Many of us are saddened by the Boston Marathon bombings and are relieved that the ordeal has come to an end. Or, has it? I think each of us will take our own time to reflect on the events, digest both the reliable as well as the mis-information that is being directed us from all directions, and derive our own conclusions. As I wrote in my last post, various technologies played important roles in identifying the suspects and eventually capturing one of them. They brought to light several important things – explosion of technologies, how the law enforcement relied on distributed technologies (video tapings from sources other than Law enforcement), social media and crowd-searching (crowd sourced searching), and thermal imaging.

Frankly what got lost in all of these discussions is how every one of these items is far more complicated than the positive aspects which helped us in the end. And most importantly, what led to the surviving suspect was an actual curious human being and not the technology. Quite obviously, every step of the way, there were pitfalls – privacy, security, misuse of captured information, dangers of subjectivity arising from crowdsourcing the search whi has a high probability of the wrong people being implicated etc. etc. And the massive data that was helpful in cases like this and others is the “Big Data“.

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