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Faces of Riots includes links to videos from Speak.
Faces of the riots / Screenshot by Steven Musil
A website designed to help identify people during the Jan.6 riots on Capitol Hill quietly went live earlier this month, displaying thousands of facial images of people believed to be involved in the deadly siege.
The website, called Faces of the Riot, includes nearly 6,000 images captured from videos uploaded to Speak, a social media site popular with Conservatives. Parler, which has become a haven for racist and extremist content, recently forced offline for authorizing publications on the insurgency that led to the deaths of five people.
The images come from an archive of Parler created by hackers scratching out messages and location data for images and videos before they are taken offline. The site’s creators used open-source facial detection software to extract images from 827 videos posted to Speaking from inside and outside the US Capitol building.
The intention is to help the FBI identify who participated in the siege, one of the site’s two creators told CNET.
“Previously everyone held responsible was a famous politician” or a notable figure, one of the site’s creators, who asked not to be identified, told CNET via Twitter direct messages. “But there were thousands of other people out there who should be held responsible for this as well.”
A Twitter account for the website began tweeting on January 15, and the site has been archived since January 16.
The violence on Capitol Hill began when lawmakers gathered to count the Electoral College votes and confirm Joe Biden’s victory. The violence follows a rally organized by current former President Donald Trump, who encouraged his supporters to march on the building. Lawmakers had to be evacuated and National Guard troops were deployed to restore order.
The Faces of the Riot site, which was previously reported by Wired, is minimalist and presented in a grid of images that often look like photos. Each image is linked to the original video which shows what the individual was doing that day on Capitol Hill. The site discourages users from conducting their own investigations and encourages them to share advice with the FBI.
“We aim to make it easier to find advice to submit to the FBI, not an average user of identifying people, as this can become dangerous,” said one of the creators of the site, who describes himself as a student in computer science in Virginia.
The creators of the site invite users to report any images that may be found in the database by mistake. The creators of the site will remove the erroneous images.
“We spent about 5 hours manually removing photos of children and non-rioters before releasing the database,” the site’s creator said, adding that they had not had any contact with the FBI, although they have submitted some advice on their own.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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