This shot is from the FBI website. It is a still from a surveillance camera. There are surveillance camera everywhere and there were tens of thousands of images to go through.

Over at reddit, there are – I have no idea, somewhere between ten and a million – people collectively thinking and talking about the images.  That is somewhere between ten and a million very smart, very computer savvy, very energized, people.

We live in a world with an astounding amount of available information. Processing is the problem but, when the government wants to throw all its resources into the game they bring a seemingly almost unlimited amount of processing. A guy from Florida sees the still above and sends the Feds this shot.

Apparently suspect No. 2 was even wearing his signature hat so he would be easier to recognize. Now his picture, in his signature hat, was all over  the internets. At that point the two brothers must have known, all the way to the bone, that they were fucked.

To me, here, 2700 miles away, watching television and this screen, off and on, during the last thirty or so hours, it seems hard to believe that they would not catch these guys. It was a surprise – and to my way of thinking, a happy surprise – that they caught one alive, but our world is too interconnected to not have caught them. There are too many pictures out there. There are too many people looking at the pictures.

In the end, one poor, wounded, scared 19 year old boy, was alone, hiding in a boat in a stranger’s backyard; nobody, not the Left, not the Right, not even his uncle, was on his side.

As the police, the SWAT Teams, the FBI, the Marshals, et al, unwound and left  Watertown, they got a standing ovation.