us to the press conference when that occurs from the fbi. but, in the meantime. let s bring in chief intelligence correspondent catherine herridge with details on the federal investigation into the boston terror attack catherine. one of the new elements we had today through an investigative source is that you have got the video. you have got the still images and there is this third track through social media what he we were told is is that a radius of about a mile was put down over the attack site and it essentially vacuums up all the social media messages facebook, twitter, instagram,f that 24 hours before and then 24 hours after the attack and 30,000 messages were accumulated. the messages that met melt a certain investigating tore criteria. messes that seemed out of place or seemed to be coded in some way were then further annualized. and that this was providing new leads as well for the fbi. that s one of the interesting developments today in terms of the sort
now. maybe people are not familiar with it one the leading edge investigative tools. almost take a comb over the area and able to vacuum up all of the messages that are out in the public domain. so, whatever is being tweeted, what s on facebook, and you are able to dictate the radius and sort of the exact gee graphic location that you want to analyze and also the time frame that you want to look at. that s what happened here. so a one mile radius around the blast site, 24 hours before. 24 hours afterwards. you have mathematical, algorithms that start processing it. i don t want to give you a math lesson in the middle of this, essentially what that allows you to do is create link analysis charts which shows you the relationship teen who these people. say you and i are on facebook and we had unusual
millions of people are going to demonstrate. sure. we can t predict what s going to happen in the streets. but, to your point of facebook and all the rest, then the senators are saying, well, maybe you should be able to do that because if you re monitoring facebook, et cetera, then you ought to be able perhaps to know when these things are coming. and the cia and intelligence community does monitor that. of course. so we re not sure exactly what occurred. i just want to remind our viewers if you re just tuning in. this a significant moment and we re bringing this to you live. what you see on the right side of the screen, that s canadian prime minister steven harper. he has been meeting with the president at the white house. it ace s a significant moment and we re staying on it because this the first time that report hes, journalists, have the opportunity to ask president obama several questions. he made a statement on egypt just moments ago, but we re waiting for the question
trying to get hosni mubarak to agree to some sort of transitional government without him. and we can rely on those white house reporters to ask those pointed questions hopefully after the prime minister finishes speaking. absolutely. before we get to that point, you know, we know these organizations, they were demonstrations, they were organized by facebook. i m just curious in terms of the u.s. intelligence community here, gloria, that they would they be monitoring what s said, what s tweeted, what s on facebook, what s talked about in egypt? they should be. would we have had knowledge, anticipated the demonstrators ahead of time? is this something we missed? this a matter of controversy in washington. there are reports that the president felt he hadn t been adequately informed about this possibility. i ve spoken with sources in the intelligence community as well as in the administration. did the intelligence community