Indians For Guns

winnie_the_pooh wrote:My condolences to all those who lost their loved ones.A speedy recovery to all those injured.I hope the authorities quickly catch those who planned it....and to the Indian origin members in USA ,be careful.

There was just one problem: Mulugeta and Tripathi had nothing to do with the events unfolding in Boston. America awoke this morning to reports that the bombers were two young Chechen-Americans, with a third possible accomplice. Virtually no one in the media, who had pushed the Mulugeta-Tripathi narrative just hours before, acknowledged the shift. They simply plowed forward with more real-time misreporting.

Sketchy and incorrect first reports in breaking stories like these are par for the course. Few media outlets have distinguished themselves by being fast and reliable this week; far more, like the New York Post and CNN, stood out by screwing more pooches than a junkyard mutt with <deleted>. But this instance—an entire industry naming the wrong suspects, and amplifying the error—was a particularly epic fail, and it seemed to be going down the blackest of memory holes

The Internet’s shameful false ID

With the perpetrators of the attack on the Boston marathon now apparently identified as brothers from Chechnya, and with one of those brothers still at large terrorizing Boston, it’s worth noting that before the bizarre turn of events that led to this morning’s chaotic scene, Internet detectives made one last totally shameful false accusation that also in this case involved the harassment of a family currently desperately searching for their lost son and brother.

Yesterday, a Reddit user posted a new, startlingly clear image of the aftermath of the explosion, that shows, on the far left, what looks very much like one of the FBI’s suspects fleeing the scene. After Philip Bump, an Atlantic Wire writer and Photoshop expert, explained why he believed the image was genuine the New York Times confirmed the photo’s authenticity.

So: The Internet actually found a new, much clearer photo of one of the FBI’s suspects. Amazing! It could’ve taken ages, before the Internet, for this evidence to surface and be sent to law enforcement. Immediately after the Internet did this admirable thing, of course, it took it to a dark and irresponsible place.

Remember how thousands of Reddit users and 4chan people spent the days after the bombing combing through every available photo and frame of video of the site of the bombings, searching for the perpetrators, and they found a bunch of guys with backpacks — so many guys they made a spreadsheet! — and (inadvertently) allowed the New York Post to identify, on the front page, two innocent people as the bombers? And remember how when the FBI released images of the actual suspects, neither of them had been spotted by Reddit or 4Chan or any other online sleuth? Well, armed with this new, clearer photo, and giddy from having uncovered it, the message board investigative geniuses then determined that “suspect two” was a missing college student.

Sunil Tripathi is a Brown University student from Pennsylvania who has been missing since March 16. On that day, surveillance cameras picked him up leaving his Providence, R.I., apartment. He left behind his computer, wallet and phone. He hasn’t been seen since. Authorities also say he left behind “a vague note.” The Brown student paper says he was depressed and the note suggested a suicidal intent.