The riot at the Capitol appeared to be almost all chaos and anarchy. But as private researchers and ordinary individuals scrutinized online video and photos, they identified some of those who took part and assisted law enforcement.
John Scott-Railton from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto focused on individuals who seemed to have a real purpose amid the mob — like two men who were spotted with plastic handcuffs that could be used to detain people or take them hostage.
“I kept finding footage of men wearing body armor, communicating with each other and moving with purpose,” Scott-Railton told NPR. “It made me think there were people in there who had specific ideas of what they wanted to accomplish and had come prepared to execute on them.”
As he gathered clues, Scott-Railton put out calls for help to people he already knew, as well as strangers, creating a spontaneous army of online sleuths that numbers in the hundreds, if not the thousands.
Crowdsourcing
“This kind of crowdsourcing is not the same thing as a formal investigation. It’s certainly not a replacement for the investigations done by the judicial system,” he said. But, he added, “it’s an excellent mechanism for surfacing clues.”
