As the FBI knuckles down with its investigation into Monday’s deadly Boston bombings, the agency is hopeful that an extraordinary amount of data, in the form of smartphone photos and videos, combined with the most modern analysis techniques available, will help it to catch whoever was responsible.

CNN reports that FBI special agent in charge Richard DesLauriers, who is leading the investigation, is appealing for everyone who was located near where the blasts took place on Monday to come forward with images or video they may have taken during the day, in the hope that it might bring them potential leads.

“We’d like to review any type of media,” including all “video [and] photographic evidence” said Gene Marquez of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms yesterday.

Last Monday, the area around the marathon’s finishing line was photographed and videoed by thousands of spectators, journalists and surveillance cameras. As a result, news of the bombing spread around the world like lightening, with videos and images being posted onto sites like Vine, Instagram and YouTube within minutes of the incident taking place. With so many people were around wielding smartphone cameras and recording the lead up to the attack, there’s a distinct possibility that someone, somewhere, has managed to document the person responsible for this atrocity – the only problem is, we just don’t who that person is, and there’s every chance that whoever possesses these clues won’t know themselves.

“This is probably one of the most well photographed areas in the country,” said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. “We intend to go through every frame.”

Investigators have most likely already reviewed the footage taken from public surveillance cameras in and around Boylston Street and Copley Square, but the idea of crowdsourcing media from the public is to build up a much wider picture of the events, from a greater set of vantage points and angles. There simply aren’t enough street cameras to cover all of the terrain, but by combining this footage with that taken by members of the public, investigators should be able to get a much better idea of who was in the area leading up to the events.

Big Data As An Investigative Tool

One of the biggest implications of Big Data analysis is that it’s capable of deriving extremely salient insights from seemingly unimportant information, and the FBI’s focus on crowdsourced media will work in much the same fashion.

Those tasked with analyzing the media will be spend hours upon hours trawling through images and videos, cross-referencing these with facial recognition software and complex algorithms to try and shed light on what happened. They’ll be examining thousands of individuals captured in those media in order to ascertain why they were in the area, whether for business, to watch the race or for other, possibly evil reasons.

These kinds of techniques have been used successfully on many occasions. One of the first instances of this kind of investigation, albeit on a smaller scale, took place in the UK in 1999. Readers may recall that the city’s black, gay and Asian communities were terrorized with a spate of nail bombings over a period of 13 days that claimed three lives and injured 139 others. Scotland Yard was initially at a loss as to who might be responsible, but fortunately for them London happens to have more surveillance cameras than any other city in the world, and it was through these that the bomber was eventually identified and arrested.

More recently, in 2011, Vancouver police launched an appeal for public footage in response to the riots that followed the Vancouver Canucks defeat to the Boston Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals. Authorities established a system through which members of the public could hand in footage of the riots anonymously, collecting more than 5,000 hours of video in total. Using this information, police were able to arrest and convict more than 300 individuals for over 15,000 criminal acts.

In the end, the FBI may not need any of this footage. Tried and trusted investigation techniques involving forensics and interviews remain extremely effective, and they may well be able to hunt down the perpetrators the old-fashioned way. But if these methods fail, Big Data should still allow the investigation to come to a successful conclusion.

The FBI is urging anyone who was in Boston on the day of the attacks and possesses video footage, images or other information that may be useful to the investigation to contact them on the following number: 1-800-CALL-FBI.