Adam Johnson has been arrested for theft, violent entry and disorderly conduct on government grounds, and entering a restricted building without lawful authority
It will be a challenging few weeks for the lawyer representing Adam Johnson, who was seen grinning and waving as he carried House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern through the Capitol building.
He certainly wishes the photos would disappear. But as he told reporters outside of court, this week “I’m not a magician”.
The digital trail left by people attending last week’s riots are being so closely monitored by amateur cyber sleuths. By the time the Federal Bureau of Investigation began asking for the public’s help in finding rioters, many had already been identified.
An Instagram account dedicated to the cause, using pictures taken by the media and stills taken from live streams already has more than 300,000 followers. Its owner, a Silicon Valley social media worker who asked to be known as Theo to protect his anonymity, opened the account after feeling "personally violated" as he watched the violence unfold last week.
Theo began compiling all the photos he could find, posting each with the caption “do you recognise this domestic terrorist?”. He woke up to 250,000 followers the next morning. At one point, he was receiving “dozens” of direct messages every minute with leads.
If he found what he felt was sufficient evidence after checking their social media accounts, he would post a picture of a rioter with what he claimed was their name and job.
“I have had people get in touch to say they are certain that someone is their high school boyfriend’s brother, and one woman who was certain one of the men pictured was an ex-boyfriend she has been trying to eradicate from her life for 15 years,” he says. “I haven’t posted his name as I haven’t been able to verify it, but she said she would know his face anywhere.”
Theo says he is not too concerned about the responsibility — and legal implications — that come with naming someone present at the scene of a crime or describing them as a “terrorist”. He feels confident having received some tips from a lawyer who got in touch after seeing the account grow in popularity.
The public are using location data from apps used by Trump supporters to work out if users were present at the rally and resulting riots
“If I am just showing a picture of them at the protest and then showing a picture of them with their name, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he says.
Theo is not alone. Online, a mix of journalists, extremism researchers and a small army of amateur investigators are looking over hundreds of hours of videos and thousands of pictures from the Capitol Hill riot.
While the process runs the risk of devolving into a trial by social media, it has also accelerated the identification of multiple figures sought for questioning by police.
Eliot Higgins, the British founder of investigative journalism website Bellingcat, has been inundated with help from volunteers who send him video clips or pictures before they are deleted from the web.
Thank you to everyone who has submitted videos and photos! We are now working with the many Parler videos taken on the 6th in DC. Here is a new link where you can view the submissions and our running, public spreadsheet of visual materials from the riot: https://t.co/OPAa9J60kF https://t.co/ofbG8DvACD
— Bellingcat (@bellingcat) January 12, 2021
“When an incident like this happens, you want to grab as much information as possible. In a way, you turn everyone into a giant human search engine,” he says.
Bellingcat, started as a project documenting the Syrian Civil war and Russia, has also been at the forefront of open-source reporting on Western far-right groups. In the build up to the events at Capitol Hill, it predicted that violent groups were preparing to descend on the protest having looked at posts on Parler and other forums.
Higgins and his team rely on help from hundreds of volunteers to sift through videos and send them key moments. He says: “They don’t need special techniques, perhaps they have just posted a link to an interesting stream.”
The team uses techniques such as overlaying videos from multiple angles to find exactly who was committing violence. They also use face-matching software so they can confirm the identity of an individual. Higgins adds that even a free tool such as Google Photos can be used to scan hundreds of photos. “Google already has a good face matching system. You can use it to compare lots of different rallies.”
Meanwhile, masters of software engineering have taken to using the tiny pieces of data hidden away in photo and video files, which could give clues to the publisher’s whereabouts.
One internet sleuth, who goes by the Twitter handle @donk_enby, found a way to mine data from Parler, an app that was used by Trump supporter.
here is the metadata from all 30TB of those videos: https://t.co/2ST86SfaYK
for how to access the video files themselves and the rest of the archive, your point of contact is now @textfiles
— crash override (@donk_enby) January 11, 2021
She reverse engineered Parler’s application programmer interface (API), which acts as a digital data funnel between a user’s phone and Parler’s app, to archive all the publicly available posts. On Monday, when Amazon announced it was revoking its contract with Parler to provide its technical infrastructure, she archived as much as she could, later sharing the files online.
As word of the data stash got out on Monday, dozens of cyber sleuths began picking apart the data, looking through users’ posts for clues such as location. This digital clue, which can be found in a photo a user has uploaded, could place a Parler user inside the Capitol Building at the time of the unrest.
They began plotting the data on maps of the building, creating a picture of Parler users, which they could cross check against user names and profile pictures, dotted in and around the crime scene on January 6.
Although these could provide valuable leads for the FBI, the location accuracy stored in photos can be off by several metres — making it difficult to conclude if someone trespassed or simply got caught up in the crowds outside.
Thank you to everyone who has submitted videos and photos! We are now working with the many Parler videos taken on the 6th in DC. Here is a new link where you can view the submissions and our running, public spreadsheet of visual materials from the riot: https://t.co/OPAa9J60kF https://t.co/ofbG8DvACD
— Bellingcat (@bellingcat) January 12, 2021
On Tuesday the FBI had confirmed it had opened 160 case files related to the riots, and that this was just the “tip of the iceberg”. There have already been multiple arrests.
But the identification process has been supercharged by hundreds of people offering to hunt through digital archives and agency photographs.
John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Toronto-based Citizen Lab, has identified two of the rioters, including a man photographed with his body covered head-to-toe while clutching white zip ties. Scott-Railton used photographs taken by journalists employed by Getty Images to hunt for clues, tracking insignia adorning rioters helmets and clothing.
WOW: Was there a plan to take hostages? This man is carrying police-style zip-tie handcuffs. And mace(?) pic.twitter.com/np3i1pUc6n
— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) January 7, 2021
He speaks while taking a break from trying to identify the man who used a riot shield to break the window to let the mob into the building.
Scott-Railton says he "looks like an operator", as he is wearing an earpiece and can be seen repeatedly checking for exits as he moves through the building in videos shared online. He has already identified his tattoo as belonging to a specific Marine station, and has spotted his face at a Proud Boys protest.
He has been encouraged by the “remarkable” outpouring of help from the public who want to do some good. But as he flicks through pictures of those involved, sifting through birthdays captured with their children, the day of their wedding, holidays spent on the beach, he is acutely aware of how human these people are.
Those helping are prone to making malicious, or accidental, false claims and he has been working with journalists who have fact-checking resources and legal backing before making any public claims.
Higgins notes he is expressly interested in finding those involved in extremist groups or violence, rather than outing those just caught up in the protest.
In a word of warning to people offering help, Scott-Railton says: “It is incredibly valuable to surface clues. But it is incredibly dangerous to simply name names because that will cause this process to become something that none of us are proud of.”
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