Today, 22 November 2013, marks the 50th anniversary since the assassination of President John F Kennedy, and much of his death still remains shrouded in mystery: was there a second shooter? Where was JFK hit?
With more recent events, the use of technology means that Big Brother has eyes everywhere, with camera phones and CCTV images to capture all. In the case of the Boston bombings, footage of the crowds made their way online almost instantly, with Reddit and 4chan pages being set up to held ‘find’ those responsible.
Unsurprisingly, the witch hunt by the public did not go well, and student Sunil Tripathi was falsely accused.
"Some of the activity on Reddit fuelled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiralled into very negative consequences for innocent parties," said the social news site in a statement at the time."The Reddit staff and the millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.” However, there were good intentions behind the campaign, and the use of modern technology meant that a massive amount of images were available.Compare this to the day of the JFK shooting. There were plenty of eyewitnesses, but still no consensus has been reached - at least in the eyes of the public - on whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or if there was another shooter on the infamous ‘grassy knoll’.That is of course, not to say that the assassination was not caught on tape: amateur filmmaker Alexander Zapruder's footage of the event shows the shooting taking place. This, however, was not released at the time. Stills of the film were released before the full footage was leaked.The video, which plays at 18 frames a second, has since been ‘updated’ by YouTuber antdavisonNZ, who stabilised with additional interpolated frames bringing it to a steady 30 frames per second.
This has now become the video synonymous with the assassination, and shows how useful the public can be in times of crisis. Despite the troubles caused by the Reddit and 4chan ‘investigations’, the public also proved useful during the Boston Bombings, with civilian David Green taking what turned out to be the clearest photo of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two suspects.
Describing the use of technology in the capture of the Boston Bombing suspects, Casey Chan and Brian Barrett from Gizmodo said: “Taking a picture of what you see in front of you—whether it be a disaster, a beautiful view, a plate of food—has become as instinctual as just plain seeing.”It was not only cameras from the public that helped with the Boston investigation: the FBI pulled footage from nearby security cameras from Lord & Taylor's, a department store across the road from the second explosion.It was images from this camera that the FBI published when looking to identify the two men.
Perhaps if such technology had been present in 1963, the assassination case would be closed. As it stands, 40 eyewitnesses said that they saw ‘smoke’ on the grassy knoll, which has been suggested to have come from gunshots.Despite this, a photo taken by eyewitness Mary Ann Moorman on her Polaroid camera - the only photograph of Kennedy the moment he was gunned down - does not instantly show any such smoke.
A Gallup survey carried out last week found that almost two-thirds of Americans (61 per cent) still believe others besides Lee Harvey Oswald were involved in the shooting.
