Posted on 01/21/2021 4:47:38 AM PST by 11th_VA
The Capitol riot has inspired a new army of amateur sleuths who want to help identify protesters. But it’s an ethically fraught hobby.
As rioters stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, Theo—like many Americans—watched, dumbfounded and in horror.
Then he had an idea. “What if we went on social and started pulling these screenshots together and tried to go around and crowdsource [the rioters’] identities?” he remembers thinking.
So Theo bought a burner phone, set up a fake email address, and created an Instagram account over a VPN: @homegrownterrorists. Within hours, and before the FBI had issued its plea for help to identify rioters, Theo (a pseudonym for the account holder, who asked to remain anonymous because of death threats he has received) had gained hundreds of thousands of followers as he furiously posted images and video. Thousands of people were commenting on and sharing the images, with the goal of identifying the perpetrators.
The assault on the Capitol, its aftermath, and the prospect of what federal authorities have warned could be a second wave of violence in the days leading up to Joe Biden’s inauguration have inspired a new army of everyday online investigators. People comb social media and archive posts, photos, and videos before they are deleted. Then they cross-reference those findings with open-sourced information to identify perpetrators and, they hope, bring them to justice. Like Theo, they are politically interested and invested but wouldn’t consider themselves activists under normal circumstances; rather, the January 6 assault was the last straw for many people....
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
It would be fun to find out where, say an NEA conference was being held, then put a few ‘Trump bumper stickers’ on their cars. (It’s best to do it on cars backed into a space) ... then watch them dox each other ... Lol ...
LOL People were doing that in Portland and Seattle! They would watch the parking spots when Antifa & BLM would come to wreck havoc. They put Trump stickers on their cars and sure enough, the idiots would attack the cars and set them on fire!
Can you imagine walking to your car at dawn thinking of all the smashed glass and fires you’d done; thinking “I showed them who rules the streets!” Then arriving at the charred remains of your car? Priceless!
Lol !!! Great story !!!
Hmm, so what happens if the authorities are inundated with thousands of names? Might bog down the bureaucracy a bit, eh? These people are playing a dangerous game that will bite them on the rear. Conservatives could start “reporting” that various liberals, including these vile people who want to turn in others, were involved in the Capitol protest. See how they like the FBI showing up to question them.
“A rat is a rat is a rat.. is an informer.”
— William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 1957
Feel free to anonymously feed false information to these doxxing efforts.
Oh my. we need to hang up our investigator gun belts and retire.
Oh woe is me....we on line investigators are deplorables too.
It’ll be a shady day in hell.
Share the information with law enforcement?
Don’t make me laugh. If they wanted to catch the perps who burn loot and murder, let them go to where the real riots are.
First we expose, them we repose.
No way we won’t be revealing the untwisted truth as best we can.
Providing that single pencil pf light beam into the otherwise liberal fascist darkness is all it takes to bring them down.
Whats more, they know it.
That’s why the article was written.
And it is why twitter and other social platforms are being purged.
Its on us now.
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