Slashdot Mirror
WoW Gamer Earns Federal Investigation Achievement
barnyjr writes "A teenager could face federal charges after investigators say he made online threats to kill Americans on a plane from Indianapolis to Chicago. According to investigators, a monitor of the online interactive game World of Warcraft saw the alleged threats in an on-line chat and called Johnson County authorities. She told investigators the chatter didn't seem like a game."
I'm not sure who's crazier, this guy or the guy who just became the first World of Warcraft player to rack up 10,000 achievement points.
..for poorly thought-out sentences hastily said/typed/written.
I really wish law enforcement, school officials, and the courts handled the fine gradiations between "stupid stuff kids say," "stupid stuff people, who should know better but apparently don't, say" and "real threats" better than they do. I remember a friend of mine getting suspended in elementary school for saying "I wish you would die" to someone who had been bullying them. Obviously the teary eyed little girl posed a real and imminent threat to the other kid who had at least 30 lbs on her. Then there was the guy in my freshman (high school) english class who was expelled and arrested for some poorly thought out sarcasm. The teacher had sent him to the in-school-suspension trailer for arguing with her about her grading policies. He was still pissed and was insulting her loudly as he left when she said something to the effect of "I feel like I've got the next unibomber right here. I hate watching little psychos like you go through here just knowing what you'll probably become." In response to this ridiculous thing for a teacher to say to a 14 year old student, he said "Oh right, like I'm going to put bomb in your mailbox or something. Are you f-ing nuts?"
Despite the fact that she had provoked him, that everyone in the class had attested to this and stated it was clear he was being sarcastic, he was still arrested for making threats and expelled from the county school district. I really wish our institutions were better at reacting appropriately to stuff like that. Maybe if they could tell real threats from stupid remarks we would be a lot safer from both the mentally unbalanced seeking to do us harm and our government's hamfisted attempts to look like it's doing something.
How the fuck should they have responded? Ignore it on the likely chance its some jackass kid
Yes.
Oh how they've failed us. Look, all show, no substance. We need competent security people!
Why does everybody think they have a right to be safe everywhere?
And why is it the government's responsibility to make a private trip in a privately owned airplane safe for you, pay for all that security with my tax dollars, and use intrusive government means as part of security?
Make airline security exclusively an airline responsibility: no tax dollars and no governmental intrusions anymore. And I bet if companies had to pay the full consequences of terrorism, they'd find ways to make sure it didn't happen.
I like your idea, problem is corps don't have the right to secure their planes the way they'd like to, only the government can make you a meat puppet. So I'm against the idea of making someone responsible for something that they don't have the rights to secure themselves against. And if we give them the rights to do that ... well ... perhaps cyberpunk isn't too far off and Shadowrun will become reality... that'd rock.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
Should have tried this last year, before he was 18.
First, from a European point of view, the "I'll sue your ass for not telling me the sky is blue" way of handling responsibility has caused any identity (government, business, neighbor, colleague, celebrity) that cannot hide in anonymity to be overly cautious. Any acceptable risk of danger is offset by the enormous danger of due compensation if something does go wrong. Secondly, the government is, due to their required independence, by definition an onlooker with regard to the communities they have to watch/control. Could we easily tell from carefully watching a box of thousands of bouncing rubber balls which ones are behaving differently from the others when it all looks like a blur? Surely, each individual ball would notice discrepancies upon encountering such an outlier, but this cannot be expected from an outsider. Thirdly, and this combines the first two, the best the onlooker can do to exclude any false negatives in its selection procedure, is to make sure any voluntary irregular behavior is absent, so that the irregular ones are more easily distinguished. For that same reason any, maybe in itself harmless, strange behavior at airports is dealt with as if it were the real thing to discourage such behavior in the future. The assumption is, of course, that the odd balls are unable to act as normal as the regular ones.
Not at all a ridiculous strategy. Think of it as a Denial-Of-Counterterrorism attack; throw up some much 'chatter' and false leads at the time you want to attack. I don't know if anyone has tried it yet, but it wouldn't surprise me.
We need sober, thoughtful investigators unraveling terror networks. Not trigger happy knuckleheads jumping on any and every chance to pretend they are Jack fucking Bauer.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?