Slashdot Mirror
University of Pittsburgh Deluged With Internet Bomb Threats
An anonymous reader writes "The University of Pittsburgh has been plagued with 78 bomb threats (and counting) since February 14. It started low-tech, with handwritten notes, but has progressed to anonymous emails. Nearly every campus building has been a target. The program suspected is anonymous mailer Mixmaster. The university has been evacuating each building when threats come in (day or night), and police departments from around Allegheny County have offered assistance with clearing each building floor by floor with bomb sniffing dogs. There is a popular tracking blog set up by a student as well as a growing Reddit community. Is there any foreseeable defense (forensic or socially engineered) to a situation like this?"
Desensitization to what? Why would a real bomber warn anyone? I'm wondering... in the whole country, how many bomb threats actually turned out to be real? Have there even been any real ones? At some point we just have to say this is ridiculous and ignore them.
Absolutely not. Surprisingly enough, most people aren't all that excited about murdering dozens or hundreds of innocents. Some will do so with enough provocation, and you get the odd psychopath who really is hell-bent on killing, but for the most part the idea of a "terrorist" is to spread "terror", not outright kill people. Killing people spreads terror to be sure, but there are other ways to do so that don't involve destroying your own soul (or not so much of it, at least.)
With your 3-step program, the goal step is actually step 2 -- a drawn out period of time when your target is afraid of you without you having to do much to incite the fear. Only after you've dragged out step 2 as long as you can possibly manage are you forced to move on to step 3 and reset the cycle.
The entire world, primarily the US, are mired somewhere in the middle of step 2 still after 9/11. There's no reason for terrorist cells to risk attacking the US again until Homeland Security finally runs out of new ways to disrupt American life. The terrorists can just sit back and laugh as internally you all work yourselves into a paranoid frenzy, and externally you run around starting wars with random nations whose primarily link to terrorism is a shared religious background.