Disclosure: I’m not involved in 4chan in any way but I have deep fear appreciation for the weaponized autists. What they do and how they do it is mind blowing. I’m not watching so I don’t know specifics here but Godspeed, autists.
On the flip side, I appreciated how Charlie Kirk would sit down, debate positions strongly, and still be respectful. It’s a requirement for society that I wish we still had. You can support his family here.
It’s been a wild week for all the wrong reasons but one of the things that’s been under the radar is groups like 4chan.
What is 4chan?
If you’re not familiar with 4chan (NEVER visit it from a work computer), in the most neutral terms, it’s an anonymous message board covering all kinds of topics. In more honest terms, it’s a hot mess.
Because it’s anonymous, it tends to attract miscreants, chaos, and relentless trolling. If you’re the sensitive type of person who wants to speak to the manager, don’t go there.
What’s 4chan have to do with anything?
But 4chan has developed a special skill and audience affectionately known as the “weaponized autists”
In short, these are guys who were raised with a generation of quest-based video games where you had to “find 10 carrots” and figure out combinations of items to open hidden doors, make potions, and the like. That level of focus, creativity, willingness to put in a lot of fruitless hours gave rise to people who are willing to dig deep, make connections, and reason things through.
In practical terms, it means that if you post a picture of your desk, there’s may be a passionate person who figures out what brand of earbuds sitting back there halfway behind your coffee cup. Or maybe they’ll manage to re-construct the notes on that whiteboard, combine it with your LinkedIn profile, and figure out what you’re working on.. if one of them cares.
I talked about some of this in the MS Dev Show back at THAT Conference 2017. We start about 5 minutes in and get serious after that.
4chan: First moments after
Starting moments after the first videos dropped, they would have started analyzing frames looking for interesting things to investigate.
This isn’t because they loved Charlie Kirk or are political at all. Instead, they would see this as a fascination challenge, a way to prove their skill and cleverness, and use their powers for good.
First, was the shooting itself. Some would have noted the likely fatality of the shot. I’d be shocked if they didn’t have estimates on the round, body armor (if it’s there), trajectory, and a variety of other things. They would have fired up Google maps and other tools to start estimating likely locations for the shooter. I saw some audio analysis trying to estimate the range but it wasn’t particularly useful.
At the same time, other people would have started collecting and organizing the online media.. everything from individuals’ videos in the moment, news reports, pictures from all over, tiktoks after the fact, traffic cameras, etc. Realistically, this isn’t a deep technical task but one of collecting, organizing, classifying, and correlating to build a timeline of events and look for common threads.
Throughout this whole process, they know and follow normies to point formal investigators (law enforcement or citizen journalists) to interesting things to research via official means.
And to be clear, none of the people involved here are professional audio engineers or library science people. These are people who can hyper focus, notice details, and a deep interest in some topic. In these situations, people self-select into their ideal roles and the skills mesh beautifully.
4chan: Next 24 hours
By this point, they’re going to have some “people of interest” and this is where things can go VERY badly. In the 2013 Boston Bombing investigation, they mis-identified someone and dug DEEP into their life building an evidence package until the correct person was identified.
Then roughly 24 hours after the assassination, the FBI released some stills of a person of interest. 4chan applied their skills here. Using background details, they had their own height estimate. They analyzed the grainy image of the tshirt to identify the design and the find the vendor and pictures of other people wearing it. And then they used the still to extract and rotate the face for a better view and comparison against their persons of interest. Yes, this is where error and estimation drifts in.
On Thursday night, September 11th, the FBI gave a press conference and noted they hadn’t seen this many digital tips since the Boston Bombing.
Unfortunately, this is one of the places where 4chan CAN fall down. They identified a couple suspects and started digging deep but they don’t have the physical presence (aka “boots on the ground”) to interview suspects, their families and colleagues, etc to get non-digital picture. In the Shia LaBeouf “HWNDU” story [2017], they did have people go out and drive around to fill in the IRL picture so this is addressable.
4chan: Now there’s a Suspect
When I initially started this, I was curious on how it would play out. On Friday morning, September 12th there was a suspect identified and arrested.
Within minutes of the name release, 4chan stepped up again. They took the name, went back to the organized information, grabbed more, and lined up a number of things that matched. More importantly, they crawled his entire social graph (friends, family, etc) and started grabbing their pictures, posts, etc to preserve it and (in)validate them as a suspect.
This is one of the places where 4chan has a huge advantage.
At the time of this writing, the suspect and his family profiles are deeply mined with packages of images and detail available for download and hundreds of people have been analyzing every single one.
Alternatively, if law enforcement wants to grab some these files, they need to a) know it exists in some form and b) know who to ask for it. It gives people that aren’t in the initial warrants to scrub data and potentially be missed on any followups. 4chan doesn’t care. They can and will grab anything public via brute force of people, scripts, or even social engineering. None of that will be admissible in court but can create tips that lead to investigations that can be.
4chan: Now what?
In parallel with all of that, 4chan has been pulling on threads to see who else, what else, etc might apply. Assuming this isn’t part of a larger conspiracy, this will quietly dissolve in the next week or so. It will pop up occasionally as details are revealed in the indictment and trial but that’s it.
While I’ve never been a part of the 4Chan chaos, I have a healthy fear awesome respect for the autists. They have some limitations – physical/IRL activity and legal authority – but they can move faster and more broadly than official channels.
If you’re curious about this as an intellectual pursuit, the formal term is “Open Source Intelligence” and I’ve written on it regularly over the years.