The reforms that followed over subsequent decades — computerized linking of vital records, mandatory death registration cross-checks against Social Security records, tighter verification requirements for passport applications and other identity documents — were, in significant part, responses to the known vulnerability that cases like this one exposed.
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## The Public Investigation and Online Theories
The Seattle Times article of June 2013 opened the case to a kind of public participation that was new in the history of identity investigations: the organized, monitored solicitation of leads through social media and online forums, managed by journalists who were aware of the risks.
The risks were real and had been recently demonstrated. The Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013 had produced a spectacular failure of crowdsourced identification, in which online communities, particularly the Reddit community /r/findbostonbombers, had generated confident misidentifications of several innocent people, contributing to harassment and to family members learning through news media rather than from law enforcement that their loved ones had been identified as suspects. The families of those misidentified individuals suffered publicly. The experiment in crowdsourced identification had caused serious harm.
Maureen O’Hagan and the Seattle Times team were aware of this history and attempted to manage the public engagement with the Lori Ruff case to avoid repeating it. Leads were collected and assessed internally; the paper’s staff monitored the channels through which tips arrived, looking for credible information and protecting against the spread of unconfirmed accusations. The Ruff family’s interests and the dignity of anyone who might be identified needed to be weighed against the investigative value of public engagement.