Slashdot Mirror
Police In Britain Arrest Man For Bomb-Threat Joke On Twitter
An anonymous reader writes "A British man was arrested under anti-terrorism legislation for making a bomb joke on Twitter. Paul Chambers, 26, was arrested under the provisions of the Terrorism Act (2006). His crime? Frustrated at grounded flights over inclement weather, he made a joke bomb threat on the social networking site Twitter."
We don't want to get slashdot in trouble.
Their they're doing there hair.
"Police in arrest man for Joke on Bomb-Thread Joke on Twitter."
Tor, I2P, and thousands of anonymising proxies all over the web. The guy totally has no excuse.
If you're going to say stuff that could bring down unwanted consequences, then do it in a way that's extremely difficult to trace back to you personally.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
My car tyres are flat and I have go to the garage to blow them up. what should i do ?
Of the way the world is heading. As I keep harping on about, and wish the politicians (and the police) would understand. Orwell's 1984 is a warning, not a "HOWTO manual".
By the standard they've set on this, most of the populace should be under arrest by dint of the anti-terror laws, which over here in the UK are draconian, misguided and completely over the top.
It really comes to something when we need to worry more about our own police and politicians than we ever would about a terror attack.
Dude, read the story. It wasn't at an airport; it was on Twitter.
Celebrating 800 years of political violence in the Nottingham area!
It is depressing as hell to be a British citizen.
You get arrested then released without charge, the police take and store your DNA. The EU human rights court says this is illegal and wrong, Labour say they don't care.
You get accused of a sexual offence, it gets recorded. Even if the accusation is entirely baseless and the person who made it is jailed for making it, you'll still have it on your record. Good luck getting a job with children when that accusation is revealed to a potential employer. Even worse, the government can put a court order on these that make it illegal for an employer to reveal why you failed a background check. You're given no legal recourse to this, even if a mistake has been made and you're accidentally added to the register.
You can have (consensual) kinky sex, but if you video it, you're a sex offender. You can be 18 and have sex with a 17 year old legally but videotape it, you're a sex offender. Draw two stickpeople having sex, label one of them as being 17, you guessed it, you're a sex offender.
Organise a protest criticising against soldier in Afganistan and Iraq? That'll be declared illegal and you'll be arrested on public decency charges.
Being held 30 days without charge? Not enough! We must change the law to make it 90 days! After all, you wouldn't have been arrested it you weren't guilty!
It's rather depressing that Labour are supposedly the left leaning of the two main parties. I would hope that the Conservatives would cancel some of these laws when they're in power but I doubt it. Removing laws is pretty hard and the tabloids would crucify them.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-joke-led-to-terror-act-arrest-and-airport-life-ban-1870913.html
How very, very sad. How can anyone think for one second that his tweet was serious ? What a bunch of idiots. Not only the authorities but also the person who reported him.
It seems we're slowly moving to a state where only correct thinking is allowed. No joking, no sense of humour, irony or annoyance.
Shit like this makes me wanna blow up Parliament
You seemed to not have even read the summary. Could I suggest reading the part about the guy making a joke on twitter. Could I also suggest reading the twitter comment he made about said Airport being closed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoPPvPbe-SM :)
They really like to "ground" people in the UK who make a fuss
All this web 2.0 stuff is watched by NSA, CIA, FBI, GCHQ, state task forces and your local PD.
So if your having a lol, remember who provided the seed cash to many of more 'effortless' web 2.0 sites.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Obviously the police didn't take the threat seriously at all:
If it takes the police to find Paul J Chambers when there a PICTURE of him on his Twitter profile AND it tells you he's from Doncaster, England.
Now, I'm not the police, but I think that if I had access to a phone book of Doncaster, I could probably find the guy in a few hours. Given that he's 90% likely to have a drivers license, it's not like it'd make it any more difficult to find him.
Geez!
They always claim that they have to take all jokes seriously. But really these events are about punishing people who heckle during performances at the security theatre.
"I'm going to eat at until I explode"
All it needs is a couple million people in every country posting every day the same identical message on every board in the planet.
Good luck arresting them all.
Stolen from the comments in the Independent: Why do British police go about in threes? One can read, one can write, the other keeps an eye on the 2 dangerous subversive intellectuals.
Seems appropriate. Although I would say that French police aren't any better, they just go about in pairs.
I would make a fake bomb threat in an airport, and then... just leave.
Millions of dollars wasted, millions of dollars more airport security theater implemented just because, and to top it off no actual bomb needed.
The NuLabour is not "leftist" by any means. Old Labour was. Old Labour is no more.
Law & order bullshit is right wing. It's the shit peddled by the likes of Sarkozy and Berlusconi that gets such morons elected (by retired assholes).
I agree with the Slashdot opinion that Britain tends to go overboard with police action lately, but honestly in this case I'm not so sure they were wrong. The man wrote:
Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!
Sounds like a bomb threat to me. I didn't see any context indicating that this is merely a joke.
I was taught by my parents, many many years before 9/11, that making bomb threats, even jokingly, is a bad idea because if anyone mistakenly takes you seriously, it WILL get you in trouble and possibly arrested. Maybe this guy's mom should have taught him the same thing.
Someone help me out here. If someone were to post a satire joke, poem, or comedic phrase involving blowing up the planet via twitter would be actionable offense and any organization would be foaming at the mouth to have first dibs on this person. I understand questioning an individual and holding them for the normal time. But arresting and charging someone with a crime is not the way to handle things.
I read the story. I don't make references towards bomb threads in any remote way on twitter or anywhere else. In 1991, ten years before 9/11 I left from Amsterdam airport. I was greeted by two MP's with automatic rifles in the passenger terminals and the airliner I was on was escorted on the runway by two armoured cars. All passengers were questioned by two independent agents. There and then I figured it is not wise to even remotely hint at explosions. I later got arrested on suspicion of espionage after being caught taking a video of an orange grove. Learn to deal with the world we are living in.
Interesting a lot of people defending this guy - but threatening to blow up an airport is just stupid. this is nothing new with bomb threats though , even pre-9/11 when in primary school somebody called our principal and made a bomb threat, and the whole school had to be cleared for the day while it was searched, and even though no bomb was found the police still spent some effort to find the prankster, because even as a joke there is a necessity for such threats to be investigated, and is a waste of police resources and time. don't even bother with proxy, just don't make bomb threats, it's not smart or funny.
There is no need for more attacks, the authorities do a splendid job at keeping their citizens frightened and in fear.
Probably just a question of time until they start bigger raids and maybe even start to execute people to be sure that those cannot cause any harm.
What has the world come to? One bigger terrorist attack and the U.S. bombs the shit out of 2 countries. Some more unsuccessful tries and several countries go mental and start to treat everyone like a possible mass murderer. I guess I get banned from several countries now for posting subversive messages and being a possible threat as well.
Time to relocate to a lonely island, a long forgotten cave on Antarctica or into a tend in the desert. That sounds almost comfortable compared to what we experience here at the moment.
(Oh for sarcastically disabled people and authorities: that was sarcasm, all of it. Gotta make sure to add that to every post on the net now. You never know who's just waiting with a gun next to your door ...)
No. The environment can adapt to me, thanks, or the environment can fuck off.
Draw two stickpeople having sex, label one of them as being 17, you guessed it, you're a sex offender.
and probably won't
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
In short, no thanks.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
Terrorists win.
We can't even joke anymore. I don't know how many times I've said I would blow up something when I got pissed off at it.
You say, "the terrorists won" when things like this happen. But to me, it sounds like most of you are on the same side as them. So quick to bash the security agencies, when you all should be having a little more concern over your own thoughts. This was obviously a lack of common sense on the poster's part. You don't honestly believe that a bomb threat that sounds legitimate would be simply ignored, do you? If you think bomb threats should be ignored, then you're on the wrong side.
We live in different times now, get used to it. Your days of making jokes at the taxpayer's expense are over, and the sooner you all get the message the better. I'm not keen on the public paying for this kind of crap when that money could instead be used towards education... something most of you apparently need.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
This message will explode in 30 seconds!
Where, if you make a joke of killing thousands of people, that's ok, but god help you if you call somebody a chink or a honkey or a nigger, that's really the threat to society.
This is my sig.
This is a lesson in appropriate literalism for this chap, isn't it? When you have the urge to scream something at the top of your lungs in the town square, you'd bloody well better make certain there's no room for misinterpretation, not to mention readiness to own those utterances, eh? When has that EVER not been good advice? Whether there's a real threat of a Big Brother in U.K. or not, this is just a story about a thoughtless wanker who likes to spout off in places that aren't very private, and he's learned the possible consequences of his spouting being misunderstood. This is really not so different from, say, Don Imus in USA making racist remarks on the radio; Imus got smacked around hard for being a thoughtless wanker and lost his job, too, and he was a bit more influential than this chap.
... is the man telling you to be afraid.
duh, what are you thinking?
Sounds like what happened to $cientology protestor Keith Henson who made a joke about a "Tom Cruise Missile", and was arrested, tried, and convicted.
At eWEEK Europe, we have spoken to his employers, and confirmed that he is suspended from work for the next couple of weeks. The damage to his work prospects may be the most serious aspect of the story. We await any comment from the company concerned. Peter Judge
From waving around a toy gun or selling sugar and pretending it's cocaine? You can get arrested for those things as well because of the potential damage you might cause. Same as yelling "Fire" in the middle of a theatre.
Fact is, if this guy actually did blow something up and the government didn't do something about it because they didn't think he was serious, they would be crucified. Look at how the US government is being hit because they didn't take seriously the warnings of the father of the man who tried to blow up that plane on Christmas Day?
Some people need to grow up and get serious. There is no such thing as a "joke" bomb threat in this day and age.
While the police action did not speak for much common sense and understanding of modern communication, neither does the Twitter posting speak of intelligence of the poster. Saying "You got one week to get your shit together or i will blow you sky high" can be interpreted wrongly and IMHO you have to be quite dumb to make such jokes in public.
I think both parties involved have trouble with Twitter. The police had no method of putting that posting into a context. They interpreted it as a standalone message. The poster did not care, how that statement looks as a standalone message. For him his own Twitter context was applied automagically.
While i put quite some blame on the police, i do not think the poster is free of it. Been questioned for several hours seems to be fair for that. But being suspended from the job and banned for life from that airport is very excessive IMHO.
CU, Martin
Interesting a lot of people defending this guy - but threatening to blow up an airport is just stupid.
While making jokes about bomb threats may or may not be the smartest thing to do these days, I used to look for security weaknesses or blindspots at every government building I worked over the years going back before September 11, 2001. In my mind I would plot how to penetrate the facility for the purpose of merely getting past security and any CCTV cameras. Surprisingly, an actual attack would have been almost too easy to execute. High-powered rifle to take-out the CCTV cameras; walk up to the security desk and toss a couple grenades or more quietly shoot the one or two security guards, they fall behind the high counter concealing their corpses, jump the turn-style and walk around the building. Am I a terrorist or simply someone bored with the daily walk to and from the workplace?
The civil libertarian Tessa Mayes, an expert on privacy law and free speech issues, said: "Making jokes about terrorism is considered a thought crime, mistakenly seen as a real act of harm or intention to commit harm. "The police's actions seem laughable and suggest desperation in their efforts to combat terrorism, yet they have serious repercussions for all of us. In a democracy, our right to say what we please to each other should be non-negotiable, even on Twitter."
~ In Trust, We Trust ~
Everybody should start tweeting similar messages. What are they going to do? Arrest 100 million people? I think not...
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Under the terrorism legislation in almost every country there is no requirement for proof or evidence to detain, question, arrest, and charge an individual the Government deems a threat. However, unlike the anti-gangsterism law the terrorism act is invoked on a daily basis. Security Theatre as defined by Bruce Schneier has now replaced Masterpiece Theatre once hosted by Alistair Cooke on PBS in the USofA.
Please send your donations to "The Government" so they can protect you from terrorists and you will receive a "War on Terror" coffee mug as a token of appreciation.
Everyone please send exactly the same message. Make sure that the police and courts have lots and lots of work to do and your reps gets rapped hard for letting this crap happen.
Human rights are for everyone, including the people who took this guy's "joke" seriously. I don't think freedom of speech gives one the right to make bomb threats or (more classically) shout "fire" in a theater, both of those acts may lead either to injury and/or financial loss. Even if it was a joke you will still have to convince a judge that a resonable person would not take your words seriously in the context they were given.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
He could have not been taking pictures of a sewer grate.
Now that's terrism.
Ceci n'est pas une
This kind of formal language does not change the fact that context is needed to determine crime.
Crime is defined by intention as much as by act.
When there is neither, there should be an apology.
Your parents are cowards if they actually asked you to follow such rules.
Your sentence is to meant to discourage youngsters from speaking against anyone on Twitter.
All Govts know that the youth participate most in protests.
And all Govts are afraid of Twitter.
And so you could be spreading FUD for any Govt.
Including USA and China.
This took seven days to the arrest only because some Nu-Labour sinister minister wants to use this to intimidate people from posting honest opinions on twitter.
This is the chill effect being put to work. This is the signature of fascism.
Elections are approaching in many countries and scandals are mounting.
We are not stupid idiots.
He is not a terrorist! He has nothing to hide! I didn't know he was living a fascist state!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
the same thing we do every night pinky
TRY AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD
And the guy's now thinking, "Damnit!!! Things were going so well with my bombing plans... I'd done step 1 'Identify target'... step 2 'obtain explosives'... step 3, 'post plans on worldwide public forum without obfuscation of any kind'... and then suddenly everything goes to shit for no reason. What did I do wrong?? How can I help my fellow al quaida brothers learn from whatever subtle mistake I must have made? Well, time to escape from prison... I'll start by loudly yelling my intention to do so every night at lockdown..."
I say, hats off to the fine policework in this situation. Keep those terrorists on the run, boys!
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Sometimes when the world conspires to enact injustice, it's the prison wardens of small minds in the general population who need to be taken to task. Likewise with your credit record. A merchant can make an unfounded allegation about payment failure, and the blotch is hard to remove. Soon people begin to fear the malingering blotch and behave in frightened, risk averse ways, which the worst of the merchants soon begin to exploit.
Personally, I think the solution is to add teeth to the liability laws, to the point that when a person suffers an social injury (such as denial of employment and credit), there is someone useful to sue for having allowed the unsubstantiated information to flow around the loop in the first place.
Comments that quickly get you sued if you mention them in public can be erected as monuments if you commit them to permanent electronic storage, equally without basis, and then dress up the reports with an agency masthead. It doesn't even matter if the agency can tell their torus from a hole in the ground.
Michael Hicks
Every time his family is detained by airport security for extra Vaseline, it's an offence against their reputation and dignity in the court of small minds who witness the spectacle.
Kind of makes a guy want to set up a credit reporting agency on relationship fidelity. A solid marketing tie-in to a couple of dating agencies, you could do pretty good, $20 for a quick peak at the morning-after decorum score would find many takers. Or just a quick $5 for the post-coital returns-your-call score.
Of course, 100% of your data would be scurrilous, but a solidly designed masthead on the official-looking fidelity report seems to take care of this. Something like "by appointment of the queen" if your headquarters reside in the BVI. Don't touch that one if you reside in the U.K. The queen has rights under British law.
I just don't get why credit reporting agencies and the police enjoy this giant loophole on damaging reputations with unfounded data, when liability laws are in other regards extremely strict on this matter.
How about one that would appeal to my exogenous backbone, my poker cue of moral outrage? How about a public CYA cowardice index, which details the many small cowardly decisions people make in life, such as not to interview a person because you've discovered an unsubstantiated allegation as part of a background check, knowing full well that the agency in question does not vouch that there is any reality behind the aspersion, but you then decide to cover your own by screening the person out from further consideration nevertheless, on the grounds that your peers will prove equally mired in cowardice in the judgement of your actions.
Those are the many tiny moral transactions by which our faulty instruments of government ascend into the shadowy penumbra of totalinariasm.
The reason there is so much blame in this world against government is that secretly wish government to function well enough to protect us from our own cowardice, which it rarely fails to achieve.
We could start by demanding a reversal in this effective debasement of our liability laws.
Thieving bastard, give me back my sig!!!!
BTW: Unreason is not a virtue. The vast majority of unreasonable men end up dead or in a cage due to their unreason, it's only the lucky few who get to be despots and dictators.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Or just be on the NO FLY LIST.
They couldn't risk not arresting the guy.
Indeed - I'm not too concerned over the arrest because it can be hard telling real threats from jokes when something is said in public.
But what concerns me far more is that, even though it's clear it's a joke now, he still faces problems:
* He's on bail.
* He may be charged with "conspiring to create a bomb hoax".
* He's been suspended from work - apparently we're guilty until proven innocent now.
* They've confiscated "his iPhone, laptop and home computer".
That last one is a particular concern - whilst totally unnecessary, it now seems standard for people to lose access to items which are fast becoming essential items in today's society, for communication and in some cases their livelihoods. Sometimes they're taken for searches, but there's apparently such a backlog that you can kiss goodbye to your equipment for many months.
No doubt they'll be scanning the hard disk to find if there's any other random "crime" that they can get him on too.
More generally, there's also the problem of blurring the lines between statements intended for friends, but that can be read by anyone.
Consider, if someone made the same joke in a pub, even though that's a public place, would it make sense for the person to go through that ordeal, because a random member of the public heard them and phoned the police? (Although I guess at least you could deny ever having said it in that instance...)
This guy was simply arrested, questioned, and released.
From the original article http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/twitter-joke-led-to-terror-act-arrest-and-airport-life-ban-1870913.html :
* He's on bail.
* He may be charged with "conspiring to create a bomb hoax".
* He's been suspended from work - apparently we're guilty until proven innocent now.
* They've confiscated "his iPhone, laptop and home computer".
Yep, you left a few things out of your "simply".
Not to mention that these days in the UK, an arrest means your DNA and fingerprints are kept on file, even if you're found innocent or never charged.
I don't see the humor in saying [snip] That's the equivalent of saying [snip]
I didn't quite catch that, could you repeat it please? Something about you making a threat?
are also complaining that the christmas crotch bomber was not caught. damned if you do, damned if you don't
the moron made bomb threats at the airport on a social networking site. please explain to me exactly how this is orwellian, intrusive, yro, or any other pseudo-intellectual reference you cling to other than simple common fucking sense: don't make fucking bomb threats at the fucking airport
or you will, and should, be arrested. what exactly is so controversial or shocking about this to you? it seems like a slam dunk to me
he didn't use putty to rearrange files on his private server from his iphone, HE POSTED ON TWITTER. you know, public fucking feed? do you understand that any of you pseudo-intellectual twits whining about orwell?
btw the use of the word "orwellian" has become so knee-jerk here it is no longer a signifier for thoughtfulness any more, but a replacement for thought. that particular fantasy's sell-by date passed away sometime in the cold war. please update your literary references. parrotting ORWELL" *cough* "ORWELL" every fucking time yro comes up that at this point it only makes you look like a vaguely functioning junior high school student. now if you mention LITTLE brother: every kid with a cell phone camera RECORDING THE ABUSES OF THE POLICE (how's that for a twist?), then you've impressed me with an updated modern intellectual repertoire. i want to hear less "orwell", more "rodney king":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King
the real world effect of ubiquitous cameras is its use AGAINST the state. understand you orwell parrotting pseudointellectual twits?
all of you please shut the fuck up about the EXTREMELY outdated fantasy of orwell, thanks. you don't look intelligent anymore, you look very outdated
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Now catch me if you can :-)
However misguided this is, I seriously doubt that the police did this with malicious intent. I also doubt that we have all the facts. The police in the UK don't go around arresting people who say silly things about bombs, it's a waste of resources.
Since when were jokes funny? Being funny is a bonus, and very much up to the individual. Funny has taken a back seat in most jokes told by the "look at me!" opportunities.
PS the RIGHT response wasn't to arrest: to INVESTIGATE.
You know, go round, see if he's genuine and if not tell him not to be so silly and complain to the right place next time he's pissed off at the airports.
But arresting? That just ups the figures on fighting crime. And it's a lot safer arresting the innocent than the guilty: The innocent will protest their innocence but follow, the guilty will fight the arrest.
The terrorists have finally succeeded in making it possible to arrest someone for being an idiot! Maybe there's a silver lining to this cloud....
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
There was a worse case in France a year or so ago. A man, annoyed at a train he was riding, emailed a threat to a friend about doing something illegal to the train. The friend read the private email, figured correctly that it wasn't serious, and ignored it. The police arrested the recipient and held him for 24 hours on the crime of not reporting the threat.
Sometimes you think there's no hope for humanity. Then there's a post like this.
Hear, hear, radtea. I wish I could mod up your entire philosophy.
I saw it first. :P
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree here. THIS is a joke about terrorism:
A Canadian and an American are captured by an Al Qaeda cell, and told by the terrorists that they are about to be beheaded. When asked if they have any last words, the Canadian says: "Yes. I will talk about the human rights dimension of this situation in relation to constitutional law, drawing upon previous incidents in Afghanistan and Iraq, and looking at a comparative religion aspect regarding the lack of moral justification for this act." The American then says: "I've got nothing to say - just kill me before the Canadian starts talking."
That's a joke about terrorism. "Get your act together or I'm going to blow your airport sky high" is a threat. It may not be one spoken in earnest, but it is a threat, and the police have an obligation to investigate it, and make sure that it is neither a terrorist plot or an unbalanced wacko who's about to try to kill thousands of people. The police are the ones in the right here.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
#88575 +(9158)- [X]
I should bomb something ...and it's off the cuff remarks like that that are the reason I don't log chats
Just in case the FBI ever needs anything on me
I'm sure they can just get it from someone who DOES log chats.
*** FBI has joined #gamecubecafe
We saw it anyway.
*** FBI has quit IRC (Quit: )
http://www.bash.org/?88575
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
...if he had just ended with "j/k" or a smiley.
What a dumb shit. By the same token, an actual terrorist wouldn't advertise the fact he was going to blow up an airport on Twitter.
The police were just doing their job though. If someone did advertise that they felt like blowing up an airport on twitter, then actually blew it up, I wonder what we'd be saying about the police then if they didn't haul the guy in despite the fact that the twitter post had been reported to them. The police are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
A guy named David summed it up nicely:
"The terrorists have won. We are now afraid of our own shadow."
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
The UK police probably paid a boatload of money for some kind of useless social network mining or monitoring software/service based on hype. They guy who wasted the money is probably getting cold feet and they are now trying to justify the purchase with some trumped up charges.
I will presume next time your house is on fire, that it is just a crank call. Hope you make it out alone and can convince the insurance company you did call for help.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
those who complain the loudest complain about everything, without regard of logical coherence about what they are complaining about
truly you won't deny the existence of such people
as for the movie, its a mark of shame at this point, about it being unfinished. but i can't change my sig, or i have admitted even more humbling defeat
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Context is key. You can often take one sentence on its own and blow it all out of proportion (See any episode of Three's Company for an example). What were the surrounding tweets?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Yes, he got into trouble because twitter is a PUBLIC forum. But what forum do we have to communicate with each other where we can expect NO ONE IS EAVESDROPPING? Because the REAL problem is there is NO SUCH FORUM.
Yes they could. What they needed to do was to just check him out. But he has a computer[1] and he uses the internet, so he's obviously up to something. Probably a pediofiddler.
Still, it keeps the stats up, doesn't it?
[1] or rather he did have. The pigs stole it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Conspiring with whom?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Having by and large abandoned sexual taboos, we now have a whole new range of taboos having to do with our physical security.
"Don't ride your bicycle without a helmet"
"Don't smoke"
"Don't mention bombs in airports"
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
In the real world, people actually do things like blowing up airplanes and buildings. To say you are going to do so in a very public and disseminated manner is, at best, stupid and definitely invites such actions by the authorities because you have left them no choice.
These are their choices:
They are going to error on the side of "no one dies" and not "a dumbass is inconvenienced and embarrassed".
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Yes, the police have a right to investigate, however, he was arrested, not just questioned.
It's on a medium that was not directed at the air port, like a letter, phone call, or email. It was very evident it was done in earnest.
I just wish the police would stop pestering those who are very evidently not harmful.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
No, they generally just beat the smart arse senseless in order to convince him that he's fucking with the wrong people. If the smart arse is a slow learner then they charge him with resisting arrest.
Humans are by far the most dangerous animal on the planet, my advise is to avoid deliberately antagonising dangerous animals.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How is this a bomb threat? It's not even possible to have oral sex with an entire airport! Is it?
I tell you what America is starting to go downhill with privacy and freedom but the UK is already a police state.
They have cameras on every corner and can search you without a warrant any damn time they please.
Add to that,
"Don't drive your car on the railroad tracks"
I'm a pretty firm believer in that one.
Qxe4
Oh yeah! You're totally right! Tack on
"Don't drive drunk" ...
"Don't text/talk on your phone while driving"
"Don't punch pregnant women in the stomach"
"Don't kidnap the pope"
man, there's just so many cultural taboos! the list is endless!
"but I can't be arsed to look up how exactly law is upheld in every country I make a comment on"
This guy essentially says "ah fuck it, I DON'T EVEN NEED TO ATTEMPT to be accurate" and he gets a +5 mod?
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU MODS?
You forgot the sunscreen... never forget the sunscreen.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
there's no erosion of rights or privacy! the guy posted on TWITTER, as in PUBLIC ACCESS. where is this erosion of rights you complain about? where is the erosion of privacy? if you say "i am going to bomb an airplane" in public, expect your ass to be punished. on what grounds can this possibly be a problem for anyone, i don't know
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What was the source of this story? Who reported it?
Some years ago, an acquaintance of mine in college was arrested by the TSA and interrogated for taking photos of airplanes taking off from the local airport. Despite being able to provide every form of ID known to man, as well as the contact information for his teacher who knew he was doing the project, they continually claimed that they had checked out his story and found him to be a liar. They held him for four hours before releasing him. I thought, as he told me this, that there must have been some mistake, until his teacher confirmed that he had never been contacted about it.
Okay, so that's the TSA, they're idiots, fine. But that story didn't make headlines, and that was much closer to 9/11, when the fear was more substantial. This one did make headlines, and it doesn't paint the authorities in a good light. Normally, terror suspect articles make world headlines and are packed with the evidence against the suspects, something to make it at least look like they found a real terrorist for once, something to reinforce the protector-hero image.
This story, on the other hand, paints the police as tyrants, for which authorities around the world will be increasingly despised and feared. Very few will read this article and feel more safe, and many will be afraid to decry it too publicly for fear that they might be next. Taken as it's written, therefore, the effect of this article is to create tyranny by way of perception, even though the event itself is not extraordinary.
So the question is - how did it get to us? The event happened, fine, but how did it get to the news room floor, and what transformation did it undergo in becoming this article? Who wants us to be scared? The only people I can think of are tyrants, and people who are very afraid of tyrants. Which one is acting in this case?
If I say "I'm going to blow up the world!!!" does that make it a real possibility?
I'm a physicist working on the LHC so that's not probably something it would be sensible for me to say (especially with a 'muhahahaha' afterwards! ;-). Of course the problem is NOT that is it a real possibility but that there are some idiots who THINK that it is a real possibility who would then make a lot of unnecessary trouble. However you would have thought that a tough questioning session by the police and the THREAT of arrest for a repeat incident might be enough to get the message across that they take this seriously (as they should!). Arresting the guy, charging him and have him lose his job (possibly) is ridiculous overkill.
What specific acts of terrorism are you thinking of here?
who the hell is supposed to know the difference between a joke and serious intent? the subject is serious. no one should be joking about it. anyone "joking" about bombing an airplane in an airport is a complete moron or a genuine terrorist or a crazy person. in all 3 cases, the police SHOULD show up. no one can tell the difference between the 3 people with a magic wand genius
please try to make some fucking sense
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seems like a case of endangering others (clear and present danger) and wasting public resources. Those cops could have been doing other things. Having lived in a place where bomb threats happened and bombs actually happened... i see no reason this dick should be treated nicely. Under US law, he committed a crime. Defending this asshat is misguided at best. If i were AQ, this would be my new tactic. "I'm in yr arprt, bmb'n yr *$! LoL". Tweet that over and over until they stop responding... them "KA-BOOM".
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Liberals are not on the political left!
Liberals are the extreme opposite of fascists and have just about nothing in common with socialists.
Liberals have a lot in common with conservatives and libertarians in the modern day world but are different from both as they're not as focused on small government as the libertarians and not as focused on tradition as the conservatives yet they share most of the general sentiments of both.
Some liberals tend towards minarchism (which is usually thought of as a kind of libertarianism) but not everybody.
Except in the US where up is down and backwards at the same time. Go read up on what liberalism (otherwise known as "classical liberalism" in the US) is. Actual real liberals in the US would have tended to vote for the Republicans or maybe just possibly the big-L Libertarians but not the Democrats except for a possible exception for Blue Dog Democrats, right now real liberals don't really have anyone that represents them politically in the US. (JFK was fairly close to being a liberal and Bush Jr. was very close to being a liberal while for example Ted Kennedy was a statist, possibly a socialist, most likely a de facto fascist).
Canada gets it right, Australia gets it right, Europe gets it right, the US gets it wrong.
Maybe Turkey gets it wrong too however I have never heard the current Turkish government being described as "liberal" instead I've heard them being described as "moderately" islamic, that's about as far from liberalism as fascists.
Btw to the parent poster it's good to know there are sensible homosexuals in your country that realize who advocate their death, sounds like you need to wake up and look at the world for what it is. In my country the immigrants themselves including muslim immigrants are joining the "far right" because they're afraid of islamist immigrants (and I know this is slowly happening in many Western European countries).
And on the so-called "far right" (which is actually kind of fitting because fascism and national socialism belongs on the far left) you'll find the true liberals in most of Europe, we want the gays and we want the immigrants that cherish western freedoms and we happily welcome them.
We can still peacefully avoid the kind of large scale bloodshed in Europe where everybody including the whole world loses, use your votes for freedom and vote conservative, libertarian, liberal, nationalist (but not national socialist), or anti-EU (but not leftist).
But above all do not vote for the politicians and parties that live in denial, do not vote for the established "elite", vote for small parties if you have to and they'll become big over time.
The guy's an asshole and sould expect to get the book thrown at him. Just because he's a Twitter asshole doesn't make it less of a crime
You point out correctly that revolution (and government in general) only succeeds when it has the support, or at least the tolerance, of the vast majority of the people. Now... think about this for a minute. How many people want to live in a "war-torn" country? How many people want to live in fear of arbitrary violence? How many people want to be around violence of any kind? How people *respect* those who use violence as a means of social change?
The answer is "very few". Which is why a government generally has to be rotten from the inside for a revolution to succeed, and it's very difficult for a violent revolution to overtake a competent, powerful government. People just don't want to deal with that much violence and aren't willing to put up with the level of violence that would be required. On the other hand, most people respect non-violent means, and non-violence doesn't cause anything like the alienation that violence does. Properly done, in a non-violent revolution the "revolutionary" looks sane and reasonable and the government looks like bloody-handed thugs. The net effect is that the people decide that they'd rather be governed by the revolutionary.
Think about it... would you *really* want to be governed by the IRA? Or Al Quaida? Or the Basque Separatists? Or the Nation of Islam? On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I could reasonably handle Gandhi or Martin Luther King. So, at some point during the conflict, people end up deciding that the "new" government is what they want. And that's when the revolution starts to grow and win.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1