A website designed to identify people in the January 6th riots on Capitol Hill was silently put online earlier this month and features thousands of facial images of people allegedly participating in the deadly siege.
The website, called Faces of the Riot, has nearly 6,000 images captured from videos uploaded to Parler, a social media site popular with conservatives. Parler, who became a haven for racist and extremist content, was recently forced offline for allowing contributions to the uprising that led to the deaths of five people.
Top tips from the editors
Subscribe to CNET Now for the day's most engaging reviews, news, and videos.
The images come from an archive at Parler that was created by hackers Scraping posts and location data for pictures and videos before it went offline. The site's developers used open source facial recognition software to extract images from 827 videos posted inside and outside the U.S. Capitol building on Parler.
The intent is to help the FBI find out who took part in the siege, one of the site's two creators told CNET.
"Before that, anyone held accountable was a famous politician," or a notable figure, one of the website's creators, who asked not to be identified, told CNET via Twitter direct messages. "But there were thousands of other people who should also be held accountable for this."
A Twitter account for the website started tweeting on Jan. 15. The website has been archived since January 16th
The violence on Capitol Hill began when lawmakers gathered to count the votes of the electoral college and confirm Joe Biden's victory. The violence followed a rally by former President Donald Trump, who encouraged his supporters to march on the building. The legislature had to be evacuated and National Guard troops were deployed to restore order.
The Faces of the Riot site, which Wired previously reported on, is minimalist and arranged in a grid of images that often resemble mug shots. Each image is linked to the original video that shows what the person was doing at the Capitol that day. The website discourages users from doing their own research and encourages them to share tips with the FBI.
"We want to make it easier to find tips to file with the FBI, rather than for the average user to identify people as it can be dangerous," said one of the site's creators, who described himself as a computer science student in Virginia .
The site's creators invite users to report pictures that may be inadvertently in the database. The creators of the site delete faulty images.
"We spent about 5 hours manually removing pictures of children and non-rioters before we released the database," the site creator said, adding that they had no contact with the FBI, despite getting some tips from have submitted their own.
The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
