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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):
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.
Think your sentence got cut off there.
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