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More than a decade ago, the frantic 5-day search for the Boston Marathon bombers left few lessons in its consequences.
For one thing, expanding surveillance technology can help catch criminals. The second was that amateur online sleuths were on reddit Could not.
But an intense search for a suspect in this week’s Brown University shooting that killed two students and injured nine others dashed those hopes.
Extensive surveillance, now found in a vast network of doorbells, cars and vehicle-tracking cameras, ultimately helped pinpoint the whereabouts of Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old former Brown graduate student investigators believe was responsible for the December 13 shooting and another murder of an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days later.
But the latest artificial intelligence-powered surveillance was of little use in the initial search for the gunman, who walked away from the Brown campus after the shooting and unnoticed into the surrounding areas. ThriftRhode Island. He evaded detection for days, using a barely recognizable phone, avoiding facial recognition software, hiding his face with a medical-type mask, and changing license plates on his rental cars.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said it wasn’t until a local Reddit user “exploded this case” by posting an old-fashioned tip on the social media platform that police were able to link a car to Neves Valente. They finally found the suspect dead in Salem on Thursday. new HampshireA few days later he possibly killed himself.
Also known as Reddit Tipster John Providence Mayor Brett Smiley wrote to the FBI director on Friday, calling him “nothing less than a hero.” Kash PatelThe entire amount of the FBI’s $50,000 reward is being sought for information leading investigators to the suspect.
According to fellow contributors to Reddit’s Providence forum, strangers have invited them to Christmas dinner and suggested they get “keys to the city and free coffee and donuts for life.”
It was a major turnoff from 2013 when commentators on Reddit and other online discussion boards mischaracterized a Brown University student as a possible suspect in a deadly attack at Boston’s famous marathon, just an hour north of Providence, because of similarities with a grainy suspect image.
“Hey Reddit, enough of the Boston bombing vigil,” a headline in The Atlantic declared at the time.
“It definitely went sideways in the Boston Marathon situation,” said Lisa Potts, a Michigan State University professor and director of the Digital Humanities Laboratory, which studies online reaction. “That’s why people will jokingly refer to the ‘Reddit Detective Agency’ or the ‘Reddit Bureau of Investigations.'”
The mistaken connection between the 2013 attackers and a missing Brown student – later found dead of an apparent suicide – is still remembered by many in the Ivy League school and its surrounding community.
Brown officials this week moved to swiftly suppress another smear campaign running on X and other social media platforms that falsely blamed a current Brown student for a shooting on campus because of his ethnicity, alleged political views and alleged similarity to a police video of a person of interest. The “unimaginable nightmare” of the false allegations led to “constant death threats and hate speech,” the student said in a statement.
Frustrated that tip lines can be jammed with nonsense, U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and former state attorney general, urged social media speculators to “just shut up.”
“There is no need for people who have no idea what they’re talking about to present their idiotic and ill-informed views of what happened on the Internet,” Whitehouse told Congress on Wednesday.
But Potts said some social media are doing a better job than others, and “of all the places I study, Reddit is doing it far more right.”
Harmful allegations were largely absent from Reddit’s Providence forum, in part because the volunteer moderators who manage Reddit’s content forums — known as subreddits — are largely responsible for keeping the peace.
Reddit’s lead moderator for the Providence subreddit said in an interview that he has been on the platform for about 15 years and remembers the trauma that the false Boston Marathon report caused.
“The Providence subreddit is very sensitive about (not) trying to go on a witch hunt or mob mentality,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid doxxing and because of the platform’s culture of anonymity.
The Associated Press also contacted the tipster on Tuesday, a day after he wrote on Reddit urging police to investigate a Nissan sedan with a Florida license plate. Fellow Redditors urged him to contact the FBI, and he said he did.
He did not respond to requests for comment and later posted that he had no plans to speak to the media. When he finally met with police on Wednesday — after approaching them on the street and identifying himself as a Reddit tipster — their information gave new life to the stalled investigation.
With a known vehicle, Providence police began looking at footage from dozens of AI-powered cameras deployed around the city, which can read license plates as well as other identifying details about the car, such as make, color, side damage or even bird droppings on the window.
According to a police affidavit, cameras operated by surveillance company Flock Safety captured his vehicle at least 14 times in the nearly two weeks before the shooting. Providence police can then ask Flock-using police agencies in nearby cities and states to look for the same car, although New Hampshire — due to privacy restrictions on how long they can keep images — has none.
It was a success that Flock was happy to boast about, especially as concerns persisted in Providence’s immigrant communities about more aggressive federal immigration enforcement. Flock says each of his clients decides when to share camera data, and the city does not share it with federal immigration agents. But some still want more security measures.
“Once you know what they are, you see them everywhere,” said Madeline McGunagle, policy associate at the ACLU of Rhode Island. “People pay attention because they look different – a solar panel at the top and a small oval camera at the bottom.”
But unlike the residential doorbell cameras that caught him walking around Providence, if Neves Valente walked near a Flock camera, he wouldn’t know.
“It’s a technical impossibility. The cameras don’t have the ability to find people for the user,” Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley said in an interview Friday. “Our cameras focus on vehicles because if you look at America, people drive. It’s very difficult to get anywhere on foot.”
“In most of our cities, they just want to know who’s coming and who’s going,” he said.
Still, without tipster John — whom local Redditors dubbed “Reddit Guy” — no one would have known how it went down.
“Someone who is in the field and sees stuff all the time will be better in many ways than a random camera,” said the moderator of the Providence subreddit. “John saw this guy going back and forth, unlocking his car and doing all that stuff, and he thought it was kind of weird.”