One on One: Tim Jones of Buzzient, Hunting Chatter on Explosives

When two bombs exploded at Monday’s Boston Marathon, good Samaritans of all sorts rushed in, from off-duty medical personnel to residents who opened their homes to evacuees. Tim Jones, the chief executive of Buzzient, a Boston-area social media management start-up, felt a similar urge to help, using his company’s ability to search Web history on forums, comments and social media, to focus on specific topics â€"  like explosives.

Mr. Jones also happens to be the former head of an explosives-detection company. Given his background, he jumped in when this week’s news broke â€" as a kind of virtual bystander. Nearly two years ago, he had offered his company’s social media monitoring tools to the Boston Police Department, pro bono. This week, his first thought was to tweak his company’s search algorithms to target online chatter about explosives, in case the police department would seek that kind of data as their investigation continued. The following is condensed and edited from an interview with Mr. Jones about his company’s volunteer efforts to assist with the investigation.

Q.

Your company, Buzzient, has been working pro bono with the Boston Police Department since 2011, shortly after the London riots. How did that relationship begin?

A.

We were big proponents of Boston’s “innovation district” about two years ago, and with that started to work more closely with the mayor’s office. I received an inquiry from the mayor’s chief of staff, and this was right after the London riots.

The London police weren’t paying attention to social networks, they had no idea that groups of people were communicating on social networks saying: “Hey, five guys, take tube and start something here. Another five guys take the tube and start something there.” The Boston Police Department saw that, thought, “Hmm, this is something we should pay attention to.”

Police Commissioner Ed Davis reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re interested in what you guys are doing, we’d like to know a little bit more.” He came over to our office, sat down with us, and saw that there was kind of a shared vision of how we could use emerging technology to at least give them a little bit of an early warning system. So what we offered to do was make this available to them pro bono. To be clear, there’s no financial relationship between Buzzient and the City of Boston, we’ve never been formally requested by the City of Boston or the F.B.I. to use Buzzient. It’s something we just did because it was the right thing to do.

Q.

How did you first hear the news on Monday about the explosions at the Boston Marathon?

A.

I saw a couple of alerts on the phone. The first thing I did was I sat down and just logged into the system myself and started making changes, based upon my knowledge of explosives. (In a prior life I ran an explosives detection company that I spun out of Georgia Tech.) There is a timeliness to this around gathering data and the best thing to do was to sit down and up the tempo of the system that we had running. So we began to focus on social media conversations and content around explosives.

Q.

With your background in explosives detection technologies, what kinds of things did you think would be helpful to look for on the social Web?

A.

As it has turned out, I believe these explosives are going to turn out to be either black powder or TNT-based. But a lot of what I worked on before was on the detection of plastic explosives and plastic explosive variants â€" C4, RDX, HMX, PETN and TATP. The analysis we conducted here was really around: were people around online talking about these much more destructive explosives? That’s to figure out if there were any telltale signs of someone asking about these complex explosives becoming frustrated, deciding they would go for less destructive explosives, like TNT. It was also to determine whether there is any ongoing threat of people trying to use these more complex explosives.

Q.

How did you get involved in the field of explosives detection?

A.

At the time I was a venture capitalist with a particular focus on spinning technology out of our national labs and major universities. 9/11 comes along and I’m sitting there thinking, “I’m making good money as a venture capitalist, but is there more to life?”

I had previously seen technology coming out of Georgia Tech that enabled you to take the equivalent of a chip, a semiconductor, and identify either explosives or biological elements to detect them based on the vapor trail they create. Every time an explosive comes into contact with air it creates a unique vapor trail, a unique signature. So the signature for TNT is different than the signature for C4. By deploying this low-cost chip technology, the thesis was, one could build a very, very low cost, very ubiquitous detector grid that you could then deploy in things like mailboxes, lamp posts, airports, etc.

The frustration we ultimately found was at that time I think the attention of the venture capital community had already shifted away from homeland and global security back to the Internet, particularly the consumer Internet. When everything happened on Monday, I kind of tilted my head and said, “I told you so.” This is the stuff we knew we needed to do and, quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of appetite for doing so.

Q.

What would be the holy grail for mining social analytics in the Boston Marathon case?

A.

The holy grail would be something similar to what happened with the ricin letters that were sent to the White House: someone who has logged onto a forum, and has logged in with some identifying piece of information â€"  a user name, an e-mail address â€"  has asked particular questions, commented, maybe, on other posts. Someone who has, in effect, self-identified, where someone basically puts out enough information you could say, “Oh, this person is kind of asking pretty much the same sorts of questions that correspond to what we found in the physical forensics.”