Boston Marathon Bombing Research Paper

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At approximately 2:50 pm, Monday, April 15, 2013 - near the finish line of the Boston Marathon two bombs exploded. The two bombs exploded about 50-100 yards apart within 8-12 seconds of each other. Three people died and over one hundred and fifty people injured (Leopold, Todd). The investigation of this fatal terrorist act will rely to a sensational degree on crowd sourced surveillance, provided by Marathon watchers’ cell phone photos, Instagram feeds, and Vine Video. While crowdsourcing help authorities in this situation to recognize and determined the suspects in the many photos and images of the explosion spot being uploaded online, at the same time the story followed up the names of some random blameless people keep repeating in a growing…show more content…
The guy in the track suit turned out to be a 17-year-old suburban Boston track star who told The Associated Press he was afraid to leave his house because of the scrutiny. Another group of the Redditors, speculated that Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who has been missing since last month, could be a possible suspect. The point of crowdsourcing after all, wasn’t just to find the bombers—it was also to connect and talk with others, and to feel like you were part of a virtual community. Reddit has done an excellent job of being engaging. Now it needs to figure out if it wants to be effective. We now live in a world where information moves faster than we can assess its value, and this is especially true in times of panic, disaster, and crisis. While an active terrorist investigation might not be the best place to allow candidate with no training be a detective, but, there are certainly situations where they can be helpful. We each have the potential to play a role in being guardians of public safety, but this requires from us a large degree of focus, caution, and care. Ultimately, these are the things which separate an empowered crowd from a raging

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