The New Committee of Vigilance
Digital Vigilantes scour online clues to help the FBI and police find criminals.
This week as I watched the images pouring in from the Capitol Riots of January 6th, I was struck by one thing. It was the desire of my fellow online citizens to help law enforcement catch people that they could plainly see were breaking the law. It reminded me a lot of the Committee of Vigilance.
In 1847 San Francisco was a sleepy village of about one thousand people. It had recently had an influx of settlers trying to get away from the government in the form of Samuel Brannan and his Mormon followers. They were part of a two prong approach to finding a new land to settle in the west — their overland counterparts formed Utah while Brannan and his lot took a boat. It stayed small until Brannan found out about gold being found at Sutter’s Mill. He proceeded to buy every shovel and pickaxe in the state (not really that hard at the time for someone with money) and then rode a horse through the middle of San Francisco yelling about the gold in a now apocryphal gold rush tale.
Men poured into town, and within a year the thousand people had swollen to 20,000. Within another year it was at 50,000. Not all the men coming to San Francisco were there for the gold. Some were there for the gambling. Some were there to make money off the miners. And some were there to steal.
The Sydney Ducks were a gang of men from Australia that lived in what came to be known as the Barbary Coast. They robbed, murdered, and burnt their way through town. The police force was not only ill-equipped to handle them, but many on the police force were in cahoots with them. Imagine a city of 50,000 people with a police force of 75 men, and that only scratched the surface of the problems that San Francisco had in 1851.
The city burnt down FIVE TIMES between December of 1849 and May of 1851. The majority of these was caused by the Sydney Ducks — their modus operandi was to set a fire and then go looting while the responsible citizens fought the fire. By May the citizens had had enough, and they formed the First Committee of Vigilance. By the time they were through, many of the Sydney Ducks had been subjected to lynch law in addition to the precursors of what we now know as “shanghaiing” — basically “get on this boat and don’t come back or we will kill you”.
The Committee was formed by Sam Brannan. That guy was all over the place and caused as many problems as he solved. He had a sense of duty to the city he called home to try to bring criminals to justice and he wanted to help where the cops were helpless.
The difference between then and now are many. But they both have the same basic roots — ordinary citizens want to help law enforcement to catch criminals, and it’s not very hard to help when the criminals themselves are uploading videos with incriminating metadata.
I was first made aware of bellingcat during the BLM protests this summer. Their website states “Bellingcat is an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects — from Mexican drug lords and crimes against humanity, to tracking the use of chemical weapons and conflicts worldwide.”
Nobody these days advocates for lynch law unless they are actually the people that stormed the capitol. But it’s refreshing to see people actually interested in law and order and participating in crowdsourcing efforts to identify these criminals. In the early hours of the coup attempt, these people were the ones bringing it to the attention of the journalists that HEY THAT GUY HAS FLEXCUFFS or WHY ARE ALL THESE PROTESTORS WEARING RADIO EARPIECES or THESE GUYS IN ORANGE CAPS ARE PROUD BOYS. I type those in caps because shouting it from the rooftops and making it go viral is essentially what they did. All of the suspicious activity will be catalogued by the FBI thanks to crowdsourcing, and arrests are already being made.
For all the supposed “master race” propaganda coming out of white supremacy, they don’t really think through anything very well. For example, many of the capitol rioters uploaded footage to Parler (you’ve all heard about Parler, right?) with incriminating metadata. This and other platforms (such as Instagram and Facebook) took down the posts these folks made too — but not before there was a concerted effort to back it all up by Bellingcat.
Criminals are stupid. A lot of what we witnessed was stupidity, to be honest. And the internet lets us all see how violent and stupid people are. There are criminals and criminal activity at all protests, due to the tyranny of statistics. But the TRULY stupid criminal is one who thinks that there could not be any possible blowback for what they are doing. A lot of these militias that we saw descend on the Capitol had the Sydney Ducks as their spiritual ancestors. They are all criminals if they think that terrorism and murder is acceptable in today’s society as a means to keep a president in place. My hope now is that the incoming government will act quickly and decisively to quash this rebellion.
The crowdsourcing reminds me of the first “victim” of the Vigilantes. He was a man named John Jenkins. We know everything about this because the Vigilantes held a trial and took notes, something unheard of at the time in SF. This man walked into a store, picked up a safe, put it in a bag, and walked out of the store. A crowd of people saw him. They followed him, and they caught him. There were so many witnesses that his guilt was never in doubt. It was the first time a crime had been effectively punished since the town began, probably. The only problem is they hung him in Portsmouth Square about six hours after he stole the safe. This exposes how frustrated the population was with lawlessness and the inability of law enforcement to do anything about it.
We should all be thankful for the internet for exposing all of this in real time. Not everyone in that crowd was a criminal. Deluded, maybe, but it’s not a crime to be stupid or misled yet. The real criminals stuck out to anyone paying attention, and there are a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands stuck inside lately. There are a lot of people frustrated with the police and their complicity in both the Capitol Riots and white supremacy in general. There are a lot of people motivated to do this, not by money but by a sense of pride in protecting their country from criminals who would destroy it. There are a lot of real patriots that want to protect their country from fake patriots.
This is the new Committee of Vigilance. Criminals beware.
