Public helps identify rioters
Internet sleuths helped scour thousands of images and videos.
What do Chuck Norris, an MMA fighter from Baltimore and a neo-Nazi from Tennessee have in common?
Amateur internet detectives identified each one as a participant in the storming of the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6. Each suspected participant was then harassed online. And each subsequently could prove he was hundreds of miles away at the time of the riot.
The misidentifications were hiccups in the massive crowdsource effort that may be among the largest internetbased manhunts in history. The FBI said this week it has collected more than 100,000 digital photos, videos and fragments of social media in an effort to track down and charge participants in the riot.
That singular event had all the ingredients to attract a massive, global, “open-source intelligence,” or OSINT, effort to compile digital breadcrumbs and pass them to law enforcement. Thousands of people attended the Jan. 6 rally and ensuing riot, which received widespread media coverage and produced a mountain of evidence.
The FBI declined to discuss how much it has relied on citizen researchers to fuel its effort to arrest the perpetrators of the riot. But a USA TODAY analysis of court documents so far shows that at least 25 of the 40 people charged in federal court were identified through open sources combed by FBI agents.
In many cases, agents used a combination of professional media images and video, social media, tips, proprietary law enforcement databases and motor vehicle records.
Some accused rioters made it easy: Wisconsin’s Kevin Loftus posted publicly on Facebook: “I’m wanted by the FBI for illegal entry.” While others, like Tennessee’s Eric Munchel, were identified by an extensive group of contributors online who examined his distinctive hat, Punisher skull logo and thinblue-line patch.
The FBI didn’t say who first identified Munchel, but Special Agent Carlos Fuentes wrote in a federal affidavit, “On the evening of Jan. 8, 2021, persons on various online platforms began to make identifications of Munchel.”
Kevin Lyons of Chicago was evasive with FBI agents during an interview two days after the riot, according to federal court documents. When confronted with an Instagram photo from his account, he marveled, "Wow, you are pretty good, that was up for only an hour."
In moments of crisis caused by anonymous perpetrators caught on camera, thousands of people online are driven to participate and contribute, said Joan Donovan, a research director at the Harvard Kennedy School, who reluctantly calls herself “a nanny on the net.”
While some may be motivated by an effort to gain internet clout, others are genuinely interested in helping law enforcement, she said.
“People mistake themselves for doing journalism when they’re really doing something else entirely,” Donovan said. “In moments like this, the stakes are so high in terms of getting it wrong.”
Names, particularly unique ones, carry extra weight as keywords on the internet, leading to disastrous consequences for those falsely identified. Those allegations could follow you for years, Donovan said.
She calls for researchers to follow ethics guidelines and work to triangulate and verify identities privately, and share them internally before accusing someone of crime with a megaphone.
Aric Toler, a researcher at Bellingcat, a site that specializes in fact-checking and open-source intelligence, worked around the clock last week with energy focused on Munchel, and said the ID effort was relatively error-free compared to previous incidents.
“This round of identifications is relatively easy because of how extremely online most of the Capitol stormers were. They were livestreaming themselves, posting publicly on their (social media accounts) and had previously attended Trump/anti-lockdown rallies,” Toler said. “With Charlottesville it was a bit dicier as there wasn't as much of a digital footprint for the participants, but now we have years of protests, QAnon rallies, Proud Boy marches, and so on.”
Peter Kleissner, CEO of Prague-based Intelligence X, says he opened up his servers last week for users to upload and preserve more than 1,500 photos and videos from the day of the incident. He advises against doxxing participants, a process of identifying and publishing address or contact information that can lead to harassment.
“However, we believe that in this particular case, the public’s interest in knowing who stormed the Capitol outweighs the individual’s right to privacy,” Kleissner said. “Amateur sleuths play an important role and can find the smallest details that others (including law enforcement) may not catch. They perform amazing work.”
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto has been a leading voice online identifying people at the riot. His Twitter following has expanded from 10,000 to 135,000 since last week.
This week he encouraged amateur detectives following his breadcrumbs to avoid publicly naming individuals in favor of submitting them to a Google form.
“Tweeting unconfirmed identities is not necessary; you may hurt someone in ways you cannot take back; exposes you to legal risk; you may get banned; plus, it impairs the final mile of attribution which is done with care & not publicly. Spamming a wrong names slows us down,” Scott-Railton posted for his followers.
Anatomy of a misfire
When a Twitter user spotted a selfie of a man who appeared to him to be Chuck Norris with a pro-Trump supporter at the rally, the side-by-side photos quickly took off. Many wondered if the “Walker, Texas Ranger” star, 80, was in Washington for the riot.
Days later, his manager Erik Kritzer told USA TODAY that Norris was home in Texas at the time.
An MMA fighter in Baltimore found himself facing harassment and threats after his name surfaced as being a member of antifa and instigating the Capitol riot.
Twitter users identified the man and then facial recognition company XRVision circulated his photo and identity, which was the basis for a Washington Times article.
By early Thursday morning, on the floor of the House of Representatives, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., angrily denounced the riot and suggested members of antifa were inside the crowd, citing the Washington Times clip.
But not only was the Times clip wrong – it has since been retracted – the man was not a member of antifa and had been misidentified.
Sarah Thompson, an authenticity analyst with Lead Stories, said she spent hours analyzing photos of a bearded man in a yellow sweatshirt whom others had incorrectly identified as the MMA fighter. She eventually knocked down that misidentification and accurately identified him as Will Watson.
“It’s kind of Tarantino-esque finger pointing of insurrectionists. It became this wild circle and this guy is being accused of being at a riot,” Thompson said of the falsely identified MMA fighter. “It was unfortunate for him to be pushed into the limelight.”
Watson, 23, of Alabama, was out on bond on a drug trafficking charge when he traveled to Washington, D.C. He was arrested Wednesday.
Another man identified by XRVision was Matthew Heimbach, the far-right neo-Nazi leader involved in the Charlottesville protest in 2017. He told Fox News he was in Tennessee at the time of the Capitol riot.
Boston provides blunder backdrop
The largest crowdsourced manhunt in recent memory produced the worst blunder on record in 2013.
The FBI called for the public’s help in identifying the Boston Marathon bombers based on photos and video from the chaotic scene that killed three and injured more than 200 people.
A former classmate thought he recognized Sunil Tripathi, a Brown University student who had gone missing months before the bombing. The identification took off on sites like Reddit and led to harassment of Tripathi’s family. He was found a week later in a river and had died by suicide a month before the marathon.
Reddit users also incorrectly identified 17-year-old Salah Barhoun, which led to an iconic “BAG MEN” front page in the New York Post depicting Barhoun and Yassine Zaimi, 24. In the following days, Reddit issued an apology for contributing to “online witch hunts” that “spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties.” The Post settled a defamation suit with the pair in 2014 with undisclosed terms.
In addition to the risk of misidentification, advocates like Harvard's Donovan also worry that law enforcement agencies will use open-source techniques unevenly based on who the victims of the crime are or their political ideology.
“Many of these politicians are beloved, and some of the attention from the public and law enforcement may have to do with the victims,” Donovan said. “We didn’t see law enforcement wanting to be as involved and solicit tips from the public about the Proud Boys when they burned a stolen Black Lives Matter banner.”
Civil rights advocates raised questions about law enforcement surveillance during protest movements this summer.
FBI agents say they found an Etsy shop that sold a distinctive T-shirt to identify Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal, 33, of Philadelphia, who they say set a police squad car on fire. They followed her shopping history, social media and her profile on the site Poshmark before they arrested her.
Some Twitter users panned the FBI’s solicitation for tips in the wake of the Capitol riot given that many participants had identified themselves in news interviews and on their own social media accounts.
Media identifications come with danger
Between amateur digital vigilantes and law enforcement exists the media.
News outlets also must decide whether they will get into the identification process. USA TODAY, like many other national news organizations, has dedicated resources to identifying rioters to “piece together stories about how the event unfolded, who the participants were and what their motivations were.”
Al Tompkins of Poynter, a nonprofit journalism school and research organization, wrote this week that photographers at media outlets could also face the uncomfortable call from federal law enforcement agencies seeking unpublished photos or videos. News organizations typically do not readily provide that material to prosecutors or law enforcement.
Tompkins also questioned whether the media should play an active role in helping law enforcement identify rioters.
And media entities are not immune to misidentifications.
That was the case last week when the New York Times captioned a photo of a shirtless man at the Capitol as a “rioter.”
The newspaper ran a correction when it was pointed out the man was a credentialed videographer for The Daily Caller.
Daily Caller Editor in Chief Geoffrey Ingersoll called the correction “weaselly” and said he was “dumbfounded” the paper made the mistake.