How Cameras Broke the Marathon Bombing Case

Wired:

As of this writing, police, FBI agents, National Guardsmen and state troopers are still combing the streets of Watertown, trying to find 19-year old University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth student Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. His older brother, Tameran, a former boxer, lies dead after a chaotic pre-dawn chase with police. But they might never have been identified so rapidly, the ex-investigators tell Danger Room, had investigators not decided that their best resource wasn’t in their own pockets. It was in everyone else’s.
“The great advantage here is the number of cameras out there,” Rolince says. “Without the cameras, I don’t know where we are.” The cameras were everywhere. It wasn’t just the surveillance cameras looming on the tops of buildings at Copley Square. Bostonians and out-of-towners who came to the Marathon, one of the most celebrated civic events in the city, pulled their phones out throughout the race to feed their Instagram addictions and keep their Flickr pages current. It would become a reminder that the public enthusiasm for documenting their lives can outpace even the vast surveillance apparatus of the government.
On Monday, the FBI-led investigation had little more than a crime scene, one that had just been trampled by thousands of people attempting to flee Copley Square after the twin bombs detonated. An intact, pristine crime scene is something investigators desperately want and too rarely find. “Twenty thousand people milling around screws it up,” says Juliette Kayyem, a former homeland security adviser to Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. Yet first responders very rapidly cleared the square of people.
The area was filled with clues. One of them would be crucial: the remnants of a dark backpack near the blast scene. The day after the bombing, FBI Special Agent in Charge Rick DesLauriers made a critical decision. He and his team called for “assistance from the public” to submit any and all types of media taken by Marathon spectators. The team set up a website for tip submissions. DesLauriers confessed that it would “take some time” for leads in the case to develop. DesLauriers might have wanted to level with the public, but the statement raised some anxieties that the investigation was far behind the curve.
If so, the call for public assistance helped get it over the hump. Within two days, DesLauriers received what he would describe as “thousands” of photos and videos, showing different vantage points of the Copley Square spectators. Once investigators arranged them by the time they were taken, they could piece together a mosaic of the scene, allowing them to check behavior they considered suspicious — and apply imaging tools to focus the accumulation of data.

Like I said before, I have to remember cameras are everywhere.  Even just doing slightly embarrassing things could make a big fool of myself.  It is a scary world out there in public.  One of my regular watering holes has a number of cameras around.  If I ever tick off the owners, there may be hours of film of me being an idiot out there.  God help me if they have any audio capability.