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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?"
Stop and use your head. Consider the result, if just once, they don't evacuate and something horrible happens.
Now you understand the problem.
This "desensitization" theory is something I keep hearing, and it's absolutely silly. Ridiculous.
You're saying that someone who wants to maximize impact by catching people off-guard would:
1. Sensitize people to a potential threat
2. Work for a long time to then re-desensitize them to said threat
3. Act.
It seems the net result would be exactly the same if one skipped straight to step 3 without making any threats in the first place.
Actually, some do. The IRA was famous for telling people where their bombs were going to be. Real bombs, too. It achieves an awful lot of terror with less blood on your hands: they know that the bomb could have gone off. As long as there's some blood on your hands, your opponents know that you're willing to do it. Most of the terror, far less mess.
The goal of terrorism is to make people so upset that they give in to your demands. In this case, it may be simply to make people upset. It's working very well.
Why would a real bomber warn anyone?
Many terrorist groups routinely send bomb warnings when they have planted a bomb. During the troubles in Northern Ireland, the practice was so common that the IRA and the police had recognised code words they could use so that the police would know it was a real bomb rather than a hoax call.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
You want to know how to destroy a school - stop responding to any threats, credible or not. If a real bomb does go off, the school will never survive.
The real threat seems to be the lawyers.
I believe he is right. If someone wants to bomb, they will not warn you, they will just do it.
Wrong. The IRA routinely planted actual bombs AND reported them, because it caused just as much fear and disruption and didn't turn as many people away from them.
True, if you get supercrafty its going to be hard to track you. But if you are supercrafty 250 times, you are going to leave the unmistakeable trail of your own demise. Its just fine if you want to play with your exgf, but the feds got money, power, and nasty fking claws.
There's another option here. Think, what if you were a bomber who wanted to maximize the terror you could cause? How about get a good voice scrambler and an anonymous email account and then call and email in bomb threats through several layers of proxies, TOR, etc. They evacuate buildings, cause fear, lots of inconvenience. Keep sending the threats, just keep doing it over and over, more frequently, relentlessly, until they end up with no choice but to ignore you, after incalculable time and expense on the fake threats. Maybe for fear of liability for NOT evacuating for threats, they will go to extremes, but just keep sending them until they're disrupting half the class schedule if they have to... make them cancel major sporting events, whatever it takes to make your threats impossible NOT to ignore. THEN, once they're ignoring you, you actually blow some people up exactly when and where you called in a threat.
Then start up with the threats again, and now what do they do?
The idea that a real bomber won't call in the threat to maximize impact isn't valid, because this scenario involves calling in the threat, and maximizes fear over a random non-reported explosion.
For very few actual bombs, you will cause much more fear and inconvenience this way.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
While my Mum was still at school in Belfast, they were getting daily/weekly bomb threats for a quite a while. The headmaster then declared that any time lost due to bomb scares would be made up at the end of term over summer. The bomb threats stopped immediately...