In the UK, that sort of thing has happened before. In the miners' strike in Thatcher's era, the army were drafted in, given police uniforms and told to enforce order at coal pits. The husband of my former boss was one such squaddie.
The high res photos were all nice and cool, but they are useless if the suspect weren't on them. It's like if i make a photo of Bratislava Castle and you will try to find the Big Ben on it. Good luck with that. Same applies to those high-res photos.
Well, what do you suggest? I posit that reality is simpler and more coincidental than fiction. Yeah, we'd all love it if it turned out to be some awesome super-conspiracy right out of Hollywood. Maybe the fertilizer plant was actually a testing facility for UFO technology, and the two Boston bombers were ex-employees about to blow the whistle. Frame them for terrorism. "Kill" one of them, "arrest" the other and ship him away. While all eyes are on Boston, move all the UFOs under cover of darkness then blow the place up to remove any trace of evidence. Sounds about right. I'm sure there's enough YouTube videos out there to connect the dots. I'm not too familiar with the efforts of all the people on Reddit. Did they have high-res photos of the bombers? Did they post them before the suspects were located? Were these photos exclusive to Reddit or were they among the thousands of photos that the FBI was busy scanning and analyzing? More and more I feel like CSI-(insert city) has given the public a false sense of what actual forensics is like. It's not uncommon to have to deal with blurry or low-res imagery.
Was about to ask the same thing... NCIS, CSI, etc is not even close to the real thing. Not to mention, the Boston police dep't is nowhere near accustomed to things like these. Boston isn't exactly NYC or Cincinnati, folks. They probably aren't going to have a system for things like this. They were most likely completely unprepared. Not equipment wise, that's a quick fix, but training wise. Even if they got the wrong guys, so what? They're still legitimate arrests on resisting arrest alone. There are probably dozens of law's they've broken even if they don't turn out to be the bombers. If they do have the wrong guys then all's I have to say is this:
That sounds like a conspiracy theory, The Met police were called in by a local constabulary to re-enforce the lines, The army was asked buit no green light was given. The evidence is there that the Met officers were acting like a bunch of idiots. I'm open to read up any evidence to suggest the army were used if you can point me in the right direction. There is documentation of Winston Churchill's involvement in Tonypandy riots where the army were called in. Back on topic.... Well waddyaknow! Look what we have here! PUBLISHED: 21:13, 20 April 2013 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312253/Dramatic-thermal-imaging-photos-reveal-marathon-bomber-tracked-police-hid-BOAT-Boston-backyard.html Something does stink, They were using TI/IR tech, Combined with dogs this guy should have been nailed shortly after his brother was gunned down. The police/paramilitaries have had an excellent live exercise of Martial law. That's what it looked like to me, And what i 100% believe is the case now.
He was about 2 blocks outside the 20 block search perimeter. And considering all the local police/boston police/federals/national guard rushed in, dogs were pretty much useless once the first few hundred officers arrived.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10007328/Bostons-terror-ends-as-second-marathon-bombing-suspect-Dzhokhar-Tsarnaev-is-captured-alive.html Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/19/tamerlan-tsarnaev-dead-boston-bombing-suspect-dies_n_3116056.html Airborne FLIR sensors can search 20 blocks in a single pass FFS, They can cover a lot more like large areas of ocean, It's all down to the keen eyes of the operator to know what they are looking for. This is the system that was used to confirm his location (Ironically, Based in Boston, MA): http://gs.flir.com/surveillance/airborne Look at the thermal images of the boat, A heat signature in a parked boat is suspect by any account and those Air units should have a good shoeing for failing to follow him and then spot him, end of. Cadaver/Search dog teams can follow blood trails/scent/injuries even amongst a large human presence, Blame the handler not the dog. The suspects were together when the first "mother of all neighborhood gun battles" took place, The air units/dog teams would have been on scene during that battle, The other kid should not have escaped, No excuses. The US authorities have justified arming the police/DHS/FBI with the very best kit and have enjoyed massive budgets that would put most nations Military budget's to shame, All in the name of fighting terrorism and keeping the "homeland" safe. To have failed in the operation of the most basic observation equipment (airborne TI/IR in this case) is laughable and I would be screaming hell or high water for my tax money to be spent on training these cops on how to "use" their kit instead of flaunting it like a bunch of "airsofters". Luckily, A Bostonian, David Henneberry with no military/law enforcement training spotted blood on his boat and dialed 911 while he was "martial-led" on his own property. Give that man a medal.
Where does "streets away" and "2 blocks away" contradict ? 2 blocks is exactly.... 2 streets. And now think a bit. A residential area of few ten thousand, everyone at home. How do you recognize a terrorist inside a house from a home owner inside a house in thermal imaging ? Answer, you can't. The thermal imaging was used only to confirm that the suspect is still there after it was reported that someone is inside the boat covered in blood. I guess you didn't watch Mythbusters episode which was about the dogs... Tracking dog got confused once multiple persons took the same path. Because patrol cars usually are full of K-9 units, right ? The ones who were in the gunfight were generic patrol units which noticed the searched plate number. It is so easy to talk from behind your couch, reality is much harder.
Dogs aren't useless when there trained to track explosives, that this guy apparently was coated in (carrying IED, and strapped up with them). Plus if they were using TI/IR, they could have covered that radius pretty quickly and extended beyond the search parameter easily. (Before anyone asks, my father is ex-mod R&D in such this given field, testing and designing reccy pod's for our tonka's at the time) I imagine UAV's were deployed, since they had every law enforcement agency with assets available. Now, I've seen military fast jet reconnaissance from 15 years ago, and the resolution is , at the time the CMOS array (much like a scanner head) is spitting out enough pixels to make your brain pop, on what I'll call the Y axis's, and the X axis of the image was measured in miles! Multiple sensors giving colour and IR imaging capable of reading the number plate text on the tax disc, I know because I've done it.) The only difficult bit is processing the data in time, 15 years ago you have to wait for the jet to return to base, 1 hour download time from flash storage and then process the data in a grid fashion, which a room of people could do in a few hours. But that's the issue, with a man hunt by the time you find him in the imagery he has had a 4-5 hour window to move which could be 10's of miles away or 60 ft in an unknown location.
Well mate, sorry to tell you are mistaken on this. In years gone by I plied my trade as an Armoured Reconnaissance crewman, I am well aware of Infra Red/Thermal Imaging capabilities, how it is correctly used and how to disseminate an image produced by this technology. It's not hard, when "properly trained" to find a thermal needle in a haystack, There is no difference thermally speaking, Between finding a breathing person in residential area hiding in a boat or spotting soviet soldiers hiding in a forest from a couple of kilometers away. I might add that software based detection/monitoring and better imaging are available now that we did not have when I was serving, Again, no excuses apart from improper training or gung-ho attitude. Heat is heat, You don't recognize a terrorist, You recognize a heat signature. Even a 20 block radius, with the residents couped up in their homes that heat signature in the boat should have been spotted, Especially an inanimate thermal signature like a living person hiding in a boat covered with a tarp. The FLIR systems being used were real time, Its all down to the operator and any software he might be using. To say you "can't do it" shows complete lack of knowledge and I'm happy to correct you. As for dogs, I'm no expert but I would suggest getting info from sources other than scripted TV shows. http://www.ussartf.org/dogs_search_rescue.htm http://diag-nose.com/working_dogs_products.html
The problem with your theory is that their expectation was probably that if he was hiding somewhere there, it will be in one of the buildings, maybe even with hostages. And in that case, how do you recognize a 5 member family from 4 member family and a criminal holding them as hostages in a urban area with thousands of people ?
If I was to hold hostages, then I would group them in one area and keep a safe distance, something which would stick out rather oddly on IR
Well, there is an issue with this ruling right from the start. That alone would prevent the use Tynecider suggested. As i said, life is not as simple as some of you may think.
Not applicable, sure IR imaging "evades" one's privacy but since in this case they are looking for someone who could be holding a family hostage. Also the authorities must have had a warranty for the city radius in order to do the search house by house.
Dunno if you guys read or not, but they tossed an identical bomb as the ones used in the original attack at police during their original fight with them. I'm not sure how much more of a smoking gun they need. I'm all for proper procedure of law, but it's pretty evident that even if somehow they didn't do the original bombings, they're guilty of a hell of a lot anyway. What would you have them do at that point?
By 'them' you mean law enforcement, correct? I would have them follow the law in their pursuit of the suspect. There is not much to address regarding the 4th Amendment argument. First, if a homeowner consents to a search then no warrant is needed. Considering the events that were unfolding, I speculate that all of the homeowners were happy to allow law enforcement to do a quick check (presuming any actual searches occurred). Second, there are a number of exceptions to the 4th Amendment. The pertinent exception in this case is exigent circumstance, i.e. a situation in which law enforcement believes that people are in immediate danger. Again, given the events that were unfolding, I'm not sure there is much argument to be made.
I'm loving this thread. To those of you exclaiming that "It should be easy" or "I've trained on this tech with the army, it's better than they're claiming" or even "Wtf, the pictures are crap" Do you really believe that regular law enforcement, or even the FBI, are going to have ready access to tech that is still mostly unavailable to the majority of the armed forces - A good number of whom are currently in a sandy pit trying not to get blown up themselves? It's all well and good saying you've used better, but that doesn't mean they're going to have the best of the best. I can't imagine Boston PD have a high altitude reconnaissance jet, for example? (Single pass would suggest that you meant jet, not helicopter..) Hell, the picture you've shown yourself is fairly low resolution, so zoom that out and even if you could see 20 blocks at once, then I'd buy you dinner if you could pick out individuals that looked like terrorists/hostage takers. Given the stress, the equipment, and the urgency of the situation (Not to mention not having any more explosives going off), I'd say they wrapped up a lead quite quickly. Certainly looks like those two were behind the bombings, but it wouldn't be unheard of for them to have been put up to it.
I think you under estimate the resources available, sure Boston PD was on the ground along with local agents from the FBI field office, but you can sure as hell bet the full agency asset was deployed on this. Might have not been as big as 9/11 but the scale of the attack had yet to be understood. It was even said early on that it was a multi-agency task force being pulled together, which would have involved departments checking on known groups and how active they were. Now I was speaking of British technology from 15 years ago, which could do that task with ease, so I can only speculate that the tech has filtered down some what based on that FLIR system, the resolution is still a bit too low in comparison but the fidelity of the IR imagery is good enough for a non-miltary spec piece of equipment. With regards to the tech not being available to most the armed forces like the lads on ground in the sand pits, well it is but IR is pretty useless when walls are 3ft thick and designed to keep the day time heat out. Could I ask what your 1st hand experience is with such matters? Have you seen full size military reconnaissance imagery? This thread has got a bit weird too be honest, the whole false flag stuff I don't believe, but something still seems iffy with event's, but maybe that's more of it being unbelievable. With America's past terrorist attack issues, I'm not surprised they had the so called "seal team" as some are saying knocking around the start and finish area's along with bomb dogs. It just seems like logical security sense, that slightly failed but the reaction to it was top notch.
