If you thought the New York Post's "Bag Men" outing was bad, the most crowdsourced terror investigation in American history transformed from Internet sleuthing of FBI photos on Thursday night into a lynch mob — from Reddit to a police scanner to social media and beyond — that led to the outing of even more innocent people as would-be suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.

Indeed, the chaotic overnight scene in Watertown, Massachusetts — before one actual suspect was killed and before the ongoing manhunt for the other shut down Boston — was just the latest in a series of false reports naming suspects in a terror investigation, with their foundations in Internet sleuthing. The r/findbostonbombers subreddit was a flurry activity on Thursday night, tracking down a photo not released by the FBI that appeared to be a clearer picture of the man now known as Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. But there was an irresponsible chase in the works, too, trying to put a name to the face of the man in the white hat, until this morning only known by his FBI description, Suspect 2: "I think i found suspect 2..." asked one Reddit thread; "Is missing student Sunil Tripathi Marathon Bomber #2?" asked another. The amateur investigators from the site — having served as a kind of unofficial proving ground for theories that made their way to the mainstream media, jumping on the clear photo, despite the Post story that had also spread on Reddit — were tying the FBI photos to a 22-year-old Brown student and this ABC News report about his having gone missing last month. There was pushback, even on Reddit — "Leave the missing guy alone" — but it was too late; the trolls on Reddit had fed an army of all-nighter trolls in the media.

On Twitter, young Internet journalists covering a shooting at MIT and a growing police scene in Watertown, were tuned in to the Boston police scanner — scanners are meant for police planning purposes, contain tons of unconfirmed information, and tend not to be reported by newspapers and television. But this has been a case unfolding in real time on social media, and so the media treated the scanner as a bridge between the amateur sleuthing that had given them a lead on the Brown student. Then came a brief blip on the scanner in the 3 a.m. hour: the names Sunil Tripathi and Mike Mulugeta, mentioned in a flurry of information. (Update: Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic has a recording of the scanner, which does not mention Tripathi's name at all, making it even more puzzling how Twitter and media latched on to his name.) It led to brief vindication from the Reddit crowd, but, more importantly, the Reddit-to-mayhem-to-Twitter-to-press domino effect was in motion. The ABC story on Tripathi was linked by numerous journalists staying up live-tweeting anything and everything; a YouTube video from his family got passed around by journalists. Media outlets repeated the names — so did Michelle Malkin. "Wow Reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner. Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi," wrote BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski, who had been live-tweeting the scanner almost all night, before deleting his tweet with the false names. There was immediate pushback from other journalists, reminding the flurry of younger, Internet-first reporters that the scanner is unconfirmed.

Of course, now we know that neither Tripathi or Mulugeta are or were the suspects, with authorities pursuing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and after killing his brother Tamerlan. But the damage to Tripathi and his family is already done — Mulugeta didn't have an already outed public story to be retold in the game of dominoes. But these men are just some of the many innocent people who have had their names and details passed around the mainstream media, the Internet, and beyond — and the passing started gaining traction on Reddit, where regret continues to set in.

The Tsarnaev family history, now that young brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar are suspects in the Boston marathon bombing, is getting an awful lot of scrutiny. One of the details, as reported by The Washington Post, is that the family lived for a time in the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan, where Dzhokhar may have been born.

The Tsarnaevs are reportedly of Chechen origin, and while the details of how they got to that far-away Central Asian state is not known, the story of Chechens in Kyrgyzstan is a revealing one, a microcosm of the much bigger and more complicated story of Chechnya under two centuries of Russian rule.

In the early 1940s, long before either of the Tsarnaev brothers was born, as German troops pushed into the Soviet Union, separatist Chechen rebels saw their opportunity to win long-sought independence from Moscow, according to Tony Wood’s definitive history, “Chechnya: The Case for Independence.” But the insurgency was brutally suppressed and, toward the end of the war, Joseph Stalin approved a plan to have about 400,000 Chechens forcibly relocated elsewhere in the Soviet Union’s sprawling empire, undermining the entire idea of a regionally distinct Chechen identity. The Chechens, after all, could not declare independence if they were scattered across Eurasia.

Many of those Chechen families ended up on the Central Asian steppes, in Soviet republics we today know as the independent states of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In 1957, they were allowed to return home to Chechnya, but many fled back to Central Asia during the First Chechen War of 1994 to 1996 or the Second Chechen War of 1999 to 2000.

Overshadowed by congressional action on guns and immigration is an Internet privacy bill that could affect most Americans, without them knowing it, on a daily basis.

Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA) is making its way through Congress, and it’s passed a House vote on Thursday.

The final vote in the House was 248-168, as 42 Democrats voted for the bill, while 28 Republicans voted against it.
And like gun control, it’s far from a done deal after the House passes CISPA. It would need Senate approval, and President Barack Obama has indicated he’ll possibly veto CISPA if it comes to his desk.

Both sides of Congress would need to muster a two-thirds majority vote to override the president’s veto, which would seem unlikely in the current political atmosphere of Washington.

At the heart of CISPA is a Fourth Amendment issue.

The amendment reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

New surveillance video footage of a missing Brown University student on the morning of his disappearance may provide authorities with new clues to help locate him.

New images from a surveillance camera show 22-year-old Sunil Tripathi, of Radnor, Pa., moments after leaving his apartment at 1:33 a.m. on March 16, just 20 minutes after he last used his computer. Police said he left his wallet and phone behind.

"Typically, two reasons people don't take the normal things they take with them is because they're stepping outside to talk to somebody, they're going half a block away, or they're not coming back," ABC News consultant and former FBI agent Brad Garrett told "Good Morning America."

"His state of mind in those last interactions on the computer, in the last few hours that people knew where he was is important to assess," Garrett said.