation an overreaction as a lead into it.

Is the guy against finding a cure for rare cancers unless they find a cure for common ones first?

E:typo

So explain exactly what the War on Terror has achieved?

US citizens now have far, far less liberty than they used to and no apparent increase in safety. This (probably) wasn't a highly organised AQ terror cell, it was a couple of teenagers with pressure cooker bombs, and the fantastically huge security state failed to stop them. Even locking down the entire city of Boston didn't catch that guy, he was found by someone going for a smoke in his back yard *after* the lockdown was lifted!

Your cancer analogy is flawed because what's actually happening in the US is the opposite - the rare, hard to treat cancers are being focused on, at huge cost, and the simple, easy to treat diseases are being ignored because there's a powerful group that makes a load of money out of letting them run rampant.

Thank God for You.  Never thought I'd be saying that.

So much easier when a Mod says what you really want to.

And, with that, the thread needs moved....

WTF?  Two guys detonating bombs in a city won't be doing it anymore, that's a good thing.  A Guardian lecture from some American kid who probably won't know a Balaclava if someone shoved one up his arse and lit it, doesn't change that.

I just assumed people were staying off the streets, and encouraged to do so, as having thousands of armed police running round looking for anyone "odd" is dangerous.

I have to say that I agree.  When you shut down a major metropolitan city for a day?  That's the terrorists winning, even if that isn't their originally intended goal.  They scared the shit out of you and made you totally over-react.  It couldn't have been much more effective.  And not that it should be used as a the sole measurement, but can you fathom how much money it costs you to shut down Boston for a day? 

The boston bombing showed a few things.

First and foremost: the kindness and goodwill of people that wasn't diminished in any way by the terrible events

The terrorists were caught by the police with standard police investigative procedures and "cop-on-the-street" methods. None of the fancy "war-on-terror" procedures like video surveillance or facial recognition, no federal terrorist database or watch-list did that it was honest police work by local law enforcement.
All the war-on-terror stuff did was add to the noise the investigators had to cut through.

In fact one of the terrorists was investigated by the FBI in 2011 after they had gotten a hint by a so far undisclosed foreign government but that fact didn't help any of the investigators in Boston at all since the FBI didn't follow up on that and the brothers actually weren't listed as potential threats or put under surveillance.

This was the latest in a long line of incidents that showed that traditional news is dead and that the internet or social media can't pick up the slack either. If you wanted information you were SOL, if you wanted conjecture and breathless babbeling by bleached blonde bobble-heads then cable news was for you. While CNN and Fox News lost what little reputatiion they still had left people on Twitter and Facebook posted live updates taken from police scanners and so directly endangered the lives of local law enforcement or could have tipped off one of the terrorists. Meanwhile sites like 4chan, 9gag or reddit ruined a few lives by incompetent amateur sleuthing and organising manhunts on innocent people. In fact one of the people incorrectly blamed for the attack is still missing as of today.

I'd have to agree with Schild and Ironwood. All of the procedures, technologies and tools introduced to combat terror were largely ineffective including the complete lockdown of a major metropolitan area. A witness put law enforcement on the trail of the terrorists (one of the people hurt in the explosion, who saw them plant the backpacks) and a witness told them where the second one was hiding after the lockdown had already been lifted.

This was a huge win for the Police and traditional detective work and a loss for the FBI, homeland security, in fact every agency tasked with preventing such attacks from happening. If billions of dollars in terror prevention budgets can't even stop two teenagers from building pressure cooker bombs and if local law enforcement is more effective in finding those terrorists than all of the FBIs and Homeland Securities with their fancy-schmancy high tech toys then people should ask whether all of the money given to them and - more importantly - all of the power given to them is really justified and necessary.

I feel sad for the people hurt and the lives lost and I feel angry that US federal law enforcement still claims that such terrorist attacks can be prevented by even more money, more technology and more leeway for them/less freedom for the people when in fact they couldn't do jack. The only effective measure would be to act in a way that people simply don't want to bomb you.

When the largest law enforcement and anti-terror budget in the world can't prevent such incidents then you simply can't prevent every such incident from happening. Not by more money, not by more investigative power, not by less liberty for the people.

I therefore don't see the need for taking away the bomber's right to remain silent, to counsel, to habeas corpus or to any of the other liberties provided to any defendant. He was caught by the Police and the criminal justice system will put him on trial and sentence him. I don't see why the agencies that couldn't even catch him should then get the opportunity to try and punish him or use him as an example as to why all the the reduced liberties and freedoms are necessary when in fact they weren't necessary nor effective nor even needed to catch him.

I don't see a "false equivalency" when a free press in a free country where guns are illegal calls the US batshit insane for allowing terrorists to legally arm themselves to the teeth, before they stage street gun battles with police.

When you're living in a country that almost never experiences the threat posed by a person with a gun, it is valid to consider street shootouts and mass shootings as one combined problem.

Between 2006 and early 2013 (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/mass-shootings-map):
- There were 25 shooting massacres in the USA (7 of those in 2012).
- There was 1 massacre with any weapon in the UK.

After the terrorists stopped shooting in Boston, you've had another shooting massacre in Seattle today (5 dead). Not to mention all the gun incidents that will no doubt have occurred across the USA without deaths.

The ease with which both terrorists and murderers can arm themselves in the USA occurs because of the same thing: the free-flowing sale of weapons. Many of us in the countries without widespread gun ownership see the problem as one and the same, and find it ironic that after a teenage terrorist is disarmed in an environment of fear, it's back to your regularly scheduled gun massacres but everyone somehow feels safer.

That is not the argument put forth in the Guardian piece.

There's a strong temptation when you are in the right about a subject to use any news opening to bring the subject involved up again.  In addition you've moved the goalposts to just being shootings and massacres now, I guess bombings shouldn't be counted in this thread with explosions in the title.

Your selective quoting of facts to support your case is the same tactic used by people like MediumHigh who thinks gun crime only happens in ghettos and doesn't consider suicide numbers at all.

The US should not have strict gun control laws to stop terrorists arming themselves, they should do it because it will dramatically cut the number of gun related deaths, a point I'd likely make once in a thread in the politics forum about US gun laws.

If you aren't arguing your points from an honest basis you are going to lose some people who'd normally support you.  As an example, the UK has tough gun control laws and has had far more terrorist incidents than in the US over the last 50 years, therefore more guns means less terrorism.  See?  That's fucking stupid, take it to the right thread.

We didn't lock down the city after the bombing.

The lockdown was an active crime scene at the conclusion of a pursuit that involved a robbery and murder, a large exchange of gunfire, the subjects tossing grenades and a third bomb, and a carjacking. The cops knew where the subject was and locked down that area so they could get him without civilians getting in the way or hurt That covered several cities because Boston isn't really Boston, it's a series of small cities, and the borders were within blocks of where the subject was known to be.

 :heart: :Love_Letters: :heart:

Thank you AP. I can't state this enough.

The other thing that's bothering me in this thread is the assumption that Boston turned into some sort of Half Life 2 city with law enforcement ordering people to stay in their homes throughout the drama. My impression, although it may be wrong, is that only certain neighborhoods/townships like Watertown "got shut down" during a fairly narrow window of time. I'd like to hear someone local comment on the experience, whether staying at home during the search and capture was a voluntary 'common sense' thing or if the oppressive hand of the gummint overlords was felt pressing upon your sheep-like head.

Because it's better to catch people building explosives by surprise rather than letting them know that you're coming?

Yes, it was only certain districts and it wasn't "martial law" as some of the more fluttery exclamations of 'abuse of power' I've seen have claimed.  

Num lives there and can verify or not but I heard plenty of times that it was only a recommendation not to leave your house. News reports indicated you still found people on the street and businesses that opened.  However, most in the area stayed closed because they figured nobody would leave their house/ want to shop with a suspect known to have explosives on the loose in the area from the night before.  

Had the 2 not tried to make a run/ been seen in the area it would have been business as usual. Or as usual as it had been Tues, Wed and Thurs.

Oh look, people in the thread using the tragedy to spew their own agenda.

Didn't see that coming.  :facepalm:

My last word on the Guardian, what that guy could have done is focused on a gun event in the US (it's not like he'd have had to wait that long for one).  Tell the back story of the victims and then, a lot later in the piece, ask why these victims don't deserve the kind of national attention that the victims in Boston rightly got. 

That's a much more effective way of A. getting the point across & B not being a complete dick while doing it.