Jake Broe Stan
Elite
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2023
- Messages
- 4,814
Josh worked for the corporate office of a global, publicly traded company in the south, but his real passion these days was solving crimes that happened two years earlier and hundreds of miles away on Jan. 6, at the U.S. Capitol. Josh’s home sleuthing setup wasn’t anything fancy: just him and his laptop, though he’d switched to a trackball mouse after he started developing symptoms of carpal tunnel “from working my day job all day and hunting insurrectionists by night.”
The halfway mark of the investigation into the Capitol attack — the largest FBI investigation in American history — was fast approaching, and Josh’s community of online sleuths were at the center of it: vacuuming up video, scouring social media, finding fresh faces and new crimes. The FBI was closing in on 1,000 arrests of people who had entered the Capitol or engaged in violence or property destruction that day, and this collection of online investigators — “Sedition Hunters,” they’d branded themselves — had sparked hundreds of those arrests, and aided hundreds more. What’s more, they’d identified more than 700 Jan. 6 participants who had not yet been arrested.
Often, Sedition Hunters like Josh were building entire cases for the FBI from soup to nuts, but the bureau’s rules made it difficult for special agents to offer even basic updates on the status of investigations. The one-way street was frustrating. The best written feedback they could hope for was maybe one word: “received.” One FBI informant was thrilled just to get thumbs-up emojis from her FBI handler.
www.politico.com
The halfway mark of the investigation into the Capitol attack — the largest FBI investigation in American history — was fast approaching, and Josh’s community of online sleuths were at the center of it: vacuuming up video, scouring social media, finding fresh faces and new crimes. The FBI was closing in on 1,000 arrests of people who had entered the Capitol or engaged in violence or property destruction that day, and this collection of online investigators — “Sedition Hunters,” they’d branded themselves — had sparked hundreds of those arrests, and aided hundreds more. What’s more, they’d identified more than 700 Jan. 6 participants who had not yet been arrested.
Often, Sedition Hunters like Josh were building entire cases for the FBI from soup to nuts, but the bureau’s rules made it difficult for special agents to offer even basic updates on the status of investigations. The one-way street was frustrating. The best written feedback they could hope for was maybe one word: “received.” One FBI informant was thrilled just to get thumbs-up emojis from her FBI handler.
Dating Websites and Furry Forums: The Volunteer Army of Online Investigators Who Helped the FBI Track Down January 6 Perpetrators
How a group of online sleuths tracked down the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6.
www.politico.com
