Looking for some advice, so this isn’t GQ, I don’t think.
I got emailed by this woman on a dating site. I wasn’t too interested from her IM convos, but when she asked for my phone number, I figured I could always not answer if I don’t want to talk to her again (cell phone with caller ID), so I emailed it to her.
Sunday, she called, blew past introductions, managed to be kind of insulting, and generally turned me off enough to think that she’s not even worth practicing dating on.
BUT:
She told me that her two roommates are Muslim women, and they’ve said, “When the call comes, we’ll have to respond and take out Americans”. EEEEEEEEEK.
I don’t have a firm grip on her location. I have an email address and a town. Her number came up blocked, so I don’t have it in my phone.
Would the FBI like a tip like this? Could they even use it? What to do, what to do?
Any suspicions you have should most definitely reported. Better to be too cautious than the potential alternative. The FBI has an online form you can fill out.
We fairly regularly get tech support questions from “enemy” nations regarding applications of the Computer Aided Engineer software we support. (Export laws prevent the software from being legally sold to these nations to begin with. Plus we only support Arizona and New Mexico anyway.) These questions get forwarded to the FBI, regardless of how harmless the question may seem.
I also say yes, and that’s a great link Strainger provided. This may just be B.S. but it may not. Think how bad you’d feel if something bad came from them and you realize you could have stopped.
Plus if you do, you’ll get Kudos from me! Everyone loves my homemade kudos!
Yes, please make accusations against people in an unknown place, whom you’ve never met, seen or heard (and who may not even exist), based on second-hand information from someone you don’t know. We need as many of these as possible if we ever hope to be safe from the enemy.
Ya know, there is paranoia, and there’s pointing out an idiot. I think this falls more into the pointing out an idiot camp, and I see no harm in it.
The woman sounds like an idiot that wants to glorify her pathetic little lot in life, but this:
kinda falls from harmless BS to a veiled threat against civilians. It’s kinda like the drunken idiot on the airplane who makes a bomb threat. Just because the guy is a drunken idiot, doesn’t mean you can dismiss the threat.
It’s not an accusation, it’s a “Hey, you guys might want to check this out.” Better safe than sorry, and all that. The Feds are trained to filter out the noise from the signal. Civilians generally aren’t.
Ok, but check what out? A vague statement that may or may not have been said by people you’ve never met, whose existence is based only on the word of someone else you’ve never met, and whose location is unknown.
I mean really, the “you’re a nice person so I’ll return the favor by giving you a warning: stay out of the subways on August 13” story is more credible sounding.
I’m just hearing a chain being yanked here, big time. What I haven’t decided is whether the chain is online woman’s, Cardinal’s or ours.
[QUOTE=Sublight]
Ok, but check what out? A vague statement that may or may not have been said by people you’ve never met, whose existence is based only on the word of someone else you’ve never met, and whose location is unknown.
[QUOTE]
Sounds a bit like the PDB… though that was a little more obvious.
(not a Bush bash, just pointing out we gotta pay attention when little things that might be something but probably arn’t come up)
Bad wording on my part. I should’ve said something like, “Hey, y’all might be interested in this.” Email address and a town isn’t much, but it’s a starting point, and may tie in with other information they have. Then again, they could decide that it’s nothing to worry about or that it’s not enough to do anything with. Either way, it’s better to err toward vigilance and leave the decisions to the professionals. An innocuous sounding email from a student in Tehran asking about finite element analysis still gets forwarded to the Feds, per their request, although I don’t know if anything has ever become of it.
Thanks for the assumption that I would bother to come here, me, a member whose join date is April 1999, to post some almost-mundanity to yank the chains of other members.
Since I once reported informations (to a foreign country police, no less) about a crime which had been mentionned to me on the internet, and which turned out to be for real despite my doubts and hesitations, I would certainly advise you to do the same and report the infos you have. It won’t hurt anybody if it isn’t true, anyway (well…at least, so I hope…given that being suspected of being involved in terrorism activities, even wrongly, could lead to some serious problems nowadays).
That’s the job of the police, or FBI, or whoever else is in charge, to take care of finding about that, assuming they think it’s worth the trouble (and they’re the best placed to know whether it’s worth it or not).
:rolleyes:
Even before 9/11, there was too much ‘noise’ in the intelligence system for anything useful to be filtered out. Do you really think that it helps now, for any suspicious comments made by a Muslim/Arab/brown-person/anyone-else-suspicious to be reported? They’d need half the population of America, just to man the phones.
Besides, I wouldn’t have the slightest faith in the system to not misinterpret something that was actually not said with any meaning.
