As more details emerge about how authorities identified two key suspects in the deadly Boston Marathon bombing, it will surely be shown that cutting-edge technology played a huge role in the investigation.

Not only did authorities use video from surveillance cameras located near the finish line of the race (particularly those belonging to the Lord & Taylor store)  – and photos from cell phones belonging to onlookers – it is likely that some forms of data analysis were employed.

Authorities were believed to have sifted through “Intercepted telephone calls and e-mail exchanges, surveillance camera footage, airline manifests, hotel registries, car-rental records, tips from informants and the public,” Government Executive reported.

Next, data was entered into “powerful computers and matched against a database of half-a-million suspected terrorists maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in Northern Virginia,” the report added.

Even after chasing the suspects, police reportedly used at least one bomb-detecting robot to search for explosives in Watertown, Mass. It was needed after explosives were thrown onto a city street by the suspects, news reports said.

Local police also made robo-calls and used Twitter (News - Alert) to warn local residents about the second suspect still at large as of Friday morning.

Three people at the marathon died and more than 170 were injured from the terrorist attack. One of the suspects was killed by police in a shootout, while the other is still being sought as of early Friday, and considered very dangerous. As a precaution, authorities ask residents in Watertown to turn off their cell phones, CNN reported.

Mobile devices may have been used by the suspects to detonate Monday’s bombs.

When investigating such attacks, police and U.S. intelligence officers have capabilities now “that would have been unthinkable before Sept. 11, 2001,” according to Government Executive.

“After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government took the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission very seriously, and it transformed the way terrorism cases are handled by giving law enforcement and intelligence agencies more resources, more legal authorities, and a lot of cutting-edge technologies to reduce the chances of future attacks,” Laura Dugan, an investigator for the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, was quoted by Government Executive. “Collectively that has greatly enhanced our counterterrorism capabilities, but it should be no surprise that an attack like Boston still happened.”

The investigation may have been made easier if even more advanced technology was already in place. The FBI has not yet installed the Next Generation Identification system nationwide. It is believed to be in use in Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, and maybe Oregon, according to a report from The Atlantic Wire.

The $1-billion project will not be in place across the United States until 2014.

NGI can undertake expanded fingerprint analysis, eye scan analysis, and provide a facial recognition database. There is also improved integration with state and local databases – which could be among the most important new attributes of the system.

Still, this week the FBI was believed to have compared video and still photos with the database of  passport photos, visa photos, and drivers' license photos and more standard photos of criminals used by authorities, Paul Schuepp, CEO at Animetrics, a facial recognition company, told Fox News.

In addition, the FBI can create 3D images and manipulate them so it becomes easier to match the stills with the database photos, Schuepp added. It also was reported during the past few days by The Washington Post that the FBI was going through records on cell phone towers near the bombings.

One of the suspects was seen using his cell phone before one of the bombs went off – leading to speculation the call could have triggered the blast. It especially helped police that they knew the exact time the explosions took place.

Michael Sussmann, a former federal prosecutor who now is a private attorney at Perkins Coie in Washington, D.C., told The Post that authorities could, “Get a dump for the closest tower and look for all calls or texts terminating at the bomb site from 2:49 to 2:50 p.m.”

“If there are many, it will be a one- to five-second call, so look for short calls. Then correlate with the other blast site and see if the incoming number at the time of the second blast matches,” he added in his speculation made earlier in the week.

Also, numbers found in the search could lead to a phone company providing a subscriber’s name, address and billing information. If a disposable phone was used, authorities could at least learn where it was purchased.

Reflecting upon the events of the week, The Inquisitr recommended that authorities employ big data technology and/or crowdsourcing.

“Current search efforts focus on pushing the bomb suspect images and videos from the Boston Marathon out to the world in hopes that someone might know the suspects and report them. But so far these methods have only resulted in chaos,” The source reported on Thursday prior to the death of the first suspect.

“A Big Data bomb suspect images project would essentially automate the function of crowdsourcing. Using object recognition and other methods, it should be possible to build a database of images based upon position and direction of sight,” The Inquisitr reported. “An automated program could cross-reference photo timestamps, derived positional data, and video images to build a quasi-three dimensional progression of the events leading up to the Boston Marathon bombing.”

In fact, Reddit attempted crowdsourcing by including Boston Marathon 2013 photos and encouraged the public to sort through them looking for details matching police descriptions. It led to some rumors and some false conclusions, as well as some useful information.

And social networks were once again widely used by the public during the crisis. Thousands of Tweets and Facebook (News - Alert) comments related to the deadly attacks appeared this week, TechZone360 reported. The statements and pictures let users see the latest information – whether it was just after the incident, as people worried about the condition of loved ones, or as police released photos of the suspects.

The Google (News - Alert) Person Finder service was also widely used this week to find out the conditions of loved ones.