For those that don’t know, since February 13th, the University of Pittsburgh has received over 60 bomb threats, with over 50 of them in April alone.
I have no connection to Pittsburgh, I just read about this on another forum and news sites, and I was surprised there wasn’t a thread here about it.
I mean…what the fucking fuck?! Why would someone do this? I would think the fun of “crying wolf” would have worn off by now…but maybe not, since they have to take each one seriously and still do a whole evacuation and sweep every time one is called/emailed in.
I can’t imagine what it’s like for students, faculty, and staff…dorms getting threats in the middle of the night, so you don’t get sleep…getting threats during classes, so you miss essentially whole weeks worth of material, and the ever growing fear that whoever is doing this might one day actually have a bomb, and was just using the fake threats to try and bring everyone’s guard down.
What’s interesting is that a NY man was arrested yesterday, but it doesn’t look like he’s a suspect for these bomb threats, but only slightly related threats.
And that wouldn’t explain things like threats to dorms in the middle of the night, like the one we got last night.
I’m not a Pitt faculty member or student, but Mr. Neville is. I can tell you, it well and truly sucks. He gets phone calls all the time about new bomb threats, and then gets another call when they’ve checked the building and determined (yet again) that there is no bomb. People are having to show Pitt IDs to get into a lot of campus buildings. This is a problem when they do something like have joint colloquia with CMU (which they do). People can’t bring backpacks into a lot of buildings.
I cannot WAIT until they catch the evil goat-fucker who is doing this. I’m sure this is a popular sentiment around here right now.
I have a bunch of friends who are students at Pitt. They’re all rightfully pissed off and sick of this. Some of them have been letting underclassmen friends stay in their apartments with them for the time being so they can avoid the dorm evacuations.
Well, that depends on if the University grades on the curve. If it does, then making sure other students get a bad nights sleep will bump up your own grades.
I lived in an apartment complex that acquired a pyromaniac. He spent a couple of weeks causing fire alarms until people started ignoring that. Then he set fire to the mail boxes.
It may be a good thing that people are still reacting to this jerk.
If I were a terrorist, this is the kind of tactic I would use to disrupt things. I would expect that the perpetrators, when caught, will face terrorism-related charges.
Here at the other end of the state, there’s been a huge rash of tire-slashings. Some moron – now, apparently, morons, including copy-cats – go down the street in the middle of the night and slash one to four tires on each car in a line of a dozen or so.
Random assholish behavior that takes on a life of its own.
Could there be any link between all this and the NHL playoffs? My expectations of Flyers fans are kind of low… though this is much worse than even I would assume! The tire-slashing might be related to the playoffs, though.
It started back in February, so almost certainly not…plus, wouldn’t someone trying to do some kind of Flyers-Penguins rivalry “thing” make threats to other Pittsburgh locations? This is all centered on University of Pittsburgh, with IIRC the only non UoP building being threatened was a Starbucks that on/near campus.
And one of the initial theories was some student who just forgot to study for a mid-term, or write a paper, but now that’s obviously not the case. The sheer number of threats, as well as the fact that so many different buildings are “targeted”, including dorms, make it clear it’s just someone who wants to cause chaos.
Some of the earlier threats were actually bathroom graffiti, too, so it’s almost certainly someone who does go to school or work there, but it’s going to be hard to catch them. It’s trivially easy to send anonymous emails, You don’t even have to be tech savvy. And at this point, there’s so many of them that who knows how many copycats there might be. That would explain why it went from just a few each week to several threats a day…nation news sites picked up the story, so now every 14-year old member of Anonymous who thinks he’s a total “haxor” is using an email remailer and sending threats.
Honestly, the only way to catch whoever is doing this, whether it’s one person or several, is if they finally break down and try to brag about it to someone.