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An update on the J6 pipe bomber story. Steve Baker of Blaze Media is now claiming that a Capitol Hill Police officer planted the pipe bombs based on gait analysis from the videos released from the FBI of the pipe bomber and known footage of the Capital Hill Police officer. (https://www.theblaze.com/news/former-capitol-police-officer-a-forensic-match-for-jan-6-pipe-bomber-sources-say). Blaze Media also claims Shauni Kerkhoff the officer in question left the Capitol Hill Police to join the CIA mid 2021 to work on dignitary protection.
Blaze Media claims the gait analysis was a 94% match but I'm unsure as to how unique that match is or how suspects were selected for matching or how many suspects were tested. Apparently, the pipe bomber also walked with a limp and Shauni had a football related injury that required an operation. Hypothetically, if 1/100 people would score a 94% match then its very likely such a match could have been produced by just trying to match against all the Capitol Hill Police officers. However, if only one suspect was tested and this testing was based on some other lead then you would have more confidence that this match was not a coincidence. Shauni was the neighbour of a person of interest that was linked to the metro card that was allegedly used by the pipe bomber (https://archive.ph/wMRun).
Steve Baker was also arrested in relation to the J6 riots (https://loudermilk.house.gov/where-is-the-outrage-over-steve-bakers-prosecution-3/) and may hold some animus against Capitol Hill Police officers.
Congressman Massie has made a statement about the claim on X (https://x.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1987120156682953165):
@gattsuru makes some good points about the gait analysis, but I don't think you even need to go that far. I spent 2 1/2 hours at the DMV this afternoon and did some reading about gait analysis. I learned that the way it works is that analysts break gait down into components, and analyze those components into categories based on how prevalent they are in the population. Like a lot of other things, when a gait analyst says there's a certain percentage match, what they're saying is that, based on the attributes they observed, they can eliminate that percentage of the population. With that being said, from here on out I'll assume that the science is bulletproof, because I don't know that that even matters in this context.
I've read a lot of crime books in my life, and one of the things that's always interested me is suspect descriptions and how useful they are. I've read about cases where police failed to solve the crime because they seemed to focus on a description that wasn't very good, and others where they didn't solve the crime and dismissed good descriptions as being too vague. I've also seen authors excoriate police departments for not focusing on suspects who matched relatively vague descriptions. So during my time at the DMV I also thought about a rubric that could be used to categorize suspect descriptions.
A Level 1 Description would be one that eliminates 90–99% of the population. This may seem high, but anything less than that isn't really even a description. If the suspect is described as a black female, well, only 12–14% of the population is black, and about half of them are female, so that eliminates 93% of the population right there. If the suspect is described as a young, tall, white male, 40–45% of the population is white males, eliminating children and anyone too old to be reasonably described as young and you cut that in half, and cut it in half again to get rid of anyone shorter than average height, and you're down to 10%. These kinds of descriptions are of little to no use in a police investigation and are completely worthless in a trial.
A Level 2 Description is one that eliminates 99–99.9% of the population. These can be of some use in an investigation but are of little to no use in a trial. Suppose the man running from the scene was described as an African American teenager, short and extremely overweight. Take the 7% who are black men, teenagers being about 20% of them, divide by half again to get people shorter then average, then in half again to get anyone plausibly described as overweight (always use the larger numbers), and we're in that 0.1–1% range. But in most places there are going to be entirely too many short, black, overweight teenage boys for police to identify and question them all.
A Level 3 Description would eliminate 99.9–99.99% of the population, but still include between one person in a thousand and one in ten thousand. To give a few examples:
These kinds of descriptions are of value to police and may play some role in a trial, but no one could be reasonably convicted of a crime based on them. It's also worth noting here that some of the attributes are changeable, and this needs to factor into the analysis as well.
A Level 4 Description would eliminate 99.99–99.999% of the population, but still probably include a few people in any decent sized metro:
If you match a description of this specificity you should expect the police to come to your door, but it still wouldn't be enough to convict absent other information.
A Level 5 description would exclude 99.999% of the population or more, aka 1 person in 100,000 or less. This is the point where you stop combining combinations of independent variables that belong to lots of people and zero in on very specific attributes that are themselves fairly unique: A missing finger, a particular tattoo, one green nipple, etc. At this level you're on the defensive; if you match a Level 5 Description, you're going to need an alibi.
A Level 6 description is a description that applies to only one person: Fingerprints, DNA, being recognized by someone who knows you. A Level 6 Description is an identification.
I bring all this up because there's a certain level of obfuscation going on, both with the science and the use of percentages. Supposing we didn't have any gait analysis but a witness who told the FBI that he observed the person in the video and it was a man who appeared to be of East Indian descent, and Baker claimed that Rajneesh Sarna was the perpetrator on the basis that he's a male of Indian descent living in the DC area, everyone would find it ridiculous. Yet Indians only make up 3% of the population of the DC Metro, and assuming men are about half of those, and we're at a 98.5% "match". Actually higher because a certain percentage of that population is going to be children. All this 94% "match" means is that the police officer they're claiming is in the video has the same gait characteristics as 378,000 other people in the DC area, more if we allow for the possibility that the perpetrator was from elsewhere. Even a 98% match only gets us down to 126,000 other people.
Of course, that wasn't the only attribute mentioned in the article; it says that both the person in the video and Karkhoff are about 5'7". Being very conservative, about 10% of the population can reasonably described as 5'7". It's the point where the bell curves cross, which makes things convenient, and about 9% of men and women will be this height. I don't know how accurate the FBI estimate is supposed to be, but we'll assume it's pretty accurate and just bump the numbers up to 10% to allow for a little wiggle room (an inch on either end would make this closer to 25%). That gets us in to Level 2 description territory, but still includes over 5,000 people. The Blaze engaged in motivated reasoning by linking this to a Capitol police officer and working backwards from there. An honest assessment would have looked at any surveillance video from DC they could get their hands on and analyze the gait and height of as many people as possible. Of course, if that information was fed into their computer and they ended up identifying a 45-year-old cashier from Landover, Maryland as the only possible suspect, they never would have published the story, because it would have been ridiculous. And that there's one person in thousands who happens to have been employed in some law enforcement capacity in the DC area makes things really convenient for them.
If that were the end of it, we could put this nonsense to bed, but there's also the whole business with the Metro card. As per the article:
I apologize from the long quote, but I wanted to include it as-written to point out something here that's particularly dishonest. The article refers to "the suspect", and from the context it looks like it's referring to Kerkhoff, and it talks about how the suspect used the card to travel to Virginia after planting the pipe bombs. Not being familiar with this evidence, I presumed the story to be making this point: Kerkhoff was the person seen in the surveillance video released by the FBI. The video was taken the evening of January 5, and while it doesn't show the bombs being planted, it shows the person who likely planted the bombs walking with a backpack in the vicinity of the targeted buildings. This person then went into the nearby Metro station and took it to Falls Church, Virginia, where they were picked up by a friend whose Metro card they used. The FBI surveilled the friend's house but were pulled of for reasons that weren't explained to them, and weren't allowed to talk to the guy, who happened to be a civilian employee for the Air Force.
As many of you know, I'm a fan of reading official reports to get all the details as best as they can be known, as piecing things together from news reports and the like is time consuming and doesn't usually contain all the necessary boring details. In January of this year, a joint report on the pipe bomb investigation was issued by a group of congressmen representing subcommittees with names too long to mention here, chaired by Massie and Loudermilk. This report was incredibly critical of the FBI's response. What we learned about the whole Metro card thing was far different than what was implied in the article.
Surveillance showed a suspicious person (POI2) photographing a dumpster near where the RNC pipe bomb was planted before meeting with 2 other people and disappearing into the nearby Metro station. This video was from the morning of January 5. The FBI was able to link POI2 to the Metro card of a man living in Falls Church (POI3), and had the FBI surveil both. POI2 was a man. The FBI interviewed him and reviewed the pictures on his phone, which corresponded with his story that he had been taking pictures of numerals on doors and the like, including numerals on the RNC dumpster. The FBI was satisfied that the guy had nothing to do with the bombing and they eliminated POI2 and POI3 as suspects on January 19.
Seraphin's story about what happened seems a lot less suspicious in this context, and it's pretty clear that he was a minor part of the investigative team who didn't know the whole story behind what was going on. The FBI identified POI3 and put him on a surveillance team. In the meantime they interviewed POI2 and eliminated him as a suspect. POI3's status was contingent on POI2 being involved, and once POI2 had been eliminated there was no reason to interview POI3 or continue to watch his house. As for Kerhoff's allegedly living next to POI3, so what? It's an odd coincidence, but what does it really mean? Someone who is a 1 in 5,000 shot to be the person in the video happens to live next to someone who had nothing to do with the bombing.
This has to be some of the worst "journalism" I've ever seen. They're using "the suspect" to refer to people seen in two different videos, one of whom was already identified by the FBI, interviewed, excluded as a suspect, and not the same sex as the person they're accusing. I don't know if they're intentionally engaging in misdirection or if Baker is simply incompetent, but neither would surprise me.
I think that you are correct in you assessment of the probabilities. However, another consideration is that the gait analysis evidence was reported on simply because it was found to be somewhat significant, so it is subject to p-hacking considerations.
Fundamentally, I am not sure how a Bayesian should update on true but potentially adversarially selected evidence. As an intuition pump, consider two persons A and B which are in a relationship which is supposed to be exclusive. A suspects that B is cheating. B proposes to send A screenshots of their text messages. Normally, a random sample of texts which contain no evidence for misbehavior would be at least weak evidence of the absence of such misbehavior. But A will not get a random sample, but potentially a curated subset selected for being misleading. Thus A should not update at all on receiving harmless screenshots (beyond the signaling value of going through the effort of sending them, at least). If A is willing to update even a tiny bit on such a screenshot, B can take them for a ride.
On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument. Most of the evidence which we use to build a world-view does not come with a strict chain of custody to guarantee that it was randomly sampled and reported without publication bias etc.
I have no good way to resolve these two viewpoints. In criminal justice, the idea to allow both sides to make their best case certainly seems helpful.
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The Blaze better be extremely certain, or they're gonna get a 100m+ civil judgment. The risk that Baker's gone off the deep end isn't trivial, and he's been very maximalist in reporting before. That said, the pipe bomber has been one of the more severe of many misses when it comes to the law enforcement response to
I'm generally very skeptical of gait analysis. Human-brain gait analysis has been extremely limited: open in scihub, and you'll find that the 'experts' got 71% and the randos 64%... when scoring one of six potentials in the training set). CNNs have done much better, but they still have problems with training data or large numbers of classes. That's not as bad as outright frauds like bite mark analysis, but it's one of the places both prosecutors and juries both seem to take that error rate seriously. And "he personally pegged the match at closer to 98%" makes me think this is the sort of human-lead that leaves a lot of space for thumbs on the scale.
The metro card is more interesting. I'll admit I have a lot less knowledge about the internals of those systems, so there might be well-known vulnerabilities re: spoofing, and there's always a genuine possibility that the original owner just dropped it somewhere. The FBI response seems extremely basic But it a lot of winking toward circumstantial evidence that, if weak, would at least narrow the search area much more for the gait analysis to not just be hilarious fraud -- though in turn, it would point to either unprofessional or nonprofessional planning for the bomber even if true, which I don't think the Blaze wants to recognize.
It sounds like the metro card might not have been from the pipe bomber but someone the FBI thought was a person of interest. But it is a very weird coincidence that someone the FBI thought was a person of interest was next door neighbours with a Capital Police officer. The gait analysis can be explained by Blaze seeing what they want to see. However, while it might be unlikely that a Capitol Police officer might be neighbours with a person of interest if we are willing to expand it to federal employee its probably not that unlikely.
It would also be funny if this was not a cover up and it turns out the suspect is actually part of some right wing militia. Of course at this point a lot of people will have trouble believing she was part of a right wing militia even if she was.
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Think your sentence got cut off there.
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Gait analysis is one subset of video and image analysis, which is generally pretty good. I wouldn’t convict anyone on it but it’s very good for narrowing suspects.
And in this case it’s extremely suspicious that the suspect lives next door to the guy registered on the metro card / getaway vehicle. And neither was ever staked out.
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Does The Blaze have $100M?
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I would put gait analysis in the same category as bite mark analysis, handwriting analysis and forensic firearm analysis. All pretty much worthless, probably mostly used for parallel construction purposes
It’s closer to facial recognition software, which has gotten fairly good.
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Comparing the marks left on bullets to the different rifling of individual firearms seems legit. You have doubts?
Not OP but it did always seem insane to me. Most bullets go through a pretty destructive process when they collide with a target. At those speeds lead is more like playdough. The barrels of the gun also don't seem like they should all be that unique. Mass production doesn't usually create uniquely identifiable things.
I could understand general identification differences like ammo or weapon differences. But anything that differentiates different guns of the same make and model seems suspect.
I do not have strong intuitions either way. Presumably, there is a difference between a JHP bullet hitting a steel barrier and a FMJ getting more gently stopped in ballistic gelatin.
In theory, this could be tackled through careful statistical analysis, same as DNA, so we would at least know if the results are strong or not. In practice, I suspect that methods are selected for convincing juries rather than the scientific-minded community. Hence "lie detectors" etc. I would probably read an article "bullet forensics: much more than you wanted to know", but am too lazy to research it myself.
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I always felt sure this was a false-flag. The idea that someone could get away with doing that in DC, the most surveilled place in America, next to the most surveilled political offices? It’s just impossible. It doesn’t work like that. Especially not in the AI age. Every street is surveilled, so even with no facial features or DNA they could figure out who did it through brute force process of omission.
I suppose the reason for this is that if the protesters managed to actually secure the building, they could make a whole show of the bomb in order to justify lethal force against the protesters. Maybe they would even let it explode so that they would have footage to put on repeat.
Who's "they"?
CIA in conjunction with DC police. Like, they wanted a contingency plan for if the protesters had somehow hardened their position; it may require the use of lethal force to disperse them; this requires an emotional justification for the public (the bombing).
the other conspiracy is 'they' wanted to discourage objections to the certification of the electoral count. the protestors provided a justification for suspending congress and then this created pressure for senators on congressmen who would otherwise voted to reject some States from doing so. if the protest didn't work out then the pipe bombs were a backup plan for creating pressure. there is also a claim that the joint session needed to be suspended in order to prevent motions for pausing the certification process from being voted on (https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/12/the-parliamentary-motive-behind-the-j6-fedsurrection/)
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And there wasn't a single Trump-friendly DC police officer to blow the lid on this operation?
Fallacious logic. There have been plenty of conspiracies that have held up to scrutiny with no one whistle-blowing, despite the likely large number of personelle involved.
MK-Ultra, for example, is only know due to a filing mishap that meant not all the paperwork on said project was successfully destroyed.
More recently, we've learned of 275 plain-clothes FBI agents amoung the January 6 crowd - not a single whistleblower.
Conspiracies can work just fine, it seems.
Or look at the Twitter - Biden laptop scandal. The IC spent months “prebunking” a story they knew was true so when it came out social media would take it down. We know because Musk bought Twitter.
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Given that police are the profession with just about the highest concentration of MAGA true believers, I'm going to call BS on the idea that operation Bring Down Trump could proceed without a single person breaking ranks.
Why would you tell the MAGA true believers about Operation Bring Down Trump?
That's the thing that really muddies the waters in conspiracy discourse, everyone acts like they have no idea how the government (or people) work. They act like "the government" is this magical monolithic entity. But "the government" doesn't do things, people inside the government do things, and sometimes they do things unofficially and/or illegally.
The threat that people are trying to get at when they talk about "the Deep State" isn't that "the CIA" will "decide" to screw over an elected official. You think there's some internal CIA policy that says "it is the official position of the Central Intelligence Agency to bork This Guy in Particular"?
No, the threat is that some guys at the CIA who don't like This Guy in Particular will use their official position and resources to bork him. I mean, look at Watergate. There wasn't an official FBI position of "we will leak evidence of the Watergate scandal to the Washington Post," Mark Felt took advantage of his position as Deputy Director to do that. And it would be the same with the DC police - IF this theory is true (and it seems too soon to tell, to me) it's not "the DC police" doing this. It's a group of DC police officers who, by virtue of not being completely stupid, aren't going to tell DC police officers who would disagree with their plan any more than they would post it on the Internet.
That's not to say that there's never been an Official Policy To Do Something Bad (there has), but the Stringer Bell's rule applies doubly so to people in the government. (If only conspiracy theorists would actually watch and pay attention to The X-Files, which actually understands the dynamic here decently well.)
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It’s slightly more believable when you consider that Trump only got 5.4% of the vote in D.C. in 2020. And of course, not every officer would need to be in on it, just the higher-ups. I’m not claiming that there was a conspiracy, but your particular objection doesn’t seem to me to hold much water.
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Image and video processing in general is very sophisticated. Much more sophisticated than the public is aware. No comment on whether this specific application is any good or not.
If only Blaze had just used good old reliable “anonymous sources”. Then we could believe unhesitatingly, as with stories that Donald Trump is a Russian intelligence asset, Donald Trump wrestled his presidential limo driver, Donald Trump called soldiers losers and suckers, etc. etc. These are all stories I was treated as some kind of crazy MAGA partisan for having the temerity to doubt.
Then — between this and the revelation of Arctic Frost, perhaps it’s time to have another conversation about The Deep State. As in, the thesis that the security state operated a slow-moving coup against Donald Trump might have been right about everything. That there really was a vast conspiracy to destroy Trump. And MAGA was right about everything.
It barely matters. The goalpost just shifts to them having been correct to do so, because the axiomatic belief is that Trump must be destroyed by any means nessecary. They are already electing officials that gloat to the opposition about wanting to see them murdered. You think they care about corrupt investigations at this point?
Define “they”. I think there are a lot of smart people on this forum and other places who fell for the Russiagate scam or should otherwise realize they were wrong about the Deep State. This matters insofar as we want smart people to realize what we’re up against.
The people who voted for Jay Jones.
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