By Tarun Wadhwa, Contributor

All it took was a couple of hours for high-school sophomore Salah Barhoum to have his entire world turned upside down.  Up until that point, he was best known for being a standout athlete.  But suddenly, through no fault of his own, he was being followed by strange men convinced that he was responsible for the heinous bombings at the Boston Marathon that happened just days earlier.  The FBI had not named any suspects yet, but his face was already on the cover of the NY Post, labeled as a person of interest. Unfortunately for Barhoum, and well over a dozen others, they were the victims of shoddy detective work – their identities were broadcast publically while they were accused of crimes they had nothing to do with and maligned by the national media as terrorists.  In reality, Barhoum and others were not even being investigated by the authorities involved with the case.  Instead, they had been outed by anonymous commenters on Reddit and 4Chan, who believed they were guilty based upon their clothes and appearance.  What started as an atypical request by the FBI to gather evidence from the public quickly morphed into a much uglier digital witch hunt; one where the crowd’s fears, prejudices, and suspicions were given credence, while guilt and innocence were doled out based on shreds of circumstantial evidence. In the four days, three hours, and nine minutes between the detonation of the first bomb and the Boston Police Department tweeting that the final suspect had been captured, a new approach for conducting crowdsourced investigations was established. Although media outlets have been quick to lump all of the crowdsourced efforts together, there were two very different processes occurring which proved to have drastically different outcomes: crowdsourced intelligence gathering – a massive success, and crowdsourced crime solving – an abysmal failure.  The FBI only ever asked for the first, but both happened simultaneously.  They each offer important glimpses into major issues surrounding the future of law enforcement, justice, and surveillance. In many ways, the Boston Marathon provided one of the most compelling cases for crowd involvement, ever.  As one of the largest athletic events in the world, event planners estimate upwards of 500,000 people attend each year, the vast majority of whom have smartphones, and a sizeable portion of whom were actively taking pictures and videos throughout the event.  Surveillance cameras have become ubiquitous, but they are fixed in place and have large blind spots – people, on the other hand, can provide deep context and multiple points of view of the same situation.  For that reason, it’s a natural fit for Big Brother to look to tens of thousands of “Little Brothers” for their help in gathering intelligence.  After all, there is no police snooping network that could rival the surveillance regime of our smartphone lifestyles. Regardless of the FBI’s statements or wishes, they could never stop people from trying to conduct their own investigations.  Events now play out in real time.  The ability for

From: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tarunwadhwa/2013/04/22/lessons-from-crowdsourcing-the-boston-marathon-bombings-investigation/