A worldwide manhunt kicks off at the end of March – a search across America and Europe for five fugitives, identifiable only by their mugshots. The successful team of trackers not only gets a $5,000 bounty from the U.S. State Department. They demonstrate to the planet's law enforcement and intelligence agencies that they can hunt down fleeting suspects using nothing but their wits and social media connections.

The "Tag Challenge" isn't the first contest designed to show how a networked crowd can unearth seemingly obscure information in a hurry. But this simulation may be the one with the widest scope – and the most relevance to government agencies.

Five jewel thieves are at large in New York, London, Washington, Stockholm, and Bratislava: That's the (rather thin) conceit behind the Tag Challenge. At 8 a.m. local time in each city on March 31, contest organizers will release a picture of the local burglar. Contestants will then have 12 hours to scour their cities, find each of the volunteer crooks, and upload photos of them to the Challenge's website.

Exactly how teams will pull off this manhunt, even the Challenge's organizer's aren't sure; finding one man among millions won't be easy. But it's clear that the job will require dozens and dozens of sleuths, and a way to share tips almost instantly.

"How will teams mobilize and coordinate this network?" project organizer J.R. deLara asks. "Unknown."

Cops have routinely shared mugshots with one another – and with the general public – for ages. But distributing the photos globally, and hoping for an instant capture in five places at once? That's anything but routine.

Even previous contests – like the one Wired ran in 2009 – seem relatively simple, in comparison. Wired's writer-on-the-lam Evan was a known commodity, at large for a full month, and spilling clues along the way. The Tag Challenge's five fugitives in the will only be known by their faces, and will have to be caught in half a day.

Darpa's $40,000 "Network Challenge," launched around the same time as Wired's, was a nationwide hunt to find 10 giant, red balloons. Some U.S. intelligence professionals considered the task to be "impossible by conventional intelligence-gathering methods" because of there were so many possible locations for the balloons, and so few clues. Of course, the balloons didn't hide or move around. These runaways will.

George Washington University graduate student J.R. deLara looked at these contests – and others – as part of a State Department-sponsored conference on trans-Atlantic security and social media. The contests "were making these claims about the ability of social networks to accomplish real-time tasks in real life. That this wasn't just a parlor trick," deLara tells Danger Room.

"So we thought: Let's test this. Let's test this question," he adds. "Could you really use these strategies to find a person of interest, a vehicle of interest, or some actionable intelligence?"

A proposal quickly followed, and State Department funding followed quickly after that.

Already, similar contests have sparked considerable interest in military, law enforcement, and intelligence circles. When a team from MIT won the Network Challenge – by recruiting 4,400 to help in the hunt – it was the first time many in the American government realized the power of social media to mobilize large groups of people. The MIT crew became the darlings of Darpa; several team members were sent to Kabul to help run a secret intelligence program that relied on seemingly-obscure data to gauge the vitality of the Afghan insurgency.

So get ready, manhunters. This challenge may lead in all sorts of unexpected directions.