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.
I kill you!
I heard he was Herbalism/Alchemy, he lacked the profession with the means to blow up anything!
Took careful reading to figure out the teenager did not make the threat while he was on the plane.
"a monitor of the online interactive game" saw words go buy in the chat log.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
What? Loose lips? Some jackass made stupidly specific threats against a major flight in the US.
How the fuck should they have responded? Ignore it on the likely chance its some jackass kid, or you know, actually follow up and do their fucking jobs.
I can just imagine the stink you would have posted in the alternate universe of slashdot where the kid is credible and the authorities do ignore it. "Oh how they've failed us. Look, all show, no substance. We need competent security people!"
You're the kind of jackass that will just play devil's advocate with any fucking thing. You first get indignant that there is no measure of increased security only the illusion of such. But then get start throwing around gestapo allusions when they actually do their fucking job and demonstrate that they're actively promoting security.
See what participating in Barrens chat will get you?
Food eaten most: Conjured Mana Strudel (5447)
So is this the WoW's secret doping formula?
..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.
I think the most amazing part of the story is this:
"According to the report, the teen told investigators he'd heard if you make threats online against a plane, the police would show up at your doorstep. The teen told investigators he was only testing that theory."
Test successful! Big Brother is watching.
FTFA:
"According to the report, the teen told investigators he'd heard if you make threats online against a plane, the police would show up at your doorstep. The teen told investigators he was only testing that theory."
It makes you wonder...did he perhaps expect Ed McMahon and the Publisher's Clearing House folks to come to the door? (That'd be a trick, and be the first sign of the so-called 'Zombie Apocalypse', but that's another issue).
There were two outcomes, either the cops come (which happened), or nothing happens (which had a fairly equal chance of happening, when you think about it). Flip a coin, you either get a new bunkmate named Louie, Bubba, or Bruno; or you continue to waste your life on WoW.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
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.
You know, its not as hard or as time consuming as you would think. Granted, he has to be a good, and that does take a certain amount of time and dedication, but when you are a good WoW player, you actually have to play *less* to do more. Almost more importantly than that are the people who you play with. Almost all of those achievements are not his achievements alone, but also a testament to the people he played with who achieved the same things: his raid, his arena team, and his friends in general.
When I was playing, I was in both the best and the worst guilds on the server. The best guilds worked at learning the fights, but still ended their raids on-time with their objectives completed, because once they discovered a strat for the boss or BG, the members executed it flawlessly. The worst guilds had all the strategies already laid out for them, and they still couldn't execute. Most of your time, especially in raids, but also in BGs and even Arena is based on how often you have to play catch up for mistakes you or a teammate didn't have to make.
When you finish raids and BGs on time, you have time to get good at other things. You can learn how to PvP in Arenas and get really good at it. Usually, your awesome guild mates are also on your Arena teams. You can sit around Orgrimmar and be King Turd of Shit Mountain with your gear, and in the end, you still didn't play much more than the mediocre people who can't get it down.
If I ever play another MMO, it will only be with the best people I can find who are willing to get shit done and go home. WoW was my first MMO, and I had to learn that lesson the hard way. If you aspire to be anything in that game, you're only going to get it done with the best people around you from the very start. This guy's record shows that very clearly.
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.
They had to. After the fifth person was sent to the mental ward, not even money could convince any sane, normal person that monitoring 4chan is worth the price. :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While more often than not I would tend to agree with your point of view, it should be considered just how far this attitude can be carried.
Would this idea of government non-interference extend to a scenario where someone heard a scream from a neighboring apartment and called a police on an off-chance that there might be a murder in progress and not a TV show? Would it go so far as to extend to a situation in a bar where someone is screaming in your face that they're gonna kick your ass all the way down to Antarctica and you would say: "well nothing to do here since the bar doesn't have a security guard"?
Don't tell me that if you go to a bar you don't have a right to expect to be safe. With some exceptions, I believe that most of the bar owners would say that they count on you to feel safe in their establishment.
I do agree that there are places and situations where the government doesn't have it's place, but security isn't one of them.
If anything I would prefer to have most of the private security firms replaced by real police with real training, responsibility and accountability. I know that this statement sounds naive but a lot of security companies are simply a collaboration of thugs, looking for an excuse to beat someone up if they're having a bad day/night at work.
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.
Your post doesn't make sense. Did you even *browse* TFA? Kid's 18 years old, first of all, that's not a kid. That's an adult, it's reported as a kid because it's more SHOCKING! if the police are wasting time over a kid than a legal adult. SPIN!
Don't forget there's been several cases recently where postings were made on the internet shortly before somebody like this kid DID go on a killing spree. I'm sure you remember that right? There is precedent for people boasting about serious crimes that will result in loss of life in their chosen favorite online hang-out before the fact. The kid also stated that he had heard making a threat like that would get the cops at your door and wanted to test it, so I'm going to guess he said a bit more than "I'M GONNA BLOW UP A PLANE LOLZ".
I completely fail to see how you could think that if he was a terrorist that the response was idiotic. What would YOU have done? Sent somebody to observe him, when the threat was he would be blowing up a plane the NEXT MORNING? I'm sorry? Fact of the matter is, he singled out a specific plane and a specific time, and that crosses the threshold from throw-away threat in to actual threat. This is no different than making a posting somewhere that in the morning you're going to shoot up your school (hai2u 4chan), or walking through a mall and being overheard telling somebody that you're going to blow up the library at XYZ address first thing Monday morning.
Stop acting like this kid's been mistreated. He deserves what he gets for acting a fool. He's not a kid, he's a god damned adult, he should know better than to do something like this.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
a lot of security companies are simply a collaboration of thugs, looking for an excuse to beat someone up if they're having a bad day/night at work.
And that differs from the FBI/NSA/DEA how?
I think the line I have in my mind is:
Threats to people should be protected by "real" police with the authority to use serious force. If you pose a real threat to the physical safety of other people (life, limb, etc) it's justifiable to use deadly force to prevent that threat in the most extreme cases.
Threats to property should be protected by the people who benefit financially from that property, and the force allowed should be limited to non-lethal means, and non-permanent. Catch 'em and turn 'em over to the civil authorities, but the civil authorities should NOT have to provide the protection in the first place.
A plane full of people is a piece of private property, but if it is damaged unduly in flight, people are at risk; the government should therefore take steps to secure it, up to and including deadly force if necessary. Note that I'm absolutely NOT saying that the way flights are protected now is anything but an absolute joke - anyone with an IQ over 80 could likely come up with dozens of ways to inflict mass casualties without even engaging the airline security.
On the case of the idiot this story is about - I think one of the ways to *actually* provide security is pre-emptively investigating potential threats. This kid certainly wasn't a potential threat (though I bet it was funny to watch him pee a little when they came to get him - I often wish Barrens-chat could be punishable by arrest and cavity search). What I *am* glad about is that we're hearing about it, rather than the kid just ... disappeared.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
But did they make specific and credible threats about killing Obama? Just saying "I'm going to kill Obama, he deserves to die" is nothing. There are thousands of people everywhere who say that, but there are very few who should be taken seriously.
For example if they threatened to kill Obama at a certain time and place, and Obama was indeed going to be at that place, and they were also likely to be in that place too, I'm sure they'd get investigated and possibly arrested too.
To anyone in the USA who doesn't believe me, try it: publicly post a specific threat to kill Obama some place where he WILL be, and then for bonus points, make plans to fly/travel to that spot some days before. But don't complain about me if you get arrested or worse. I'll just laugh at you when the relevant slashdot story appears.
If this nut was in Hawaii, and said he'd blow up the Indiana-Chicago flight, I suspect the FBI wouldn't have bothered about it (and just investigated him later on if the plane actually did blow up). But he was living close enough to the relevant airport (maybe 25-30 minutes away?). So the FBI certainly should investigate him.
Why libertarianism doesn't work:
The downside cost of an action (or failure to act) can be greater to society than the individual actor is capable of reimbursing, while the upside benefit of so acting (or failing to so act) can be substantial.
Remember the financial crisis after 911? From an airlines cost/benefit perspective it's better to scrimp on security, because they personally are unlikely to recoup the cost of security expenditures. However, if even a single airline has sufficiently lax security to attract a terrorist strike, the cost to society as a whole is astronomical. Meanwhile, that one airline folds as soon as it is sued, and your 401(k) suffers.
I believe that would be the FDA and the AMA as, to the best of my knowledge, they have yet to authorize a drug or technique that makes knocking someone out 100% safe. Reactions to anesthetics (the way doctors knock people out for surgery) are one of the most well known ways that people die during, even mundane, surgery. Even when the surgery works, there is an anesthesiologist there the whole time monitoring the patient's condition. This is the real world, not fantasy. Just because the rest of the A-Team gave BA a shot every time they needed to take a flight doesn't mean it's a realistic technique that could be done to every airplane passenger.
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
The example is a specific rebuttal to the GP's assertion that we should let airlines handle their own security. I'm not dismissing libertarianism only on the one example, I'm dismissing it based on the general principle I laid out. I could offer dozens of examples to support this, for instance, particualrly timely are Liehman/AIG, Bernie Madoff, and countrywide financial.
Socialized risk and privitized reward is the worst of all worlds. And since some risk is always going to be socialized, since the individuals will be unable to fully account for their actions even after we level our most sever punishmets (see Bernie Madoff again) some level of regulation is absolutely essential. This is true in enviornmental cases (superfund), economic cases (glass-steagall), and security cases (airlines).
I am in no way requiring that we "throw out the constitution." I'm making the case that some level of security at airports is necessary. If you find the airport search to be "unreasonable," you're free to find alternate travel arrangements. That is not to say that any measure is acceptable. We're seeing some pushback on millimeter wave technology, and one can hope that someday the TSA will get their head out of their asses and stop making me take off my shoes and give up my cologne. But even if those measures are frustrating and useless, they are not unconstitutional.
AIG was selling insurance. Insurance is no substitute for regulation because it is at least as easy to game as the system you're insuring.
No one is capable of insuring against the next 9/11, the next sub-prime mortgage crisis, or the next dot-com bust.
See also: cost accounting and risk analysis of nuclear power.