So now if you want to have some yuks, just head on down to your local Mickey D’s with a laptop, glom onto their WiFi, and have at it!
You don’t even have to be Al Queda! Just some kid with a test you didn’t study for.
Zero chance they catch this guy. We shit our pants in this country for nothing. They called the threat “credible”. So any bozo that calls a radio station and sends an e-mail is now “credible”! Good to know. Fucking morons.
We’ve been having a bit of an epidemic in Des Moines this month with kids calling in fake bomb threats to their schools. I think 6 in November alone.
If they are convicted, one has the chance to serve up to 10 years in prison. Sounds like they have 2-3 suspects on a couple of others too.
But if somebody uses a laptop at one of the many free WiFi hotspots, and one of the many free websites that let you make phone calls, seems like a crime that would be pretty hard to solve. This is probably just some schoolkids, but if someone really wanted to disrupt this country, you could make a lot of trouble pretty easily. Assuming, of course, that the authorities respond to all such incidents. Seems like they overreacted down in Florida.
Nothing new. Kids called in fake bomb threats from pay phones at my high school on a regular basis.
Yeah, but with a pay phone, the call might be traced to the location, witnesses could be questioned, fingerprints taken, etc.
Now, you can do it pretty much with the assurance of perfect anonymity. Grab yourself a Hotmail account, sign up with an outfit like this, and you are all set to terrorize the nation! Or we could just realize that 99.999999% of bomb threats are bogus, and that real bombers don’t screw around with e-mails and phone calls and just blow you the fuck up.
And if they didn’t take the threat seriously, and a bunch of kids were killed…
When is the last time someone blew up a school in this country? Oh, that’s right, it’s never happened. What if someone puts poison in the Halloween candy? Oh, right, that’s never happened either. We are a country of Nancys, worried shitless about stuff that never happens.
Agreed. I would still hate to be the one making the call and getting it wrong.
“Jeez, we get 3 of these a month. Who would have thought this one was actually real? Sorry about the 300 kids who were killed.”
Not that it would support needless paranoia, but, strictly speaking, “never” is a bit too strong…
Ok, so once in the history of the republic it did happen. I wonder if the guy called in a threat? Or maybe just sent an e-mail! 
The Columbine shooters also had bombs, but they failed to detonate.
Did they call in a threat?
Also, in the Cokeville Elementary hostage crisis the hostage takers were armed with a gasoline bomb.
This guy set pipe bombs off at his school.
This isn’t to mention the numerous cases where students or adults were found before bombing the school.
Wow, wasn’t aware of those incidents. Again, were threats called in? I doubt it.
You’re grossly overestimating what the police could/would do.
My high school gets a bomb threat (got about one or two a year, actually). They figure out it was called in from the 7-11 down the street. If they take the time to go fingerprint the phone, they’ll get a bunch of fingerprints, which, if they can be identified, will reveal that…someone has used the public pay phone. They go back the next day and ask the day-shift clerk if he was working yesterday. “Yeah.” They ask if he saw anyone using the pay phone around 10 AM. “I dunno, a lot of people use the phone, I don’t pay attention.”
And since the school has not in fact blown up, and all the detection dog found was the jacket some kid was wearing when he went hunting over the weekend and apparently has some traces of gunpowder on it, there’s not a lot of motivation to further dedicate police resources to the case.
The answer of course is for all public pay phones to have a [del]telescreen[/del] security camera built in, so their use can be monitored.
During my junior year in high school in the late 90’s, we spent a good two months averaging one bomb scare a week (oddly, they were usually Wednesdays). It got to the point that most teachers were telling their students to take textbooks/notebooks out with them and would continue to teach (as best they could) on the football field or wherever the evacuation point was.
I learned later the first few were called into the high school’s main line via the pay phone down by the gymnasiums (opposite side of the school). The perpetrator of the first couple didn’t get caught, if I’m recalling correctly. Though, to Lumpy’s point, this was the main reason we got a video security system installed pretty quickly that summer.
However, after the first couple though, the other morons in the school who thought this was funny and wanted to enjoy another afternoon in the sunshine started to use cell phones and other phones that were a lot more traceable. They got caught.
The bottom line was that I really don’t think anyone thought the threats were “credible”, but the administration didn’t really want to gamble with 1000 students + another couple hundred faculty and staff … you know, just in case this one wasn’t a prank.
(PS - I don’t think they ever found anything remotely bomb-like when the police and K-9 units showed up)
Did you even read your own damn link? I bet not. Let me quote it for you:
The article doesn’t mention WiFi or a bomb; you just made that crap up. So it was not a bomb - it was a threatened shooting, and the warning was called in by a third party - not the planner, you stupid dipshit. So it was a threatened shooting and it was called in by someone who wasn’t claiming to be the shooter. It may very well be fake, but for the love of God, buddy, don’t make shit up.
Third party reports do avert school shootings. Read these links:
http://www.1up.com/news/potential-school-shooting-averted-xbox
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/239569?doredir=0&noredir=1
Many schools don’t even evacuate anymore. They just do a lockdown until the police and available school staff can do a security sweep. The incidents of bomb threats have actually diminished since this became policy, as there isn’t the spectacle of kids rushing out of the school and instruction being disrupted for most of the day. The people perpetrating the threat, usually students, aren’t getting the vicarious power thrill they used to.