As he watched footage of the Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol, Chris Sigurdson, an out-of-work actor in Canada, found himself drawn to a disturbing image: a man in an olive sweatshirt spraying chemicals at the police. On the man’s face, Sigurdson says, was a look of “demented glee.”
Sigurdson, 58, had been growing obsessed with the riot, spending 40 hours a week poring over photographs and videos. He noticed a resemblance between the man in the sweatshirt and a rioter who bragged about attacking police officers in a different video recorded at a hotel in Virginia. When he looked closely, he could see that they were the same person, carrying the same backpack.
Sigurdson posted his findings on Twitter at the end of January. Two weeks later, the FBI arrested Daniel Ray Caldwell of The Colony, Texas. An affidavit cited Sigurdson’s tweet as evidence. (Caldwell has pleaded not guilty to the seven federal crimes he’s charged with.)
The arrest was an early triumph for the growing community of self-proclaimed sedition hunters—a motley assortment of internet sleuths who have spent hundreds of hours analyzing the reams of footage that emerged from the insurrection. Over the past few months, the sleuths have coalesced into an expansive network that shares and cross-references videos and social media posts, dissecting the material on Twitter or in private group chats on platforms like Discord.
“Every person brings a piece of the puzzle together,” Sigurdson says. “People are only able to really hone in on somebody based on the work that everyone else is doing.”
Senate Republicans recently blocked a bill in Congress to create an independent, Sept. 11-style commission to investigate the riot, making it increasingly unlikely that the U.S. government will ever produce a comprehensive and impartial accounting of the attack. On the internet, however, ordinary people are conducting investigations of their own, bolstering the FBI’s official inquiry while raising concerns that untrained vigilantes might broadcast the personal information of innocent people.
Five months on from Jan. 6, the authorities have brought charges against more than 400 rioters, often using the traditional tools of law enforcement, such as search warrants and confidential informants. But they’ve also relied on the crowdsourcing efforts of sedition hunters. In the days after the riot, the FBI saw a 750% increase in daily calls and electronic tips to its main hotline. The bureau still receives twice the normal volume of alerts. Such tips have proved helpful in “dozens of cases,” says Samantha Shero, an FBI spokeswoman. “The public has provided tremendous assistance to this investigation, and we are asking for continued help to identify other individuals.”
Some sedition hunters are now trying to identify people who stormed the Capitol but haven’t been apprehended—the FBI’s official wanted list still features hundreds of photos. Others have moved on to more sophisticated projects, looking for evidence of additional crimes by people who have already been charged, or tracing clues that could shed light on whether far-right groups plotted the riot in advance.
“There’s a sense that this stuff still has to come out and be in the public domain, otherwise we risk being in a situation where the history gets missed,” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which focuses on digital threats to civil society. “The fact these groups still exist shows just how much people care.”
Despite the hundreds of arrests, there remain significant unanswered questions about the riot, from the extent to which Donald Trump’s allies aided the protesters to the level of coordination among far-right groups. Those mysteries have helped turn sedition hunting from a crowdsourcing project into a kind of internet subculture. Amateur historians of the Kennedy assassination could rewind the Zapruder film only so many times; Capitol riot obsessives have a seemingly infinite amount of footage to examine. Websites have popped up with titles like jan6evidence.com or seditionhunters.org, featuring research tools assembled by the sleuths: a gallery of hundreds of rioters, each identified by a hashtag such as #Tweedledumb or #camocrazyeyes; a map connecting videos of the siege to specific locations around the Capitol; and a set of links to annotated videos. In the online community, the release of an important new court document is eagerly anticipated, “like it’s the next hot bestseller,” as one sedition hunter puts it.
Many sedition hunters share their best information with FBI agents or investigative journalists. But as with previous online crowdsourcing initiatives, the effort has had some high-profile misfires. A retired Chicago firefighter was falsely accused of participating in the riot after footage surfaced showing a lookalike hitting police with a fire extinguisher. So was the actor and martial artist Chuck Norris.
Even accurate identifications can set a dangerous precedent and may embolden far-right groups to employ similar tactics against their own targets, says Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “As soon as you put someone’s personal information out there, you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” Segal says. “When you do it publicly, there’s just a lot more that can go wrong.”
Still, the online sleuths appear to have learned from past mistakes, like Reddit users’ misidentification of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Several Twitter accounts that have helped mobilize Jan. 6 research efforts explicitly warn their followers to avoid naming suspects, urging them to report personal information to the FBI. In the weeks after the riot, established open source researchers sought to channel the intense interest in the siege toward less risky tasks—logging material into Google forms, for example, or making copies of photos to preserve evidence.
“There’s a way to harness it,” says Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open source research organization. “If you can give them a useful outlet for their energy, then it’s more productive. … Because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Most sedition hunters contacted by Bloomberg Businessweek were reluctant to speak on the record for fear of retaliation from internet trolls. One expressed concern that the “layers between those we work on and the former administration are paper thin.” Another declined to be interviewed but offered to provide the names of rioters who haven’t been arrested.
Many of the sleuths have treated the project as a full-time job, creating infrastructure to help fellow investigators sort through the footage. A sedition hunter in California built a facial recognition database that the community has used to identify rioters. (The site’s tagline: “They should have worn some f#$!ng masks.”) Such tactics have sparked concern among civil liberties advocates, who argue that the proliferation of facial recognition technology has eroded privacy. The database’s creator, who works in the health-care industry, defended the tool, saying it simply automated the time-consuming process of cross-referencing Jan. 6 images. He used the technology to identify Taylor Johnatakis, a podcaster from Washington state who was later charged for his role in the siege. (Johnatakis pleaded not guilty.) The creator says he felt a civic obligation to alert the FBI but took no joy in Johnatakis’s arrest. “He’s an honest-to-God good guy, completely brainwashed by Trump,” he says. “I hope the justice system is forgiving.”
The sleuths’ stated motivations range from righteous outrage to a nerdy fascination with the technical challenges of identifying suspects. “We want these people brought to justice,” says Forrest Rogers, a German-American business consultant who helps run a sedition-hunting group called Deep State Dogs. “And we don’t want a random sampling of them, a token group.”
Sigurdson says his interest stemmed from a combination of curiosity and pandemic-induced boredom. (“I’d mastered sourdough bread.”) He wanted to understand why seemingly normal people had converged on the Capitol to attempt to overthrow American democracy. “I don’t think anger would’ve sustained me through this whole process,” he says. “It’s more of a deep quest for comprehension.” He still spends hours a day researching the attack.
For some, watching all that riot footage has exacted a mental toll. Several sedition hunters noted that the audio is especially disturbing—an angry cacophony of screaming and swearing. At a certain point, Rogers turned down the volume on the videos and started listening to classical music; he’s become accustomed to watching the Proud Boys march on the Capitol with Tchaikovsky playing in the background. Rogers has discussed the issue of burnout with others in the community. “You see them drop off for a month,” he says. “And we’d DM each other, and they’d say, ‘I have to take a break, it was doing my head in.’”
Another sedition hunter, a stay-at-home mom in the Pacific Northwest, annotated nearly 100 hours of video, which she compiled in a spreadsheet that’s been widely shared. She recently began an even more ambitious project: tracking a Proud Boy leader who she believes may have mobilized a group of rioters to block exits around the Capitol, a possible sign of coordination and planning.
Like Rogers, she usually keeps the video on mute. But the images are searing. After watching all the footage, she says, she’s formed a three-dimensional map of the Capitol in her mind, built around images of violence and mayhem. She’s never seen the complex in person.
“I do want to visit,” she says, “and maybe purge some of those images from my head.”
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Sigurdson, 58, had been growing obsessed with the riot, spending 40 hours a week poring over photographs and videos. He noticed a resemblance between the man in the sweatshirt and a rioter who bragged about attacking police officers in a different video recorded at a hotel in Virginia. When he looked closely, he could see that they were the same person, carrying the same backpack.
Sigurdson posted his findings on Twitter at the end of January. Two weeks later, the FBI arrested Daniel Ray Caldwell of The Colony, Texas. An affidavit cited Sigurdson’s tweet as evidence. (Caldwell has pleaded not guilty to the seven federal crimes he’s charged with.)
The arrest was an early triumph for the growing community of self-proclaimed sedition hunters—a motley assortment of internet sleuths who have spent hundreds of hours analyzing the reams of footage that emerged from the insurrection. Over the past few months, the sleuths have coalesced into an expansive network that shares and cross-references videos and social media posts, dissecting the material on Twitter or in private group chats on platforms like Discord.
“Every person brings a piece of the puzzle together,” Sigurdson says. “People are only able to really hone in on somebody based on the work that everyone else is doing.”
Senate Republicans recently blocked a bill in Congress to create an independent, Sept. 11-style commission to investigate the riot, making it increasingly unlikely that the U.S. government will ever produce a comprehensive and impartial accounting of the attack. On the internet, however, ordinary people are conducting investigations of their own, bolstering the FBI’s official inquiry while raising concerns that untrained vigilantes might broadcast the personal information of innocent people.
Five months on from Jan. 6, the authorities have brought charges against more than 400 rioters, often using the traditional tools of law enforcement, such as search warrants and confidential informants. But they’ve also relied on the crowdsourcing efforts of sedition hunters. In the days after the riot, the FBI saw a 750% increase in daily calls and electronic tips to its main hotline. The bureau still receives twice the normal volume of alerts. Such tips have proved helpful in “dozens of cases,” says Samantha Shero, an FBI spokeswoman. “The public has provided tremendous assistance to this investigation, and we are asking for continued help to identify other individuals.”
Some sedition hunters are now trying to identify people who stormed the Capitol but haven’t been apprehended—the FBI’s official wanted list still features hundreds of photos. Others have moved on to more sophisticated projects, looking for evidence of additional crimes by people who have already been charged, or tracing clues that could shed light on whether far-right groups plotted the riot in advance.
“There’s a sense that this stuff still has to come out and be in the public domain, otherwise we risk being in a situation where the history gets missed,” says John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which focuses on digital threats to civil society. “The fact these groups still exist shows just how much people care.”
Despite the hundreds of arrests, there remain significant unanswered questions about the riot, from the extent to which Donald Trump’s allies aided the protesters to the level of coordination among far-right groups. Those mysteries have helped turn sedition hunting from a crowdsourcing project into a kind of internet subculture. Amateur historians of the Kennedy assassination could rewind the Zapruder film only so many times; Capitol riot obsessives have a seemingly infinite amount of footage to examine. Websites have popped up with titles like jan6evidence.com or seditionhunters.org, featuring research tools assembled by the sleuths: a gallery of hundreds of rioters, each identified by a hashtag such as #Tweedledumb or #camocrazyeyes; a map connecting videos of the siege to specific locations around the Capitol; and a set of links to annotated videos. In the online community, the release of an important new court document is eagerly anticipated, “like it’s the next hot bestseller,” as one sedition hunter puts it.
Many sedition hunters share their best information with FBI agents or investigative journalists. But as with previous online crowdsourcing initiatives, the effort has had some high-profile misfires. A retired Chicago firefighter was falsely accused of participating in the riot after footage surfaced showing a lookalike hitting police with a fire extinguisher. So was the actor and martial artist Chuck Norris.
Even accurate identifications can set a dangerous precedent and may embolden far-right groups to employ similar tactics against their own targets, says Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “As soon as you put someone’s personal information out there, you just don’t know what’s going to happen,” Segal says. “When you do it publicly, there’s just a lot more that can go wrong.”
Still, the online sleuths appear to have learned from past mistakes, like Reddit users’ misidentification of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. Several Twitter accounts that have helped mobilize Jan. 6 research efforts explicitly warn their followers to avoid naming suspects, urging them to report personal information to the FBI. In the weeks after the riot, established open source researchers sought to channel the intense interest in the siege toward less risky tasks—logging material into Google forms, for example, or making copies of photos to preserve evidence.
“There’s a way to harness it,” says Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open source research organization. “If you can give them a useful outlet for their energy, then it’s more productive. … Because they don’t know what they’re doing.”
Most sedition hunters contacted by Bloomberg Businessweek were reluctant to speak on the record for fear of retaliation from internet trolls. One expressed concern that the “layers between those we work on and the former administration are paper thin.” Another declined to be interviewed but offered to provide the names of rioters who haven’t been arrested.
Many of the sleuths have treated the project as a full-time job, creating infrastructure to help fellow investigators sort through the footage. A sedition hunter in California built a facial recognition database that the community has used to identify rioters. (The site’s tagline: “They should have worn some f#$!ng masks.”) Such tactics have sparked concern among civil liberties advocates, who argue that the proliferation of facial recognition technology has eroded privacy. The database’s creator, who works in the health-care industry, defended the tool, saying it simply automated the time-consuming process of cross-referencing Jan. 6 images. He used the technology to identify Taylor Johnatakis, a podcaster from Washington state who was later charged for his role in the siege. (Johnatakis pleaded not guilty.) The creator says he felt a civic obligation to alert the FBI but took no joy in Johnatakis’s arrest. “He’s an honest-to-God good guy, completely brainwashed by Trump,” he says. “I hope the justice system is forgiving.”
The sleuths’ stated motivations range from righteous outrage to a nerdy fascination with the technical challenges of identifying suspects. “We want these people brought to justice,” says Forrest Rogers, a German-American business consultant who helps run a sedition-hunting group called Deep State Dogs. “And we don’t want a random sampling of them, a token group.”
Sigurdson says his interest stemmed from a combination of curiosity and pandemic-induced boredom. (“I’d mastered sourdough bread.”) He wanted to understand why seemingly normal people had converged on the Capitol to attempt to overthrow American democracy. “I don’t think anger would’ve sustained me through this whole process,” he says. “It’s more of a deep quest for comprehension.” He still spends hours a day researching the attack.
For some, watching all that riot footage has exacted a mental toll. Several sedition hunters noted that the audio is especially disturbing—an angry cacophony of screaming and swearing. At a certain point, Rogers turned down the volume on the videos and started listening to classical music; he’s become accustomed to watching the Proud Boys march on the Capitol with Tchaikovsky playing in the background. Rogers has discussed the issue of burnout with others in the community. “You see them drop off for a month,” he says. “And we’d DM each other, and they’d say, ‘I have to take a break, it was doing my head in.’”
Another sedition hunter, a stay-at-home mom in the Pacific Northwest, annotated nearly 100 hours of video, which she compiled in a spreadsheet that’s been widely shared. She recently began an even more ambitious project: tracking a Proud Boy leader who she believes may have mobilized a group of rioters to block exits around the Capitol, a possible sign of coordination and planning.
Like Rogers, she usually keeps the video on mute. But the images are searing. After watching all the footage, she says, she’s formed a three-dimensional map of the Capitol in her mind, built around images of violence and mayhem. She’s never seen the complex in person.
“I do want to visit,” she says, “and maybe purge some of those images from my head.”
‘Sedition Hunters’ Turn Capitol Insurrection Into Ultimate Online Manhunt
Amateur sleuths have turned the Washington D.C. insurrection on Jan. 6 into the ultimate online manhunt.
