Yesterday, Wednesday, December 4th, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was assassinated on his way to an annual meeting in New York City. The killer remains at large.
It is an intriguing status check on our evolving technology infrastructure, means of communication and human nature.
The police are of course highly focused and using similar techniques used to identify and capture the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, such as using CCTV security cameras to reconstruct the killers approach, killing and escape.
But almost instantaneously, on X, the collective capacity to informally generate new and otherwise inaccessible information was on display. And what a display.
Early reports on Wednesday had the killer escaping on an electric Citi Bike. A college-aged kid immediately contacts the police to report that he has been scraping Citi Bike use data in real time and that he was able to identify the only bike in the vicinity of the shooting which left the area headed north in the time window identified by the police.
The young man posts his information on X and by that evening a friend of his had posted an interview video of the young man explaining how he had reverse engineered access to Lyft (the Citi Bike operator) app data and had been scraping it in real time in order to construct a geo-visualization of bike movements for several weeks. Because he liked to do interesting and novel data visualizations.
X user @rtwlz explains how he found where the ass*ssin who m*rdered the United Healthcare CEO likely fled using Citi Bike data.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 5, 2024
"I've been scraping Citi Bike data for the past few weeks... only 1 of [the rides] was headed northbound through Central Park"pic.twitter.com/JDkzjGGJkw
Wonderfully amazing.
At nearly the same time, gun experts were coming out of the woodwork, offering their marvelously detailed interpretation of the probable nature of the gun used based on the otherwise low resolution video of the assassination. Analysis such as this from Louis vil LeGun
There's been a bunch of misinformation about today's murder of United Healthcare's CEO. I'm going to debunk some of the firearms nonsense that's been stated.
— Louis vil LeGun 🍌 📟 (@LouisvilleGun) December 4, 2024
Myth 1: The pistol was a Welrod / B&T Station 6!
Categorically false. pic.twitter.com/HhFcxKFhFw
It is early in the investigation. It may not have been a Citi Bike. Better resolution of the shooting may change the interpretation of the nature of the gun.
None-the-less, within a couple of hours of the shooting, new data (Citi Bike geolocation scraping) and deep expertise (guns) were near instantaneously made available not just to the police but to the entire public. And entirely circumventing the legacy media. Traditional journalists were at best playing catch-up, several hours after the X-knowledge ecosystem.
With any luck, the perpetrator will quickly be identified and apprehended and brought to justice. But the event is interesting for the light it sheds on the utility of the emergent epistemic order from distributed knowledge, data, and expertise brought together through platforms such as X.
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