![]() Capitol Police, who weren’t wearing body cameras. Maybe you’re trying to debunk yet another conspiracy theory from some nutty far-right website ( Nope, that guy’s not antifa either!), and you stumble upon a previously undocumented assault on a member of the U.S. Maybe a newly unearthed video you discovered pans past a rioter at juuust the right moment, and suddenly you’ve got a perfect face shot of a masked-up assailant who took a sip of water at the wrong time. Pull one string, and suddenly the answer to another question you had months ago just falls out of the sky. That’s part of what kept him at it, on top of the comradery and the knowledge that he was helping protect democracy and get justice for those affected by the attack: There was always a new discovery to make, another piece of the puzzle to find. “It was less of a record scratch moment and more of a record getting blown up by a tomahawk missile moment,” he said. That came as a shock to Josh, who remembers the moment as well as he remembers where he was on Sept. Just a few months earlier, he’d learned that one of those friends he’d worked with closely - a sleuth who played a critical role in the community - had voted for Donald Trump. Those new friends could still surprise him. “Screennames and hashtags and references to specific J6 events.” His wife heard all about Josh’s fellow Sedition Hunters, many of whom became close friends, even if they mostly stuck to screennames. “Dinner table conversations sounded a little more unusual at our house for sure,” Josh said. Josh had spent countless hours over the past two years working on this new hobby he found both addicting and rewarding, even if his “unbelievably patient wife” found it somewhat mystifying. ![]() ![]() 6 participants who had not yet been arrested. What’s more, they’d identified more than 700 Jan. The FBI was closing in on 1,000 arrests of people who had entered the Capitol or engaged in violence or property destruction that day, and this collection of online investigators - “Sedition Hunters,” they’d branded themselves - had sparked hundreds of those arrests, and aided hundreds more. The halfway mark of the investigation into the Capitol attack - the largest FBI investigation in American history - was fast approaching, and Josh’s community of online sleuths were at the center of it: vacuuming up video, scouring social media, finding fresh faces and new crimes. Josh’s home sleuthing setup wasn’t anything fancy: just him and his laptop, though he’d switched to a trackball mouse after he started developing symptoms of carpal tunnel “from working my day job all day and hunting insurrectionists by night.” Josh worked for the corporate office of a global, publicly traded company in the south, but his real passion these days was solving crimes that happened two years earlier and hundreds of miles away on Jan. ![]() It was early 2023, and an online sleuth I’ll call Josh was on the hunt once again. ![]()
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