The Man Behind The Internet's Hunt For The Boston Bomber. Reflections on the Recent Boston Crisis. The Web's Failed Hunt for the Boston Bomber. The Internet failed to find the Boston bombers, despite its sincerest efforts. First, it failed to identify the correct individuals in photos, initially focussing on people that it deemed suspicious-looking, like “Blue Robe Guy” and a high-school track athlete with brown skin who soon found himself on the cover of the New York Post. Then, after the F.B.I. released the correct photos of the two suspects—and pleaded with the public to only use those photos to I.D. them—it targeted Sunil Tripathi, a student at Brown University who’s been missing for nearly a month, along with Mike Mulugeta. These were the people, according to Reddit, in the F.B.I.’s photographs, not the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Fuelled by erroneous reports that the Boston Police Department scanner dropped his name—a chain of events spectacularly recounted by Alexis Madrigal—it failed rather spectacularly in the case of Sunil Tripathi. Read more of our coverage of the recent events in the Boston area.