Slashdot Mirror
Emailed Threats Less Crazy Than Snail Mail
SoyChemist writes "Psychologists at the University of Nebraska have read 300 threatening letters and 99 angry emails to members of Congress. They concluded that the authors of the electronic messages show less signs of serious mental illness, but they are more profane and disorganized. The report was published in the September issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences."
Opening and using an e-mail account requires some amount of sanity, but very little social skills.
do you insists on being such a bunch of pigshit-eating donkey wanking bastards? oh look - ponies!
Oh come on, the explanation is simple. You've got to be crazy to write a message to someone with postal mail. Welcome to the 21st century people, we have e-mail now!
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
It makes perfect sense; it's a lot easier to send an e-mail than it is to put a pen to paper, then send the letter -- you have to be really pissed off to go through that kind of trouble. I'd say it's highly likely that angry phonecalls aren't quite as "crazy" as angry letters, too -- in general.
If someone would take it's two minutes in order to check out the article, then it would be quickly realised that the _abstract_ of the actual paper is more detailed than the whole article linked in the summary and it is also free of the stupid sensationalization.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
First, to clarify the summary, psychologists were not reading letters to congress (like a bedtime story for politicians), they were analyzing letters that had been sent to members of congress.
The results were that postal threats were more extreme than email threats. This is hardly surprising. The barrier to writing a snail mail letter is higher, so this inherently selects for the more passionate people (whether truly concerned about an issue, or incredibly angry, or truly dangerously threatening). Writing an email is so easy that just about anyone will do it if they are slightly bothered by something. As such, I would expect email to, statistically, have fewer of the "fringe cases" of people who are being truly mentally ill, and more "normal people" just venting (in a profane and disorganized way, apparently).
I do wonder a bit about the sample size, mind you. I would have thought that there would be far more emails than postal letters sent to members of congress (and far more 'threatening' ones, too), but instead they analyzed more conventional letters than email. I wonder if this is a result of the relative frequency of the two types of threats, or if the researchers had some other reason to focus on postal mail.
You suck.
Love,
The Associate
Someone hates these cans.
Many really crazy people can't hold down a job. Can they really afford internet fees?
The truly paranoid probably don't trust computers.
The functional-but-unstable ones probably heard that snail-mail and faxes are taken more seriously than email. That was true back in the late '90s. I don't know if it's still true now.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
People who send angry emails are often acting on impulse without taking time to calm down. It's the long distance communication equivalent of road rage. We are insulated by distance and the transitory nature of the medium, just as when we drive, we are insulated by the fact that the other driver will not know us for more than a few minutes, and we are separated by glass and steel. As the incident happens, we are already moving on from it.
Letters require more forethought and more steps (finding envelope and stamp, going to mailbox, etc.). They require premeditation. Snail mail letters are also harder to trace and thus less likely to result in a visit from the FBI.
Someone with a real mental delusion, making real threats is obviously more likely to use snail mail when compared with the average angry constituent who just wants to let out their frustration.
Yes. The article is typical blogodreck, and links to a blog.
The research itself has serious problems. These weren't samples from incoming mail. They were samples from Capitol Police files, which means they'd already been considered potential threats by at least three people.
Consider what happens to incoming e-mail at a congressional office. First, it's spam-filtered automatically, so any bulk threat e-mailed to every member of Congress probably was dumped at the filters. Then some junior person reads it and sorts it. (The people who do that job for the White House are unpaid interns.) The basic sort is "opinion", which is just tallied; "casework", constituents of that Congressman who want some specific help; "office matters", something that the office staff actually needs to deal with, and "threats". The threats may get a quick look by a more senior staffer, who decides whether they need to go to the Capitol Police. Then, at the Capitol Police end, someone has to decide if it's worth opening a case file for the letter.
So a study based on Capitol Police files reflects what gets through the automatic and manual filtering. The study may say more about staff thinking than the incoming content.
The same could be said for mailing a letter. I suspect the cause may lean more towards simplicity and availability.
To sit down, find an envelope, and actually put 35 cents on the thing requires more forethought and commitment than firing off an email. It also takes at least several minutes to do, so there will be a bit more composition of thought than in an email.
Email can be a much more heat of the moment thing, as evidenced frequently by this forum. I guarantee that if replying to this thread, or even this forum required me to mail an envelope it would not have happened.
Snail mail is much much harder to trace than email. Therefore, the most extreme nutjobs are smarter: they realize that it's easier to be anonymous with snail mail than email.
We all know here that tracing an IP and then bullying an ISP for an identity is quite easy and becoming easier everyday.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
Not to mention that if you're sending a threat it would be best to do it in a way that cannot be so easily traced back to you.
Dropping off a letter in a different city is an easier method than anon proxies for most people.
Oh I can.
Emails can be traced back to the sender. If I was going to threaten someone, a "real" letter would have much more impact and be non-tracable. (Unless of course you write your address on the top, in which case the proof of "crazy" has already been made.)
'corse[sic] you'd have to take a few basic precautions: never, ever touch the paper/envelope. Use a common type of printer (no handwritten stuff for analysis, naturally) and don't lick the envelope or stamp, so they've got no DNA. Post it where there are no surveillance cameras, preferably at night to reduce the chance of witnesses.
Have I forgotten anything?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
There have been a lot of comments to the effect that it takes more effort to send a letter than an email, so there's a selection process that means only the more die-hard loonies actually bother to get letters in the mail. I agree with this, but I think there's another selection process in place that also makes the mail more scary: age.
Of the people I've known who rant on with horrifying opinions from within their own delusional, disconnected world, there's a sharp tendency that the more loony ones were older. Not always, but there's a trend that way. I don't know if it's due to too many years of witnessing and magnifying perceived falsehoods, early onset dementia, a build-up of heavy metals in their systems, or what causes their buildup of paranoid ramblings to burst forth, but I think there's a strong age factor at work here, and that the snail mails are much more likely to come from older, and therefore more hard-core lunatics than the email, which more often originates from young lunatics-in-training who are not yet as comfortable and confident in their insanity.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
You have to be far more focussed to sit down, write out a letter, fold it, put it in an envelope and post it than you do to just bang out an email in a few minutes and fire it off. This leads to the obvious conclusion that most threatening emails received will be profane, angry missives from pissed-off but otherwise perfectly sane people, while most threatening letters will be written by people who are more mentally unbalanced, because they're the ones more likely to write such things with a level head, and not in a rush of blood.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
The letters and emails might have been reported by people who were more easily frightened by email than letters, i.e. the readers would report any threatening email but only very threatening letters. The authors assume that the media makes no difference in which communications are reported.
From the abstract: "[letters and emails] were randomly selected from the United States Capitol Police investigative case files and compared." [Emphasis mine]
And it's obvious: the glue on envelopes causes mental illness.
Excuse me, I have to put on an eyepatch and commandeer a freighter now. I'm trying to slow down global warming.
Avast!
Enlarge your manhood. She will love you more. You will die in 7 days if you don't.
Soft tabs cheap, buy in bulk. We will make your penis explode.
Hi, my name is Courtney. I live in Ukraine. Marry me or the bitch dies.
Seriously, email threats creep me out.
-Billco, Fnarg.com