we are joined by richard falkenrath of the chertoff group. he's a former deputy homeland security adviser and special assistant to president bush. he is also a contributing editor at bloomberg tv. d wi oremus, a staff writer foslatand lead bgger for "future tense," where he reports on emerging technologies, tech policy and digital culture. will oremus, what is reddit and how in this case did it become a tool for the use of law enforcement. >> red zit an online message board who has just rocketed to popularity in the past two years it's a place where anybody can go if they just sign up and post a message about pretty much anything they nt. messages are divided into pa bunch of different topic threads called subreddits and in the course of the boston bombing case a couple reddit users have developed a thread called "find boston bombers" dedicated to try to help the authorities do their job. first they were trying to find suspects, then they were trying to help locate where the suspect might be once the f.b.i. had circulated photos of them and t

. >> suarez: richard falkenrath, you can understand the appeal of enlisting hundreds of people to help the police but do you also lose a little control? in effect unleash peer-to-peer sleuthing with people talking to each other rather than to the cops? >> you lose more than a little bit of control and, frankly, i'm kept dhal this crowd source investigators on the i thatto are pretty soph they've done this fore and farreater amount ofata dh the crd source analysts were working with. and i think the statement yesterday from the f.b.i. special agent in charge of the investigation was really quite telling that he found this activity troublesome and led to an enormous amount of unhelpful speculation and misidentifications. >> suarez: in this case, two young fellows, salah adean and his friend yassin were identified on the covers of nationally published newspapers as major suspects here. will oremus, walk us through some of the blind alleys that this kind of investigative technique walked the investigation down. >> so, over the course of the past few days on reddit there has been one potenti