The Zapruder Film vs. 9/11 Films

The Zapruder film is an interesting historical source because it can be viewed in two different lights. It can make people aware of the awfulness of the assassination and how it must have felt to be watching the Kennedys as JFK got shot, but it is also a platform for conspiracy discussions that disregard the emotions experienced by those in the car and those watching it. If you dissect the film, looking carefully at the all the frames to see what clues you can find that point towards a government conspiracy, you risk becoming used to the sight of someone having their brains blown out. Then you also risk forgetting that this caused everyone a great deal of pain; JFK obviously suffered physically, but Jackie and the people watching suffered emotionally. It strikes me that the Zapruder film is very similar to the films of 9/11 that people have tried to dissect, searching for clues about government involvement.

There is much more footage of 9/11 than of the Kennedy assassination, and this means that there is a lot more material to work from when forming conspiracy theories. There are dozens of videos on Youtube about conspiracy theories, all showing in detail how the planes crashed into the World Trade Center. They examine how the floors collapsed, claiming that there must have been explosives placed inside the building. Other films, however, show a more human side. They show people jumping out of the buildings because they don't know what else to do. They show pictures of people in the street, screaming and running in panic. They include recordings of phone calls made from the buildings from people who were about to die to the people they love. If you watch the first type of video, you don't understand the despair that people felt, just as you lose the human side of the story if you watch the Zapruder film with an analytical mindset.

Of course, these are tragedies on very different scales. In one, one man was killed, and another was killed in the aftermath. In the other, thousands of people lost their lives and thousands of families lost their loved ones. But they are both tragedies, and perhaps that fact should be more important than the government's possible role. I do not mean to say that it is not important to figure out the truth. But since it may not be possible to know the truth, perhaps it is better to focus on the sadness and the ways that people reacted to these events after they happened. Focusing too much on how it happened feels somehow disrespectful to the people who died.

The Fake Identity Toolkit

Nowadays, obtaining a new identity is not as difficult as it once was, with Everett forging all the documents in his basement.Of course, most people who assume a new identity do it to hide from less omnipresent organizations than the federal government and its many intelligence operations. Most people who create a new legitamate identity do it by registering new names and social security numbers with the government, meaning that the government has a record of these changes. However, this new identity can help certain people slip under the radar of other organizations. I found several stories that interested me about creating new idendities.
The first is the simplest, and the only one that would allow you to keep your identity change secret from the federal government. According to Bob Burton, president of Cobra, a bounty hunting organization, assuming a new identity is as simple as obtaining the birth certificate of a dead person:

"You look in the obituaries," Mr. Burton said, "in Topeka, Kan., say. You want a gas station attendant more or less your age. Once you get the date of birth, you call the county. 'Hi, I used to live in Kansas, but I've been living in American Samoa for the last 20 years as a Christian missionary. Any chance I could get a copy of my birth certificate?' 

If the ruse works, you can now become a new person. Since you possess one piece of real identification belonging the this person,  you can obtain others. To the federal government, you exist, and the other person exists, but by becoming both of them, you have hidden yourself from them.
I also read about Frank Cullotta, a former mob hit man who had several run ins with the people he was informing on and was entered into the Witness Protection Program by the federal government to protect him from other organizations.He made the switch to a new identity sound much more difficult that Burton did. Here are some of the general guidelines he gave for keeping your identity hidden:

1. Come into your new town with a story: "They asked me why I came there and I would say I was married and my wife got killed in an automobile accident, and I didn't want to stay where I was at anymore because of the memories..."
2. Don't take pictures of yourself an post them to any social media site because there will inevitably be something in the background that could identify you or the place where you are living.
3. No credit history is a problem. Claim that previously you had chosen to spend only cash for idealistic reasons, but now you think that credit will be a little more secure as you get older. "They want your money. They give you a little static at first but they’ll take your money.”
4. According to Cullotta, it is nearly impossible to change your personality or demeanor though: "You hear my voice? Can you imagine me living in Biloxi, Mississippi?...Of course, people would look at me and they would say, ‘you’re a Yankee, you’re a gangster, you sound like a gangster,’” he said in a strong Chicago accent. “So I tried to dress down. I wore ball caps, jeans, tennis shoes, s— I never wore in my life to try to fit in, but I still had that accent. And the demeanor, how I walk and carry myself which is almost impossible to change. It is impossible for me to change.”

It is interesting to me to see how much you have to change to disappear, even when you are not trying to hide from the government, and these points were just a few of many. The next story was just kind of interesting. Jacob Allred, whose other hobby is reading and writing science fiction, runs the site fakenamegenerator.com, a comepletely legal site that creates "a name, date of birth, address, email, Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, even a credible-looking credit card number with expiry date and security code" for billions of new identities every month. He uses real street names, zip codes, telephone numbers, and names from databases of common names and mixes up the data to get a fake but realistic new identity. Some people use these idenities online, and others generate them just for fun. Some people use the name database to look at baby names, while researches sometimes use large batches of fake identities to test database systems. Even though most people do not do illegal things with the identities, the federal government is somewhat suspicious. The FBI and the NSA have been looking into the operation, and the government has asked him not to post social security numbers (even fake ones) openly on the internet. 
 To me, it is interesting to see how someone could remake themselves if necessary. I think it would be very difficult, and I would not want to do it myself, but it is amazing how some people have just disappeared and started entirely new lives in new places.

The Assassin's Fan Club

I have to admit that I was surprised when Mr. Mitchell said that there was a lot of sympathy for, and even romanticizing of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev after the Boston Marathon bombings, and that there was that same current of romantic interest in Lee Harvey Oswald after he assassinated JFK. So I decided to look into it a little more.

Tsarnaev has garnered the interest of women young and old, primarily because he is attractive. Despite the evidence that he is a mass-murderer who is interested in violent jihad, women all over the country have seen the prom and graduation pictures that show him as a curly-haired, slightly-smiling kid who looks completely harmless. Young women enamored with Tsarnaev (and the apparent "air of mystery" that he seems to have earned by murdering three people and wounding many more) even set up a site called "Free Jahar" to chat about how he was set up by the government, complain about unflattering mugshots, and "[cluck] maternally over his well-being". Unfortunately, criminals like Tsarnaev often have fan-bases; among the celebrities of the criminal world are Oscar Pistorius (killed girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp) , Ted Bundy (murdered 30 or more young women across the US), and Chris Brown (on trial for assault).Older women have also been on Tsarnaev's side, talking about he didn't know what he was doing, and how he is too young (at 19, he is a legal adult) to be charged with such as serious crime as terrorism.

I couldn't find any information on corresponding fan clubs for Lee Harvey Oswald, but conspiracy theories surround them both. Many of the people on Free Jahar believe that he was framed by the government. This seems very similar to the way that many people believe that the government was really behind the assassination of J.F.K. and that Lee Harvey Oswald was not the sole perpetrator of the crime. It is difficult to think about, since three people were killed and more than 200 were wounded, but perhaps at some point a few decades from now, someone like DeLillo will write a novel about how the government was implicated in the Boston Marathon bombing. At the moment, most of us would be unwilling to absolve Tsarnaev and his brother of any responsibility for the crime, but it is possible that we may end up contemplating the involvement of others in future. I don't know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is an interesting phenomenon.