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."
"Police in arrest man for Joke on Bomb-Thread Joke on Twitter."
I don't think the most troubling part of what happened is that this guy didn't try to ensure his anonimity.
He didn't intend to make a bombthreat, hell, he didn't even make one. The fact that all hell breaks loose over something silly as this shows that the terrorists have won. Western society lives in fear, whether you like it or not.
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.
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
Honestly, I'm not sure which side I'm on. The guy makes a joke on twitter, which is public and made for raw information without context. It is akin to write a tag saying the same thing in front of the airport. It is normal for police to investigate, I really don't blame them there. They quickly saw there was nothing to it. I prefer to criticize the airport (who banned the man for life) and his company which suspended him for a lack of common sense.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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 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.
Frankly this is no different to making a threat against someone's life or any other kind of threat that would entail crime.
But he didn't threaten anyone, unless you have the reading comprehension of a child and cannot see a joke when one is presented to you.... oh yeah, this is the same police that recently had to lower their testing pass mark as they weren't getting enough recruits. Looks like that policy's working!
The guy from TFA made the mistake of saying something that allowed the pigs to use powers that if they don't use, they might lose!
"Can't have that training be wasted" said police PR spokesman H. Himmler.
Car analogies break down.
You seem to be confusing the UK with somewhere that has guaranteed and protected rights. And if you were drunk and shouted "I'm going to kill you", you'd almost certainly be charged with a Public Order offence if the target made a complaint against you.
Right. Because we all know, everyone is serious on the internet.
Nobody should be arrested because the authorities don't have a sense of humor.
Well, don't be so lightly touched man, I'm from the Netherlands, we don't have a D.A. here either, but I can't be arsed to look up how exactly law is upheld in every country I make a comment on, and how court is ran. I sometimes watch Law & Order, so I know the term D.A. to be someone working for "the people" aka, the government, and is the one responsible to provide the proof that suspect John Doe is the actual person to have committed the crime. You probably have something similar over there, perhaps a person, perhaps a committee, or whatever, I don't care, but something or someone has to present the evidence in court. Fill in the blanks.
Manuals are your last resort only
It is for him.
Slashdot needs a "Troll +1" mod, so people can learn to recognize such wonderful red herring mastery.
I think you're missing the point. If he knew this would happen, he probably wouldn't've done it at all. It was just him venting in a moment of frustration. How the police responded so quickly is beyond me, though...
Firstly, it implies that the fuzz over in the UK are listening pretty much non stop to Twitter to be able to react so quickly.
Or somebody who read the tweet reported it. In fact, from the Telegraph areticle (linked from the RA), police acted on "a tip-off from a member of the public".
Secondly, it implies that they are showing utterly no concept of applying common sense to what they do when they take what is clearly that sort of vent "oh fuck it, I am so sick of this weather!". Seriously guys, use your heads, can anyone really be that pissed at the WEATHER that they blow something up? I doubt it. I really fucking doubt it.
Can any normal person? I agree. Are there psychos out there who just might? Sadly, yes. And "You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!" does sound rather like a psycho. Britain has been the subject of extended terror campaigns, and I suspect that the British police are more familiar with what a genuine terror threat sounds like than the average /. reader. Unfortunately any measurement system is going to suffer type 1 errors (I hope innocence is still the null hypothesis). What matters is how they're dealt with if they're subsequently identified. That's not yet the case here: "He has been bailed pending further investigations." The police are not yet convinced if it was a joke, or if it was whether it was a harmless one (too many people think that hoaxing the emergency services is a "joke"; I expect that some think that real bomb hoaxes are), and it has not yet been tested by a court (as it should be if reasonable doubt remains). The real test will come if it does all turn out to be a misunderstanding. Wil he just be taken on one side and told not to be such an asshole (er, sorry, "will it be explained to him that the police need to investigate such matters, because after all, how would it have been if the threat had been real and he had carried it out? It would be helpful if he kept that in mind in future"), or will things like the airport ban remain in place?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
But then coded phone call AFTER the attack would have been enough. But I guess doing that BEFORE the bombs exploded had two beneficial (for the terrorists!) effects:
1) Increase Panic, spread fear. (And bring more "military" targets closer to the bomb)
2) Actually save "civilians" or at least give the terroists themselves the illusion of trying to save civilians.
From what I remember from interviews and documentaries I saw about that, they had the self-image of an army in a war against another gouvernment and its military, and to a lesser extent against the people of that country.
And don't forget the image. Thats even important to terrorists. It's much easier to convince an unsuspecting young guy when you can say "He, we're the good guys! We're at war, but we try to avoid civilian casualties". And it may help yourself to justify your feelings of guilt.
bickerdyke
For a long while, the police in the UK has been set targets for number of arrests/convictions, number of crimes within certain categories and other such targets.
The natural change of the behaviour of the police officers as a followup of these targets was:
- The police started arresting people for things that previously were dealth with informally, for example, if a kid throws a stone and breaks a glass window he can now end in court: in the past, the local copper would typically have a serious talk with him, take him to his parents, get them to pay for repairs and that was it.
- The police started pushing people to accept "Cautions" which are a formal admission of guild for minor crimes which does not require going to Court: this does create a Criminal Record for a person which might very well ruin their lives (for example, a Nursing Student got one of those because she was drunk and misbehaving, which resulted in her not being able to find any work as a nurse since she now had a criminal record).
- The police started misreporting crimes (as being in a less serious category) or even avoiding reporting them altogether (I know of a at least one case where a bag was snatched from a baby-buggy which was left unattended and the police refused to file the case because "nobody saw the bag being taken from the baby-buggy, so how do we know you didn't lost it").
At the same time, the increased bureaucratic overhead of keeping track of all those targets meant more time behind the desk and less time on the beat of the cops.
This resulted in people loosing trust in the Police. The familiar, well-liked and trusted local "bob" (the police officer that does the rounds in a neighbourhood) that knew and was known by the people in his beat (usually having a "fair but firm" image) was replaced by a group of guys in uniform which don't know you and you don't know them, with most people not wanting to interact with unless they really have to (they way the law is now, they can pretty much arrest you for not being properly polite). The cops themselfs have become distant and distrusting in reaction - they adopted a Us vs Them mentality.
The cops were taken out of the community and the community was taken out of the cops.
Under this environment, is hardly surprising that most good people don't want to join the Police Force anymore: while
in the past police officers were respected and trusted as wise users of the power they had (mostly prefering persuasion rather than force), nowadays they're mostly feared, distrusted and disliked.
The sad bit is that the old soft target of "making people fell safe" was much better than whatever hard targets they set for the police nowadays.
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?
He doesn't deserve to get anything. A quote from the article: "On 13 January, after apparently receiving a tip-off from a member of the public, police arrived at Mr Chambers' office...I had to explain Twitter to them in its entirety because they'd never heard of it." So now there's a new recipe to be an asshole. Find any piece of written evidence of someone you hate that they "intend" to do ANYTHING harmful, and mail it to the police. Then anonymously report it and watch the police go ape-shit.
Help fight spam
Great, just great.
First in the US we have a guy whose father turned him in and who was on several other countries no-fly-list and yet he's able to board an airplane and try to set off a bomb. Now we have a guy who made only one remark and the authorities are all over him.
These 2 items are related by the failure of authorities to see the whole picture. In the Christmas day bomber case they didn't put the evidence together to realize he was a threat. In twitter-threat case they over-reacted to only one piece of evidence.
I would hope that if authorities looked at the entire picture in both cases the proper course of action would have been self evident. So why aren't authorities looking at the WHOLE PICTURE before reacting?