Though few answers have been uncovered in the case of the disappearing Malaysia Airlines MH370 aircraft, the disaster has unveiled a charitable side of thousands of netizens. Indeed, scores of civilians have volunteered their time to remotely assist authorities in tracking down the missing plane. In doing so, crowdsourcing has emerged as a means of gathering intelligence and fresh perspectives on an increasingly dire situation.
DigitalGlobe, a commercial satellite network, has reached out to netizens to examine satellite images of the presumed crash site. Unsurprisingly, the website crashed as a result of thousands of people rushing to contribute to retrieval efforts.
While DigitalGlobe is able to photograph the region, time is of the essence in cases such as these, and limitations on the number of staff means that parsing the images might not be completed in an optimal time frame. Opening the gates to the people of the Internet brings considerably more hands on deck, and theoretically, will reveal more information quicker than if it were simply left to staff and authorities. Currently, more than two million people have signed up, and each individual pixel has been viewed by human eyes at least 30 times. More than 645,000 seemingly unusual or interesting features of note have been tagged by users.
"This is a real needle-in-the-haystack problem, except the haystack is in the middle of the ocean," said DigitalGlobe's Luke Barrington to KMGH, an affiliate of CNN. "I will ask you to mark anything that looks interesting, any signs of wreckage or life rafts. In many cases, the areas covered are so large, or the things we're looking for are so hard to find, that without the help of hundreds of thousands of people online, we'd never be able to find them."
However, DigitalGlobe's repository of images comes from the region around the Gulf of Thailand, originally speculated as the site of the crash. More recent information from the Malaysian military suggests that the plane turned around and subsequently went down over the Malacca Straits in Malaysia, an area not included in the initial 3,100 square kilometers of imagery captured by DigitalGlobe. Nevertheless, the company will persist, with an additional 14,000 square kilometers being added to the database.
Of course, it's essential that such efforts are taken with a grain of salt. The Internet's track record of solving mysteries is hit and miss, with Reddit's foray into identifying the Boston Marathon bombers now serving as a cautionary tale against the collective hype of the hive mind. Users of the site incorrectly accused two people, including Sunil Tripathi, a former Brown student later found dead in unrelated circumstances.
Other aspects of the missing MH370 flight have also yielded little information, with at least one of the stolen passports linked to a young Iranian migrant, Pouria Nour Mohammad Mehrdad, 19. It's thought that Mr. Mehrdad was hoping to migrate to Germany, and is not believed to have any links to terrorist organizations.
Accounts of still-ringing mobile phones have also proved fruitless, with the audible ringtones thought to be an automatic network response when numbers are dialed. "Just because you're getting ringing, just because the signs that we see on these cell phones, that's no proof that there's any - that's just the way the networks work," said technology analyst Jeff Kagan in conversation with Wolf Blitzer for CNN.
Tracking the phones by calling them is similarly fraught with issues, with Kagan cautioning against false hope. "It depends on the phone. It depends if it has GPS. It depends if the GPS is on. And it depends if the cell site that they're on has GPS, too," he said, reported by Mashable. "If everything is working right, yes, the network can tell where that phone is - within a very small area."
The phones, presumably amongst the wreckage and well below surface level of the ocean, are unlikely to fall within the required range for GPS tracking.
Neither wreckage nor debris have been found as yet.
