It Could Happen Here - Open Source Verification

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Garrison walks us through how they identified Rittenhouse the night of the Kenosha shooting and gives tips for starting open source verification. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. America.

Hey, Americans. America. How is American? That is the podcast. And those beyond. That was a horrible issue. That was maybe your top 10 worst this is it could happen here a podcast where an incompetent rube fucks up starting the show

and then we talk about how things are falling apart or how to make things not fall apart or some version of things in between those two facts. Yep. Yep. That's a kind of, kind of not great time going on right now. A lot of people are, that was our second, that was our B pitch for the name.

It's kind of not a great time going on right now. It actually is not that far from what was discussed. Yeah. I mean, especially right now, there's a lot of trials going on on stuff. I know the Ahmaud Arbery trial is happening. The one about Unite the Right is going on. And of course, the Kyron House trial.

As of recording, the jury is still in deliberation second day of deliberations so no idea what's going to be the result by the time this episode goes up I've actually been like not commenting on it or trying not to think about it there's nothing we can do about it and like a lot of people

there's been discussion about how much civil unrest there's going to be depending on the result of the trial. I know there's been a lot of National Guard sent to Wisconsin. It's been FBI door knocks at activists' homes trying to scare people so they don't go out and riot or whatever. Discussion online of people planning protests in response to whatever the result is. to in response to whatever the result is um i noticed today there was a post from i think the ohio proud boys claiming that they'd be sending like like uh was it hundreds or thousands of like people armed with like ars to wisconsin or yeah there's it there's a fucking post people are saying like you should take it seriously because it's from a proud boys internal chat and it's

like we've got 300 guys heavily armed heading to, and there's already X number of guys there. And we're gonna kill a lot more communists than Kyle Rittenhouse did and yada, yada, yada. And if I could give you one piece of advice now, and who knows where the world is at the point at which this episode drops. It's when people talk about, if you are at a protest

and someone starts talking about the Proud Boys, as in the Proud Boys are coming or the Proud Boys are here, if you don't immediately see incontrovertible visual proof that they have access to showing it, assume it's nonsense. Okay? Yeah. That is my advice as someone who has heard a thousand times people say versions of the Proud Boys are coming. Okay? Insist on evidence uh or ignore it but you know whenever whenever these big civil you know unrests and types of stuff happens there's always an increased uh chance that there'll be some kind of protest related

shooting um especially yes definitely absolutely that may have happened by the time this episode drops yeah especially people are bringing guns, people are bringing firearms. There's been a lot of, you know, for like the demonstrations outside the courthouse, there's been, you know, guns there. There's been, you know, an increasing in the rate of shootings at protests on the West Coast throughout the past few months.

So I'm going to be kind of talking about, you know, some things that you can do if you're at home and you feel confident enough in the aftermath of one of these shootings, you know some things that you can do if you're at home and you feel competent enough in the aftermath of one of one of these shootings you know if if if you know if a proud boy does bring up bring a gun and shoot somebody what you can actually do if video if you're in a situation where you've been following something happening all day there's a shooting and like low quality footage starts coming out of somebody killing someone or someone's else here's what to do next if you want to maybe be a positive part of of that of that process well not of that process but of like the the aftermath of it yeah you know and

and because because the universe is cruel i i originally wrote this wrote this write-up about the Rittenhouse shooting because the universe is a cruel place and it's going to continue to – this particular incident is going to continue to be impactful. Even though it's not the first, it's not going to be the last one of these, it is still impactful because of how much of a symbol it has been turned into. So I think a lot of people forget about how chaotic the night on the internet was the day of the Kenosha shooting. Like, it was wild. Being online as that was going on, no one had no idea what was going on. People could not agree on who the shooter was beforehand. There was a lot of pictures floating around. It was a nightmare. We knew that people were shot. We did not lot of pictures floating around. It was a nightmare.

We knew that people were shot. We did not know how many or who. It was pretty bad and chaotic. And it is always that way in the wake of a shooting. In any given shooting, always keep in mind when you're online or in person

and there has been a shooting and people are saying things about said shooting other than we should take cover from the shooting if they're saying anything else about it um you have to assume they're probably not either wrong or not entirely accurate um because it's hard to be it happens constantly i mean that's not it's something against any of them i can remember a moment when you and i were out last year garrison, and there was a shooting, I don't know, like 40 feet away. Nobody hurt, thankfully, but the immediate report from it was some guy had pulled an AR-15 out of his car. And I think the thing I said to you was, I'll bet you right now it's a nine millimeter handgun.

And sure enough, within minutes, there was a photo yeah it's and it's not that those people were like dumb or bad it's that like shootings are scary guns getting pulled is scary and people fuck up um in in their recollections um it's the same way in which like if a bear comes after you uh you may exaggerate the size of that bear in your head because you're scared as shit. Yeah. Because it's a bear. Yeah. So I was home on August 25th. I was actually about to go out to a cover to purchase in Portland, but then I saw this happened on my phone on Twitter.

I was like, I cannot go out. I will be more useful at home. So with so much uncertainty online around the details of the actual shooting, it was clear that trying to provide concrete information would be crucial in the hours to come. So I booted up my computer and started to

try to begin to search for information and verifiable stuff. So I spent all night looking for details about the shooter, uncovering his supposed identity. Ultimately, about an hour before the police announced their investigation

even started. And 12 hours before the police announced the shooter's arrest. And also, to my surprise at the time, I discovered that the shooter was the same age as me. Which is fun. What a moment for you.

That was a night. So because I mainly use Twitter and most of the video of the incident was on Twitter, I started my investigation by looking at Twitter. My first goal was to find as many videos of the shooting that I could and collect pictures of all of the alleged suspects. All the people who were claiming, hey, this is the shooter. I think I got a picture of the shooting that I could and collect pictures of all of the alleged suspects. All the people who were claiming, hey, this is the shooter.

I think I got a picture of the shooter. Here's who he is. So I kept my eye on trending terms so I searched under the hashtags like Kenosha, Kenosha shootings, Kenosha shooting, Kenosha protests. Boogaloo was trending a lot. A lot of people thought the shooter was a Boogaloo was trending a lot. A lot of people thought the shooter was a Boogaloo boy.

Was not. And also hashtag militia. So the searchers brought up a lot of photos of multiple young men, most of whom were carrying long guns. And a lot of unconfirmed reports that the shooter was a Boogaloo boy was trending on Twitter. This was the main thing that night was Boogaloo Boy shot all this stuff. That was the main trending topic. A lot of conflicting details, and I did not want to kind of add to the misinformation, so I decided to not make any posts whatsoever about the identity of the shooter

until I was 100% confident that I had the correct ID, which takes a while. Twitter wants you to post stuff quickly as soon as you find it out, and it's way better to hold off your information and wait until you are absolutely sure it's the right time to post it because it's that correct stuff. Misidentifying a suspect can have serious consequences for any individual involved. One of the worst things you can do is misidentify any suspect. So I was looking through all the videos that I collected

for kind of unique or identifying clothing that the shooter may have been wearing. The first video I found useful was from a right-wing videographer named Drew Hernandez, who a few months later called for bloodshed at the Capitol. He also testified at the Rittenhouse trial. This video did not actually show any actual shooting.

It had a wounded person on the ground being treated by a medic and a man standing over the scene with a gun, wearing a green shirt, a tan baseball cap, jeans, and purple latex gloves. He had a black and orange bag.

The person in the green shirt then runs towards the camera while talking on the phone. And he says into the phone, I just shot somebody. Or I just killed somebody. It's hard to tell where he's actually saying. It's one of those things where if you think about it, you can hear both ones. Yeah. it's one of those things where if you think about it, you can hear both ones.

Yeah. Yeah. But he says something like, I just killed somebody on the phone and he runs past the camera. So this was the first kind of really important piece of information. Yeah. That was brought up in the trial too. And he was like, I don't remember what I said.

Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah. And to be honest, like even if this was, I don't think any of us believe this was legitimate self-defense, but even if it was, either of those things would be

perfectly acceptable things to say. It's a surprising moment. And you probably wouldn't remember what you'd said. I don't necessarily think he's lying about that. It turns out he was on the phone with the person who bought him the gun of a friend of his um so but but this was my first like important piece of information i you know the night of right this is before anyone's analyzed any of this stuff so this is

the first video that i can find it like okay here's a person admitting on camera that they shot somebody um and wearing a few potential identifiers, namely the green shirt, baseball cap, and bag. So now I can search for all of those items together and the rest of the footage collected throughout the night. Looking over the top viral videos of the night showing multiple people getting shot.

This is from later on, after the first person gets killed. We can see someone in a baseball cap, black and orange bag, and what could be a green shirt, running through a street. Somebody runs over to the individual with the gun and kind of punches him in the head,

knocking his hat off. So now the person running with the gun does not have a hat. The individual with the gun keeps running, but trips and falls on the ground before people try to disarm him. Four more shots are fired from the suspect and one more person dies as a result of this.

Other person gets their arm nearly blown off. There is one continuous video of all of this happening. Extremely useful, having one video of this whole shot. Yeah, it lets you time it and everything. Yeah. So the shooter, who appears to be the same person, is the other video because of the green shirt and the hat at the beginning continues to get onto his feet and runs off again. And the the orange orange and orange and black bag swings in front of him as he's running. And a purple glove is also visible. Multiple vehicles drive past like police vehicles.

so visible. Multiple vehicles drive past, like police vehicles. The shooter then walks up pretty close to the police vehicle and he just with the rifle and nothing happens. He waves to the cops and they just keep driving and he walks away. So

after finding and watching these videos, I had no reason to believe the shooter was in custody. And I had a good idea of his clothing and attire. So now it's time to compare this information that I gathered to pictures of the supposed suspects circulating on Twitter. But first, I think now it's the time to listen to people selling you stuff. You know who doesn't? Oh, boy.

Travel to another state to show up armed in a community to threaten people? They don't do it. I'm saying they don't. That's good. Okay. All right.

Products and services who support this podcast. Unless it's HelloFresh. Black Rifle Coffee. Washington State Patrol. What do you have against HelloFresh? Actually, a number of our sponsors will show up unwanted in your community armed. I forgot the Washington State Patrol. What do you have against Hello, Brad? Actually, a number of our sponsors will show up unwanted in your community armed. I forgot the Washington State Highway Patrol and the FBI have both dropped ads now.

Well, also, and California Highway Patrol. Don't forget about those motherfuckers. Like Kyle Rittenhouse, a number of our sponsors may show up in your home neighborhood with a gun. I have another one. Also, Black Rifle Coffee, Kyle's favorite brand of coffee. Remember? Well, it was until they disavowed him. Anyway, that's a long story.

Here's the ads. Here's the ones that paid us. Just do it. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building

things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel.

I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me

in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Yay. So there was a lot of pictures of suspects on Twitter. Some of them who look nothing like the person we now know who shot those people. Funny how that happens. Well, it's not funny. It's pretty bad.

Dangerous misinformation. Yeah, yeah. It's not great to share stuff like that when these things happen. Which is why I said, I'm not going to share anything until I 100% know. And know that it's actually worth posting about.

I'm going to go through some of the pictures and stuff. I'm going to go through at least one of the pictures of one of the people people claimed to be the shooter so in one picture circulating uh you see someone in a green shirt a baseball cap and big big big black rifle but this man's also wearing shorts a black hat not a tan one has no bag uh appears to be wearing like a tactical vest that is also green. So not the guy.

Even though he's wearing a green shirt and hat, not the same dude. Would be pretty easy to check. You really don't need to show that kind of stuff. Pretty sure a lot of people own green shirts. Yep. So two other photos that were circulating. They were claiming to be the guy. We had a green shirt, a tan baseball cap put on backwards.

Jeans. to be the guy. We had a green shirt, a tan baseball cap put on backwards, jeans. One of the pictures has a bag in front, which is an orange and black one. One of them doesn't. One picture has purple gloves. The other picture doesn't.

But these dudes look pretty similar, despite the same differences. I'm pretty sure this is the same guy, but I made the decision at the night this is probably the same dude. And he does appear to match the shooter a lot better. And there was a few clearer pictures of his face here. But honestly, if you look at all the pictures of the Kenosha shooting that night, the pictures of the suspect are really unclear because the way that the light hit his face,

he looks like an incredibly generic white boy um like extremely generic it is hard to tell any any identifying features from his face because they look like an archetype he looks like every every white every white boy it's really hard to say um everyone you went to high school with who, I don't know, sniffed a girl's chair. That's Kyle Rittenhouse. That was such a gross visual. Now that I decided that I have a decent collection of pictures of who I believe the actual suspect is, it's time to figure out who the suspect's name actually is. And this is one of the harder things, but often

you can have a lot of help in ways that you might not expect. Often, once you can get a good picture of someone, be like, yes, this is actually the dude, once that gets shared enough, often somebody knows who this is already. The internet's a pretty big place.

I believe the first person to actually... I was the person to like prove online who, who Kyle Rittenhouse, that Kyle Rittenhouse was the shooter. The first person to actually tie Kyle's name to the shooter was a neighbor of his on Facebook. They, they saw pictures of the shooter on, on Facebook and said, they saw pictures of the shooter on Facebook and said, hey, I think I recognize this guy. I think this is my neighbor. So often, once you have enough pictures and those can spread,

people will fail to find names. It isn't as hard as you would think. The hard part is finding out what personal connections are making those links and finding out where those are. But stuff spreads in a weird way. And for this, I was able to prove that it was Kyle pretty quickly for a few reasons. So after I was doing my clothing comparisons to figure out, to prove,

he said this is the actual person who did these things. The other thing I found that was not viral at all, but just because I was digging through so much stuff, was this meme shared by some small Boogaloo account. It was a picture of the shooter, right beside a collection of Blue Lives Matter pictures of someone who looks kind of similar linking to a Facebook page. Not linking. It was screenshotted from a Facebook page, and I can tell because of the font.

And it said, like, Rittenhouse's photos. house's photos so this was the first this was the first thing i saw on like buried deep inside like twitter's twitter's twitter's images but by using all of like these uh hashtag terms was this meme and and and the meme said so y'all think he's still a boogaloo no no he wasn't because of all of like the pro police stuff uh because boogaloo's generally are not not that fond of police they sure aren't yeah so so yeah um given given so you know if someone was to look at this you know look at this meme itself he's like okay you know the job is done you know information this dude looks vaguely similar ish to the guy on this written house Facebook. The gun looks kind of similar, because one of the pictures of the Facebook was the guy holding

an AR. But, you know, just something looking similar, or even holding a similar gun in one picture from a Facebook account, that's not enough to be sure about publishing a positive ID. There's no actual, really, there's no definitive proof there. Because, honestly, if I was to look at these two guys' faces,

they don't look incredibly similar, because faces can distort with lighting and compression. It can be really difficult. And this is where trying to ID a shooter is hard and requires complex judgment calls and posting inaccurate information or incomplete information can have extremely harmful effects. There's a lot of examples

of this happening in the past. Probably the biggest example, the most notorious one of false identification is the Boston bombing incident. Right after the 2013 bombing, thousands of users on sites like Reddit and 4chan began combing through footage to try to identify potential suspects. Screencaps of the people they deemed suspicious went viral online on various social media sites.

Unfortunately, the sleuthing work done on 4chan and Reddit was incredibly shoddy and seemingly had way more to do with, like, racial paranoia than actual detective work and evidence gathering. The New York Post subsequently published a picture on its front page that originated on Reddit that users had declared that it was showing the two suspects without doing any further verification. So it's real bad how stuff can spread from Reddit like this that's completely unverified to a newspaper, even as one as unreputable as the Post. It's still a how stuff can spread from Reddit like this that's completely unverified to a newspaper, even as one as unreputable as The Post.

It's still a very popular paper. The Post also claimed that the law enforcement were looking for those two individuals in that picture. One of the people identified by The Post was harassed online. Police later told him just to delete his social media accounts entirely because there was no use at that point. When the FBI did officially release photos of the unnamed suspects, Reddit users again falsely identified these people. One of the people they falsely identified went missing for weeks prior. His family received media inquiries about the false and verified rumors of their son's involvement and rumors of involvement were spread by reporters from Politico, Newsweek, NBC News, and BuzzFeed.

Eight days after the bombing, this guy was actually found dead and his family said it was a suicide. He was not one of the shooters, not one of the bombers. Which is again why even more than the tactics you could use to try and verify things online, the most useful thing you can take out of this is if there is a mass shooting or other act of violence and people on social media are saying it is this person, don't share it.

Just don't share it. Just wait. There's no value in sharing it. If they don't have anything to verify this at all. So yeah, I'm not going to. Don't. Again, that is the overwhelming thing we want to get across. That's why I'm not going to share this Kyle Rittenhouse boogaloo meme

because there's no proof for it. It's not there. Now, eventually eventually after digging i would realize that this meme cut is uh comes from his neighbor saying that she thinks the suspect is him so that's that's what this meme was created um but still like there there was no no proof for it so i don't i i didn't share it so all the boston bombing stuff was like going through my mind as i you know found this and was trying to dig for more details. So yeah,

I knew that I could not post a name on any social media or any info until I could prove it without a shadow of a doubt that this is the same person. Because a lot of times it is possible, it just requires work and time. And a big part of doing this on Twitter is you want to get it out fast

so that you're the first person to do it, that you know you can go viral on your thread of identifying this killer and like no that's not the reason to do image verification it's not to go viral on a thread it's because whenever that's your goal you're gonna do you're gonna do shitty fast work that is gonna end up causing some kind of horrible consequence like in the case of the boston bombing and to be even extra clear the primary use for this that kind of horrible consequence, like in the case of the Boston bombing. And to be even extra clear, the primary use for this, the kind of what you're teaching people, image verification, which is something that like Bellingcat, which has been like kind of a part-time employer of mine, is an open source journalism collective that's broken some of the biggest stories in the last couple of years.

And in the classes, we teach a class on image verification. And the point is just whenever someone is sharing a piece of what is like supposedly breaking news based on video or images that have been taken at the site of a whatever, image verification tactics can help you to know whether or not it's – whether or not either it's true or false, but also just whether or not the image – the information they're presenting gives you any reason to believe it. Or how the information is useful or how it's been altered. Just knowing you might be full of shit.

That's super important. Yeah. There's a thing that happens. And any time there's something that looks like a war starting, there's this video of a bombing from 2014 in Gaza that goes around. Yep. Every time. Yeah. It's like every time. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, there's, there's actually five or six different kinds of things that are like that. Chris that are like, Oh, this is, there's actually footage from like a Russian video game that people keep, keeps getting like mistaken for actual combat footage. Yeah.

And it's like, no, it's fucking from a video game. This has been on, this has been three wars. Now there's this famous footage of like a fucking um an airsoft battle at night uh with glowing like airsoft pellets with the glowing pellets and it kind of it kind of looks because it's black and white not a great camera it kind of looks like tracer fire and it's there's like three wars that people have said like look this is real combat footage from it happens all the time like and again great yeah great account to follow is uh hoax eye on twitter

they they do really good work pointing out just like kind of more like more like less high stakes kind of image image verification stuff um so but before i get into the actual like verification work of like proving hey i can actually prove that prove that by not just someone's face, I can prove that this shooter is the same guy from the Facebook page. I'll explain that next. First, short ad break, and then we will finish up with this actual proving section. Yeah. You know who is not Kyle Rittenhouse. Wow.

You have really dropped the ball to all of the transitions today. Yeah, I am not proud of myself or my place in society at the moment. Here's the ads. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Here's the ads. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists

to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them.

Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. I feel terrible. Garrison. So even though the Boogaloo meme was not hard evidence, it did provide a lead. So after seeing the meme, I did the first most obvious thing that I could see was compare the gun in the two frames. They do look similar. They're not identical. The optics are different for each rifle. But the rest of it, the stock, the grip, and the barrel do seem to be, if not identical, at least extremely similar.

Again, still not enough to make a positive ID on an individual basis. Like, this person is this person. So the next step is to scour the actual Facebook account itself that is alluded to in this meme and see what I can find there. The goal, obviously, being to find statements or pictures that will tie this person in the images of the shooter to the person on the account. So that's

clothing, location, intention, all these types of things that could tie the pictures of the shooter to the pictures of the person on this account. So, Kyle Rittenhouse's old public Facebook profile was mainly made up of Blue Lives Matter and pro-police images going back as far as 2017. Um, with a few, uh, then-recent pictures of him holding his AR-15-style rifle.

Uh, those, the, the rifle pictures were, like, from June, the shooting happened in late August. Um, it appears, I think it came out in the trial that he got his rifle around like May. So, yeah, a lot of pro-police stuff, a lot of thin blue line, Blue Lives Matter type things. His public page is relatively sparse, and there was no public

friends list to look through. One noteworthy piece of information was that he did list another name for himself as Kyle Lewis. Which I believe is his mother's maiden name. Sure. But even though I wasn't able to view a friends list, and there

wasn't many public posts, his page is by no means a dead end. I can still see everyone that has commented on, shared, or liked his public posts. So he did not have any pictures himself on his page that I could use for verification. He didn't have, like, nothing that I could tie to the shooting besides the actual gun. So not tons of useful stuff.

But perhaps there's still other leads to look through, like everyone who's liked, shared, or commented on his posts. So I opened up new tabs for every single person that interacted with Kyle's posts. While looking over their pages, I was searching to see if any of them had listed Kyle as a relative, with a focus on anyone with the last name of Rittenhouse or Lewis. And, you know, ideally was looking forward to see if anyone had pictures of Kyle or someone who seemed to be Kyle. One post from May of 2018 eventually proved useful. One comment read,

Kyle, you sure do look like a Lewis. So there's the alternate last name. And two people had liked that comment, Kyle himself and someone who is his mom, which I would later find out is is is his mom. So she said that lived that she said that she lived in. Is it Anatoke, Illinois? Antioch, probably Antioch, Illinois uh which matches uh with kyle's uh illinois based pro police posts he made a lot of like chicago blue lives matter posts so i assumed that kyle

was from illinois and also um uh antioch is that what you said whatever yeah antioch, is that what you said? Whatever. Yeah, Antioch. Antioch to Kenosha is only like a 30-minute drive. So that is also like, okay, that's pretty close. That is doable. So the next, I went through a lot of the relatives' pages, but I'm going to focus just on the person who I found out who was Kyle's mom because they're the one that had the most useful information, right? A lot of other information I looked through just didn't turn out to be useful, right? So I'm not including all of that here.

One post from Wendy's mom featured a younger Kyle wearing a police outfit. I'm sure people have seen this picture online before. I think I was probably the first person to share this photo of Kyle in this younger Kyle wearing this police costume. An unbelievably cringy photo, like even outside of the fact that he took two lives. Like just, I mean, look, we all have photos we took when while in rotc like so yeah ideally we would we would get a chance to grow there's actually there's actually a lot more of these photos uh there's photos of him touring so this is this is stuff i also found that night

uh photos of him like touring a target with police as he's in a police uniform he was part of like a police young cadets program he would he was like 12 um so that's where he got this outfit and he like tagged around with police for like a day or something and there's photos of him like in a target with police even when i was like a shitty right-wing kid that sounded like a nightmare so so yeah so uh kyle – the person who I figured out was Kyle's mom posted this photo of her and Kyle, which Kyle liked. And then in another picture from Kyle's mom, I found – it's a family picture including Kyle wearing what I would say is like an army green shirt. Kind of similar, but it's a green shirt. Like I have shirts that are pretty similar to that.

That's not going to be anything super definitive. Until we got, there's one picture that proved to be much more useful of Kyle on, or someone who I assumed was Kyle you don't actually see his face but he is wearing horribly cringy American flag Crocs which Kyle Oh my god. Horrible.

I know. I know. So and on Kyle's page there was also pictures of him wearing those same Crocs so like even though I can't see the person's face, the Crocs are the same, probably the same guy. He's also wearing a tan baseball cap.

And on this, I can actually see that it has an American flag on the front of the cap, which I did not notice on anything else before. That's something different, but again, that's not like a red flag. That's just a, but again, that's not like a red flag. That's just a thing of note.

Because the baseball cap is tan, and it has white mesh on the sides. I did make one post before I actually did any kind of claiming to do identity stuff. I did ask my Twitter followers if there's any pictures of the back of the shooter's cap um and i got them to to send me those and then i i got one picture of of the back that actually has uh i couldn't see like okay the back of the shooter's cap also has the flag on it so i was able to actually show that. Okay so the baseball cap. On the back of it. They're both tan baseball caps.

They both have white mesh on the sides. They both have an American flag. And then I got another picture. That was even closer. That showed a tear. On the brim of the hat. And if you zoom in on one of the beach pictures. You could also see a tear.

On the same position on the hat. So this is the hat is the same hat. The hat was definitely in both locations. So at this point, based on the gun, based on the hat, based on the location being very close to Kenosha and being close on the rough facial similarities, there was enough to put stuff together to be like, okay, I think this is probably fine in saying, I think this is probably the dude. So at this point, I wasn't,

and again, I'm not going to post this immediately, and I'm not going to post something by saying this is think this is probably the dude. So at this point, I wasn't, and again, I'm not going to post this immediately, and I'm not going to post something by saying this is who it is without providing the evidence. So instead of writing a thread tweet by tweet, I write the whole thread out and then tweet the whole thread at the same time. So I put together the thread documenting my relevant stuff. I wrote the first eight posts at the same time and posted them together with all the evidence

uploaded. And then as I was writing the thread, I came across another piece of evidence. There was one, I was going through one of the live streams of that night from a channel called The Rundown Live, which I've not heard anything of before or since then.

But, you know, one of the many streamers that were out in 2020. And you can see Kyle inside the frame and then, like, pans away, but the people are still talking. So Kyle's actually off-camera now, but he

I think someone, like, asks him his name and the person who I think is Kyle replies Kyle. Now, of course, it's off-camera so you can't be totally sure. There's enough context clues and that plus all the other evidence. I'm like, okay, this is enough to add to the thread because, again, it's not enough proof by itself, but it combined with everything else completes a much fuller picture. So I posted my, like, nine or, yeah, like, eight or nine thing, thread on being able to prove it's Kyle via, you know, comparing stuff like the gun, the hat, the shirt, and demonstrating my work tracking across Facebook and how I was able to, like, link these two people together. 22 minutes after I posted the thread identifying Kyle, Kenosha Police announced that they were starting an active investigation.

I soon added a court document to my thread about a traffic violation by someone named Kyle Rittenhouse, filed a few days before the shooting. The traffic violation thing also included stuff like address, which I blacked out the address for that just because sharing the

for reasons I'll soon explain, because again again, if it's if it's a if it's a track violation, if people really want it, they can find it themselves. Right. It's it's not making it possible to find it. And this was able to confirm that it was in the same location, Antioch. And also this this proved that Kyle was 17 at the time. proved that Kyle was 17 at the time. This is how we knew that he was 17 years old at the time of the shooting was because of this traffic violation document found online.

So the address on the violation document was the same one I had linked to Kyle's mom by doing other OSINT address work. I was able to find out what her address was. So yeah, that was most of my work that night.

It took about, I don't know, like two-ish maybe. It's hard to break up the timing. It took about half an hour to get from the Boogaloo meme to finding the matching baseball cap on Kyle's mom's Facebook page. About another half hour to write out the thread and about an hour of work previous to that about trying to find out the actual footage and categorize it. And, okay, this is the clothing he's wearing. Here's the clothes I need to look for on social media, right? See if I can find these shoes, these pants, this shirt, this hat, this bag, that kind of stuff. And I was able to find enough of those items to make it pretty clear that it was linked. And that makes you, Garrison, one of the first people in the world to get to know way more about Kyle Rittenhouse than you ever wanted to know.

Yeah, a lot more. This nightmare has been going on longer for you than anybody else, buddy. Other than his family. Yeah. And so I want to note a few other ways to do image verification, specifically on Kyle that I didn't do, but other people did after i after i said hey this is probably the guy so uh afterwards people found other kind of evidence on kyle's tiktok um and snapchat so it turns out kyle was snapchatting his night in wisconsin um which we would find out later so he was that he was snapchatting from kenosha um garrison first off i do feel as the representative

of zoomers in in this call why why are you guys all using the snapchats huh i i don't use i don't use the snapchats um well i'm making you answer for the crimes of your generation the crimes like yeah the snap nope now well technically speaking i have one friend who I only talk to through Snapchat, and we both only use it for that, and we don't know why we use Snapchat for it. Yeah, there's a few people who are like Snapchat people who only text through Snapchat, and I don't get it. Yeah, except neither of us are like that. Just download Signal. Just specifically there. Just get Signal.

Anyway, so yeah, the Snapchat. There's also TikTok. There was footage of Kyle attending a Trump rally at TikTok. Also him assembling and testing out his gun was on Snapchat. I believe clips of it were also shared on TikTok. So I could have gotten a lot more closer details of the gun if I looked on Snapchat or TikTok. And I think this is good advice that I've taken since then,

and for other people looking to do this stuff, if a suspect looks young, Snapchat and Instagram might be apps that are worth checking out for information as opposed to Facebook, right? Lucky enough, there was enough stuff on Facebook on this instance, typically probably because Kyle's family was conservative

and he was conservative, so higher chance of being on Facebook there. But in general, if someone's younger, maybe look on younger apps. But yeah, so good thing to think about. Whenever these chaotic, panicked moments happen, misinformation can spread very, very quickly.

Cannot stress enough how dangerous and irresponsible it is when a suspect is named without proper verification. You know, last last September, Ian Miles Chong falsely identified a suspect in the shooting of two L.A. police officers. This resulted in the falsely accused got a man and receiving many death threats online. I think Ian Miles Chong did this again a few months later. He was doing this a lot last year. He was really bad about trying to

identify people. Doing solid verification work is possible, but extreme caution needs to be taken. I need to be very mindful of the consequences of your actions when you're doing this work. I also want to put out, Garrison is very good at this. That's why it took two and a half hours. It's going

to take you longer. It takes a lot longer. Honestly, finding Kyle was just the right mix of things in one moment. Often it doesn't go that fast, and it doesn't need to be, right? Like a big part of the problem is that if people think about it needing to be like a fast-paced thing,

that's where the mistakes happen. I was just lucky to have enough dominoes fall in the right place to identify how the night of. Having his neighbor say, hey, this guy looks similar to my neighbor, extremely useful in the long run. That happened faster than that happens in a lot of cases. So that really accelerated things.

Sometimes it will be easy. Sometimes – like a good example of when it's harder, we have a decent amount of footage about the individual who placed bombs outside of the DNC and the RNC before the 6th. That person has not been identified and the fucking FBI seems to have no goddamn clue. But also, they were way more intentional in what they were wearing. They were very smart. Whoever they are, they're very capable.

The only thing that we have on them is their shoes, basically. Those are kind of the polls of this, right? With Rittenhouse, you've got this situation where it's like, all of the information you need to identify them is there openly online. And part of OPSEC, if you're doing things that are crimes, is to make sure that – Is to limit that.

That whatever it is you are going to the crimes in, nothing exists on the internet that connects that to your name and face. And that doesn't always mean Black Block. That can mean other clothing. Especially if you've been photographed in Black Block a bunch. Yeah. I think if you look at the guy who dropped off bombs on January 6th, he's not wearing Black Block because Black Block draws attention. He's wearing like a graze. I will bet you money that guy, well, that individual is either a former Fed or former special forces.

They were very capable. Yeah. Leaning towards Fed who showed up in clothing they had never worn before and paid for used in cash probably from a variety of places. That clothing was burned as soon as they got away. They were out of the state uh as early as it was possible to do so plant them and then immediately get out like um and you know by the time the capital right by the time their bombs had been found they were they were if they were smart i mean gone you know yeah like that's how anyway whatever like so yeah so like oftentimes

it can be if someone knows what they're doing this process can be a lot harder Those are the kind of the polls. Oftentimes, it can be... If someone knows what they're doing, this process can be a lot harder, like in the case of the guy who left the bombs at the Capitol. Kyle wasn't wearing much identifying clothing, wasn't even wearing a mask because COVID was for cucks. There's a lot of these things

that made this process easier than a lot of other verifications. But like I said, there still was a lot of these things that made this process easier than a lot of other verifications. But like I said, there still was a lot of false IDs going around that night. So it still happens. I'm kind of on the fence myself as to whether or not it would have been safer for our country or the society or whatever you want to call it. How much more damage or less damage would have been done if Kyle Rittenhouse had been someone who showed up in impeccable like clothing that he could not be identified from fucking ran off and was never caught and we just knew there was the shooting of protesters in kenosha um by somebody um like i don't know how much better or worse that is for

society if that happens i don't know know. I'm thinking about terrible things. But sorry. First off, I want to apologize. Sometimes talking about this stuff winds up seeming like advice for how to commit crimes. That's not the intent. It's just when you talk about what makes something difficult to identify, you're kind of by default talking about like here's how to commit a crime and get away with it. And it's the kind of by default talking about like, here's how to commit a crime and get away with it. And it's the kind of thing, like if you're doing verification work, one of the things that helps is to kind of put yourself in the mindset of somebody who, okay, if I'm in this situation

and I do this, what are the decisions that I might make afterwards? And you can kind of try to think through this person. Like it can be helpful, especially if you're trying to like track someone through a day. So you know someone was at this point at a protest at X hour because they shot somebody. You know, think through, okay, what else happened that day? Were there other protests? Were there other gatherings? Like, or is this one in a series of events? Can I go look for, you know, videos from other things in the area that this person might

have also been at and might have worn the same clothing um there's a lot anyway image verification is is fun catch the fever um it is it is a fun thing to do it's good to if you're not able to attend in-person demos for like like physical reasons or whatever or like mental reasons uh doing this stuff from home is another way of getting involved, especially for, you know, tracking down bad people after they do bad things. Yeah. So you can, you know, if you want to learn more about this with, you know, the benefit of also visual aids, Bellingcat has. If you just type image verification bellingcat there's beginners and advanced guides to verification yep um there's talk about like manual reverse image

search tools and like how well they work there's quizzes so go go there if you're if you find this interesting um it it can be quite a hoot um but you know what else is quite a hoot? Ending a goddamn podcast, which I'm doing now. We're done. Goodbye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second

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