Boston Bombing - One Year Later

How did authorities miss the Tsarnaev brothers Boston Marathon bombing when they had the elder brother in their records as a possible national security threat?

One of the allegations against Tamerlan was that he was going to Russia to meet with underground groups. “This violates the laws of the U.S.,” says German. “So it’s difficult to understand why that didn’t raise more alarms.”

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Kade Crockford, the director of the Technology for Liberty Program at ACLU Massachusetts, believes it should have. Crockford, perhaps the foremost authority on the lingering questions raised by the Boston bombings, sees the FBI’s failure to look into Tamerlan’s journey as part of a larger institutional problem. “Millions of people are listed in government databases as potential terrorist threats,” says Crockford. “The FBI has the legal authority to approach anyone for an interview, at any time. Tamerlan’s case confirms what we have long suspected: The databases are so large that they are practically useless. When everyone is a suspect, no one is a suspect.”

“The FBI, originally, was an investigative agency,” says Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program. But since 9/11, the bureau, like many federal agencies, has increasingly refocused its efforts on intelligence gathering as part of the overall counterterrorism agenda. This, German believes, is where the central failing lies.

“Just like false alarms dull the response of firefighters, these ‘see something, say something’ leads [result in] only cursory investigations, then they move to the next one,” says German.

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The FBI’s failings went beyond the years before the bombings; they also extended into the days immediately following the attack. On April 17, 2013, two days after pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the marathon’s finish line, the FBI received an image of both Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarneav. But the FBI was unable to identify the two suspects, despite the fact that the agency had photographs of Tamerlan, who’d been arrested for domestic violence, in its database, and that the U.S. government had spent billions of dollars on facial-recognition software meant for just such purposes.

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At 5 p.m. the next day, on April 18, the FBI released the images to the public and opened up a hotline. It wasn’t long before people began to call in and identify the brothers, who were star athletes in their community.

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Essah Chisholm, a teammate of Dzhokhar’s, reached out to the FBI that evening immediately after seeing the images on television. So did John Allan, who owns a martial arts gym where Tamerlan worked out. But their calls did not affect the intensifying manhunt in Boston. Meanwhile, around 10:30 that evening, the two brothers killed an MIT police officer, Sean Collier, after trying to steal his gun.

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Instead, Tamerlan remained unknown to the bureau until he died on April 19, early the next day, after a shootout with police in the streets of Watertown, a quiet Boston suburb.

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By that point, the damage was already done. And Crockford, a resident of the city, still can’t make sense of it. “If the FBI pieced together the info they already had, all the trauma could have been avoided,” she says. “I mean what is the point of operating a massive, costly, rights-infringing surveillance apparatus if key warnings from the system are routinely ignored?”

  Vocativ

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