 Thank you, Beth, and thank you, Word Camp, for having me come today to talk about kind of a passion of mine. Bank robberies. Obviously, it's exciting to be here in Philadelphia with its rich history, and I'm not talking about even what happened in 1776, although that's obviously very important to most of us. Actually, 22 years after that, 1798, less than a mile from here at Carpenter's Hall, was the first bank robbery in the United States, so it's very exciting to be here in fitting. Obviously, bank robberies have kind of become part of American lore. We've all heard of Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd and Babyface Nelson, Jesse James, Willie Sutton. We could go on and on. I think what we hear less about is the people that died, and the FBI's Hall of Honor, excuse me, more than half of those that have fallen in the line of duty have been bank robbery related, so they've died fighting bank robbers. So what does all that have to do with WordPress? Photo blogging. Today, I want to take you through the last 10 years of kind of bank robberies in the United States, and kind of what we've done with WordPress, a network of WordPress websites called Bandit Tracker to help fight crimes. So let me take you back 10 years to this start. This was March 2017, and I got an email from a friend of mine. I had helped with a family blog, the email said, anyway, I'm writing to see if your buddy, the guy that told me to help me with your family site, would be interested in helping with the website for the FBI. That was kind of my response as well. I did kind of, considering myself a reasonable person, I did what any of you probably would have done, said, it's the FBI, they have their resources, I ignored it. So I was not a professional developer at that time. In fact, the primary successful website, I'd add up to that point in my opinion, being a San Antonio Spurs fans and being tired of watching the NBA refs help the Lakers win year after year, had started a site, nbarefsucks.com. So we had a lot of fun with that. Anyhow, you know, I just learned about WordPress, but I was excited about the capabilities and decided to take on the challenge. My first conversation with the FBI, the agent shared me a bank robbery site that Maryland and Washington DC had set up, and he sent me to the site. It was bankbandids.org, and this is what it looked like. And it was Mamba-based, and in 2007 even Mamba was kind of out of date. And obviously Mamba would grow up to be Jumla, but I was like, I know we can do better than this with WordPress. And I went and found some photo gallery plugins and actually found a theme. This was the WP magazine theme, 1.0 developer edition by Michael Polak at solostream.com. And I just kind of tweaked it to meet the FBI's requirements and we launched it. So really what I want to do now is just kind of take you through some of the things that we found are important, not just for photo blogs, but really for any website in general. Those things are obviously SEO, analytics, social sharing, quality media, scalability, and innovations. So to start, we'll start where the users start on Google with SEO. We kind of had it made, honestly. We had links from FBI.gov and from media sites linking to images of bank robbery suspects. You typed in bank robbery suspects were the number one result. Pretty easy, you typed in a bank name. We came up. But then something kind of changed. How many of you have had a Google penalty? Anybody? A few of you, anyhow. This was actually a little different kind of penalty. I received an email. It says, the suspect called just a moment ago. And that's what he can do to remove the active wanted information from him on Bandit Tracker. He claims he was arrested. Served time for his bank robbery and then the outstanding wanted notice for him made it difficult for him to find a job. So in researching that, I said, OK, let me check this out. Sure enough, I typed the suspect's name in Google, number one search result. And Google was nice enough to share an image of him robbing the bank as well for the prospective employers. Obviously, they were excited about that. So we didn't expect that people were going to vet their job applicants on Bandit Tracker. That wasn't our mission. It was to identify suspects. And that kind of gets into our next topic, analytics. Why are people coming to the website? I love this quote. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess. And that's never been more true than on Bandit Tracker. We found some really interesting things for our analytics, obviously Google Analytics. We had visitors from all seven continents, even Antarctica, which is not important at all to bank robberies, but it was kind of cool to know there's internet access in Antarctica. So I'm looking forward to the word camp Antarctica. And if I can get a direct flight from San Antoni, I'll speak. Not likely to happen, but we can try. But we found some other things. And I don't know if you guys have noticed, you have the question mark S equals, and then a term in a URL on your content. It's a term that's been searched on the website. And people searched everything on Bandit. They searched location names, they searched bank names. They typed people's names, a lot of people's names. And early on, I was interested in people doing searches. And really, there were so many names searched, I wanted to see names that were searched multiple times. And I found one. I said, hey, OK, why did this person search this name? And then when I looked at the user session, actually typed two other names in his searches. OK, well, and how did he get there? So we looked at the source. It was Google. Great, we could get a keyword too. So here we typed keyword, Fort Worth Crimes Stoppers March 2000. So now we have a place, a location, and names tied specifically to that. Excuse me. The location, actually, of this visitor was Mexico City, Mexico. So here's somebody from more than 1,000 miles away in a different country concerned about a specific crime event in Fort Worth in March of 2000. And obviously, I forwarded this information to the bank robbery coordinator there. That's what we in the FBI like to call a clue. So again, this was early on. It actually got a little more formalized later. And then I started receiving things like this from the FBI, a subpoena to testify before grand jury, just to have a more official way of supplying this information. They asked for the same things. In this case, they wanted everything related to the reckless robber or reckless bandit. And they wanted to know anything that was searched, the visitor's time and location, all the data that we could provide to them about that. Unfortunately, doing things this way, about the time I received this request, the reckless robber got a little too reckless and was killed in a shootout. Obviously, we would have preferred him emailing us saying, hey, can you take my wanted active poster off of the bandit tracker site? But again, he was a little reckless. Next thing I want to talk about, social sharing. Everything you post on social media impacts your personal brand. How do you want to be known? Early on again, it's 2007. Twitter had 1,000 users. I think Facebook had 12 million users. So not where it is today. So we started off with RSS feed burner. We could get you email updates. We did add Twitter, Facebook, and other feeds as we moved forward. Now, something that the FBI does to help brand the suspects and make it easier to share is they come up with nicknames or monocurs for any bank robber that's robbed three or more banks. In this case, it was the earlobe bandit. The earlobe bandit, they called him that because he wore the large gauge earrings in his ears when he was robbing banks. And he was arrested as a part of social sharing, as you'll see here. It wasn't this bank surveillance picture that led police to 19-year-old Anthony Blue. It was his own mother. It's very difficult for a mother to do what his mother did and actually turn in her own child. But she knows that this was the right thing to do. A family member alerted Blue's mom that he was on the website bandittracker.com. After seeing these pictures of the earlobe bandit, that's when she decided to call the FBI. We did talk to Anthony's mom who lives here in Garland and she didn't want to be on camera. But she did say that she does not regret her decision because it came down to doing what was right or wrong. But this is something she will live with for the rest of her life. He is not at all upset with his mother for doing this. He applauds what she did. He knows that she did the right thing and he stands by his mother 100% for her decision. Blue pled guilty Tuesday morning for robbing three banks in Garland, Rockwall, and Quinlan last June and July, stealing nearly $9,000. From the start, Anthony's really remorseful about what he did. Even the notes that he gave the tellers all said, I'm so sorry that I'm doing this. Blue's lawyer says he turned to crime to pay off his debts. Temi Mutasa, NBC. Thanks, mom. All right. Actually, I was watching this with my kids this week and my daughter said, it was probably a sister because that's a sister's job. So he turned in their brothers and was like, hey, mom, did you see what Anthony? So as you can see, we had images of Anthony. You can't really tell that he has the gauge earrings in most of the images. And that kind of leads into what we want to talk about next. And that's getting quality media on the site. Quality is never an accident. It's always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction, and skillful execution. It represents the wise choice of many alternatives. Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of alternatives. We didn't want other victims to be in images. We didn't want tellers. We didn't want customers of the bank to be in images. And we were trying to find good images, obviously. On Bandit Tracker, for photo blogs, we had the worst images ever. As you can see from the images here, first image, we have kind of a grainy magnetic tape that's been recorded over probably dozens of times. We had artist sketches. In fact, they called me from this bank and they said, yeah, we want to add this suspect to Bandit Tracker, but the cameras at the bank were out. I'm like, thanks for calling. How can I help you? And then obviously this last one was a digitized zoomed in version as well. Now, these suspects here, or this suspect, this was the ZZ Top Bandit. And this was his second career in bank robbery. He went from 2003 to 2013, dozens of banks, millions of dollars. It's his second career in bank robbery. He was arrested actually in served time in 1986 for bank robberies as well. But I'll get more into how he was arrested a little bit later. This to me was probably one of the most embarrassing situations I've ever been in. I was actually at a conference like this and pointed out as kind of the creator of the Bandit Tracker sites. And then the FBI went on to talk about this SIT rep or informational situation report from the FBI. And what it said was, recent intelligence derived from admitted bank robber revealed that he targeted banks in New Jersey based on information contained from the Bandit Tracker Northeast website. The website posts information about bank robberies in New York, New Jersey to include details. Suspect, bank name, method of operation. The bank robber admitted that he used the information contained on the site to research banks that had been previously robbed. He also viewed surveillance photos posted on the website. So obviously he went to the website. The suspect's not captured. It's a bad image. That's the bank I want to go rob. He was ultimately caught but I was in my seat sinking down during the conference like don't look at me. My intention was not to be an accomplice. There was another similar suspect that I heard did similar things. In fact, this suspect actually would plant weapons and things in two years in advance of his crime and go back and execute. And as you can see, it's actually a pretty good image. This is, we wish all banks had these cameras. But he's wearing the dust mask. He's wearing the protective goggles. And he's wearing the construction helmet. In which you can't tell, this is actually Azul, Texas here. The hair coming out of the construction helmet that is not his hair. That is the hair of a woman that he raped and murdered and taped her hair on the inside of his helmet. So this suspect actually came to be known as Israel Keys, arsonist, burglar, serial killer who fancied himself a bank robber. So this photo blogging is kind of serious stuff at times. Obviously, he actually committed suicide in jail a few months after he was arrested. Actually, and he was arrested in Texas for a murder of a young lady in Alaska. But 11, at least 11 people we know of that he killed, some of which aren't identified, but he only considered Americans people. So we think there's other victims in Mexico and or Canada that we'll never know about. Let's talk about scalability. Any idiot can put up a website. I'm kind of proof of that. We had a few successful launches in a number of regions after the first Texas bank robbery site we set up. And I thought we were doing good. We were cashing everything right, all was well, and then this happened. These are the pictures the FBI wants you to see. Faces of the people responsible for some of the 88 bank robberies in the Chicago area so far this year. Today the Bureau launches a new website, bandittrackershicago.com, to get these security camera pictures in front of the public as soon as possible. The faster we can put these photographs on the internet or out into the public sphere, the more people we have looking for these bank robbers, the better chance we have of solving these crimes and the better chance we get dangerous people off the street. While the FBI isn't seeing an increase in bank robberies, it is seeing more and more of the violent takeover style of robbery, like the one Tuesday in Calumet City. The expectations are very high as far as what the results are gonna be here. It will be almost as if you're adding more officers in regards to bank robberies. And the FBI needs all the help can get. Since 2001, the number of agents assigned to bank robberies is down 40%. And the FBI's solutions rate is down two, from 80% in the 1980s to 50% now. Bandit tracker is being run in conjunction with Texas based security firm Electronic Tracking Systems. For whatever reason, FBI headquarters has not released control of our external website to our office. So by the time we actually tried to get something up on our external website, it has to go to FBI headquarters. They have to put it in the right format. They have to place it on the website. And by that time, it's usually too late. This is instantaneous. The bandit tracker sites are active in a number of cities, including Little Rock, Arkansas, where they are quickly seeing results. And within two weeks, they had one of this violent group who was committing bank robberies there in custody, out of a lead from that website. A record Chicago hopes to be at FBI headquarters. Charlie Vaughn-Chahusky, NBC 5 News. So the Chicago FBI announced a big press release in Chicago. And this was 2009. 2009, I don't know if you remember, Rod Blagojevic was in the news. So the media said, oh, the FBI's doing a press release. They showed up in droves with cameras rolling. They get there and the FBI says, okay, we've got this new website coming up. The media hit early. I was actually at the kids' school, picking them up. I get a call from the host company and your website is frying our servers. I said, well, let me check the caching real quick and the caching was set right. And no, you made it worse. We're gonna turn the website off. I said, don't turn the website off. The FBI's doing a big press release today. These guys have guns. Come on. They turn the website off. The next three days, I spent either, on the phone with the FBI explaining why the website went down or with companies saying, hey, can you handle big burst of traffic on the website, on a website. The agent that I worked with there, the bank robbery coordinator in Chicago, this was his feedback. The biggest thing we screwed up on was the site wasn't fully ready for the public's reaction once we went live. The site crashed twice due to visitors flooding the site. We received phone calls from the local media who were ticked off that they couldn't access the site. That really angered me. Ouch. So then the news media, the next day it was, traffic shuts down new FBI website. So that's, yeah. Not where you wanna be. I did find a good host. And I know everybody's heard it. We talk about finding a good host partner. It's critical if you want to prevent things like angering people with guns. But we did find a good host and then two years later, this was the result. This is one other reason that FBI officials say bank robberies may be down. A two year old website called BanditTrackerChicago.com. It is a group effort by federal and local law enforcement that allows bank robbery information to be seen much faster by the public and allows internet users to view bank photos, details of holdups and descriptions of the bandits along with a map that pinpoints where banks have been held up. Tonight an FBI spokesman credits tips from the website to the capture of some bank robbers along with work by the federal violent crimes task force. So we hope lower crime. Within two years the crime, the bank robbery rate in Chicago was lower. The bank robbery coordinator there, this was his feedback since then. I live each sleep bandit tracker. We've had it since May 2009. Love it. It is the hub for bank robbery information of Chicago in Chicago. So again, make sure that your host provider is a partner. Make them love the sites. Don't anger the clients. Next thing I wanted to talk about today was innovations. For good ideas and true innovation, you need human interaction, conflict, argument, debate. In our case the human interaction was often dangerous. The conflict obviously very real in bank robberies. But I've got actually a special agent in charge, Casey, talking about one case we had in Dallas that led to a lot of innovations. When I talked to Mr. Casey in preparation for this interview, he said, you know, people don't, a lot of people don't understand. They think of the FBI as investigating corruption and things like that. But in the scarecrow bandit case, you said, I actually feel like we helped save a lot of lives. Tell me about that. Oh, absolutely. I'm convinced that whether it was the life of a responding police officer, one of these bank robberies or citizen or bank employee or an FBI agent conducting the investigation, this was really a life and death situation. They had robbed 21 banks across the Metroplex. They were what we call takeover bank robbers. They go into the bank and they take the place over with weapons, get behind counters often, get in the vault often. So very, very dangerous crew. We saw a pattern of the use of long weapons. We suspected they were wearing bulletproof vests, which turned out to be true. Signaling, lookouts, switchcars, the whole deal. So the scarecrow bandits in North Texas were, they robbed over 20 banks, very dangerous group. As Special Agent Charge Casey said, they were wearing bulletproof vests. They had very weaponized, very dangerous violent group. Everyone involved knew people were gonna die when these guys finally got caught. Actually, through their investigation, they found out that they actually left all of their weapons and bulletproof vests in the trunk of the car till they got to the bank, which actually kept people alive at the end. But for my part, it's like, what can I do to help capture these scarecrow bandits? What can I do on the website? So I kind of made an enhanced page. It was just scarecrow bandits and we put a gallery. Actually, this was at a press conference where they'd blown up a full-sized page of the website that Zach Casey is walking past. But I wanted to do more. I wanted to map all of the bank robbery locations that they had gotten into. Went to the WordPress repository. I didn't really find a plugin that worked for me. So I came up with one and I released it. The Google Maps Geocoder. For those of y'all that may have used it, I apologize for the people that are still using it. Stop. It doesn't work anymore. The feedback from the FBI at that time was great. Great job with the scarecrow banded page. Some of the best info on the scarecrow is coming from people viewing the site. Amazing how a crackhead can get on the internet, but $90,000 reward is very motivating. Yes, it is. And at the same time, I was making these changes. The FBI was doing some innovations of their own. Well, deal, so we were very concerned about that. And as a matter of fact, when we developed them as suspects toward the end, I thought the situation was so dangerous that I asked the director of the FBI for authorization from the attorney general, which was granted, to wiretap a cellular telephone that we thought was being used by one of the suspects without going to a judge, known as an emergency wiretap authorization. Not many of those done. So someone researching this case actually told me this was the first case of the FBI wiretapping a phone without a warrant. And I don't know that that's true. I think this is the first time they publicly admitted to a case of wiretapping a phone without a warrant. But they did have some other things as well. FBI's pushing for cell phone tracking. So the next time you're venting about the NSA, tracking phone calls and things like that on your blog, I just remember in some obscure way, WordPress has kind of led to a vetting that, hey, maybe that's not such a bad idea. What happened? It works. I mean, Scarecrow Bandit hit with 354 year sentence for holdups. Another Scarecrow Bandit, 29 life sentences. As one article put it, Scarecrow Bandits could be free by early 24th century after a pills victory. So they are in prison for a long, long time. Another thing I found in actually getting ready for this presentation, they actually are coming out with the Scarecrow Bandits movie next year. A fictionalized account of how these bandits were arrested and some of the cell phone tracking and tapping came about. So just diving a little bit more into innovation. Innovation really is about the adjacent possible. When something's innovated, what can be innovated as a result of that? Innovation is taking two things that already exist and putting them together in a new way. At my house, it was daddy hook up your laptop, we wanna watch Netflix. Okay, actually I went to find an Apple TV. It's like, daddy needs the laptop for work. The Apple TV was sold out. So I came across another device, the Roku. Okay, this will work. It's got Netflix, it's got Hulu, the kids will be happy and I can do my work. But going to their website, registering, I saw the developer section. Hey, look, you can stream images and you can stream video to a channel there. And so I set up a suspect TV channel. Awesome, this is great. And it was more academic for me, hey, can I do this? At that time I had about 5,000 email subscriber to the Bandit Tracker sites. And I said, heck, if half those people ever get Roku and set it up, I'll have 2,000 subscribers to this channel. And then I got my first AWS bill afterwards and I'm like, why is my bill so high? And there's like 66 million images that have been streamed from your AWS account. And today we have actually over 35,000 active subscribers to suspect TV, just watching images of bank robbers streaming by, yes, exactly. And the FBI's been innovating as well. The FBI and police have a new tool to help capture bank robbers. Diane Rines live in downtown Phoenix to tell us about it. Hi Diane. Hey, good morning, that's right, we're just a little south of you guys to ride off of 7th Street and Lincoln. And you can see behind me, they are unveiling a brand new billboard here. And this is not a billboard that is selling you anything. This is actually a billboard that is going to be showing a gallery of suspects as you drive by. These are pictures of people who may have robbed a bank and they were caught on camera and now they're gonna be on a big screen here as people drive by on 7th Street and Lincoln. And this is called the Bandit Tractor. They're actually hoping that people when they see some of these pictures might be able to identify one of these suspects. This is run by the FBI, but to clear channel, teaming up with the law enforcement to make this possible. They have donated these signs. Yeah, so when the FBI calls, sends an email and says, hey, can we put your website on a billboard? Yes, yes you can, please. But this was a way to expose, bank robbers in a big way, literally, get the images on digital billboards. A couple of other quick things. I'm running out of time, I know. The Bandit Shield Initiative special agent, Dennis May from the Austin FBI office, he actually started this. He was very keen in getting the Bandit Tracker sites rolled out, but started kind of a best practices for banks and credit unions to follow, to not get robbed and to help capture bank robbers should they get robbed. Fake websites. I told you about the ZZ Top Bandit earlier. He went 10 years, 2003 to 2013, before he was caught by a fake website about a single bank robbery location that he robbed from the Shortener State Bank, and they called it the shortenerbankrobbery.com. He went there, they got some information about him and were able to arrest him. And actually, we had talked about this five years earlier and the FBI headquarters says, no, you can't do that. So the shortener state bank, people actually helped with that. They could do it, we couldn't. Riot robbery investigators of Texas, again, special agent May, detective Sean Scott from the Roundtrip Rock Police Department. They wanted to build a network of detectives from law enforcement state, federal, local law enforcement, and they did that. We actually built a buddy press site, onward press again for the robbery investigators. So when we started all this, 2006, there were 7,000 bank robberies in the United States. Last year, about 4,000. So we've reduced bank robberies in the United States, and at least in part, due to word press by over 40%. So thank all of you for your involvement with word press, and are there any questions? Thank you, that was an amazing presentation. Could you back up to the fake websites I didn't catch, something about an innovation, was it like a, was it copying the concept? So the fake website, in 2008, actually, the special agent called me and he said, look, based on the profile of this bank robber, who was getting his very, I mean, he was going into banks and clearing out everything. He was clearing out the vaults, clearing out all the drawers, getting all the money, and within three minutes he was gone. So in 2008, he's talking to me, saying, hey, could we set up a website that would attract this guy to read about himself? And said, yeah, we could do that. We'll set up a word press site, whatever. We went to headquarters with it, and they shut the concept down. Schwertener State Bank is a small bank in Texas, and was, I think they were aggressive, and they were like, what can we do to help? And so they actually set up the website themselves, and just monitored the traffic going to the site, and they said, hey, here's this person keeps coming from Fort Worth, and they ended up finding the suspect that way. Hi, really great, very interesting talks. I thank you for that. My question is going back to the situation that you guys encountered, where you had the barrage of traffic coming in, and your host shut you down, and you had to move to something that would scale better. I'm just curious what solution have you guys gone to, and what are you using now to set up curiosity? At that time, actually, at the beginning, we went to, when we actually did that, we went to, at that time it was Moso, I believe that was what it was called. It was Rackspace was just kind of coming out with a cloud solution at that time that we started using, and it worked really well for us. I kind of don't want to throw anybody else under the bus, but it was very, very frustrating when they shut the site off. Anybody else? Banks don't care about bank robberies until it happens. They are losing so much money in fraud and things of that nature right now that bank robberies like in the back of their mind, right? They're trying to get in front of the credit card fraud. It's like, oh, you want us to spend more money in this lot of the marked bills and things like that. Nobody does anymore, right? It's like, why are we gonna have this million dollars and marked bills set aside for bank robberies and we can have that in circulation? So I would say for the most part, there's an investment there that they have to want to make and they lose so little money really on bank robberies compared to fraud and other situations. This is nothing to them? No. It was privately funded. The question was if the site was funded by the government. No, the site was not funded by the government. There was, they actually had, for me for a while they had, I was set up as a confidential human source, which means they can give me money and I take it. But there was, there was a sponsors as well for the, depending on the region, there was corporate sponsors who were covering the cost of having it developed and again, memorandums of understanding of how it was gonna be used. But the FBI posted all the suspects. I mean, they'd go in the bank and you would see the suspects on Bandit Tracker before you'd see it in the FBI's crime index even. Have you ever had any issues or had to put processes in place to make sure that you're publishing accurate data, like not putting somebody else's name or stuff like that? There was a few cases where they've made changes but that's exactly why I let the FBI do all the publishing, so I was kind of out of the mix. You'll see on a lot of the images it shows, copyright of a certain bank or whatever because it is from a bank robbery, but the FBI gets obviously rights to use that information. Have there ever been any efforts like to tamper with the site or sort of hack it or any malicious actors and like, if so, or how do you protect against that? There really hasn't been to my surprise and honestly I was kind of always waiting for that to happen. I do nightly backups just in case but really we haven't had any malicious attacks or defacing it besides ever. Okay, thank you.