Bob CollinsBack in the day, it was relatively easy to find out who made bomb threats in our high school. Authorities would start by finding out which teachers were giving major tests or had big assignments due that day, and then pick up the usual suspects in each class and work them over until one of them confessed. They usually weren’t very bright to begin with and there was always a trail. It was a relatively fool-proof method most recently employed at Harvard in 2013 when Eldo Kim found he wasn’t ready for exam week.
“As I got closer to my last exam, I felt that I was under a huge amount of personal and academic pressure,” he said in a subsequent apology. “I had been sleep-deprived for days and was not thinking clearly. I could have gone to bed, sought help or just simply taken an exam I felt unprepared for. Instead, in the face of this anxiety and stress and blinded by the light of my ambitions, I lost sight of logic and reason. I absurdly acted in a way that put my personal priorities over the well-being of everyone else.”
But the school was shut down after authorities said the threat was “credible.” In hindsight, it wasn’t credible at all. The young man wasn’t in a position to plant a bomb at Harvard. What made it “credible”? People plant bombs to kill innocent people nowadays. Nothing more.
The chances are pretty good that the “credible threat” that got a day off for kids at Southwest High School in Minneapolis will turn out to be just as not credible as it did at Harvard, but who can blame authorities for not taking that chance?
And so they don’t, of course.
“We know today’s closure may have posed an inconvenience to some families, however we make decisions with the safety and security of our students and families in mind,” Stan Alleyne, the school district’s chief communications officer.
Bomb threats work now.
In the last few days, there have been 16 instances in which Twitter was used to make a bomb threat against an airline. Each resulted in disruption to air traffic, USA Today reported today.
“We’re seeing these new threats. In terms of the quantity of (online) threats we’re seeing now, you just haven’t seen it,” said Glen Winn, former head of security at Northwest Airlines and United Airlines and an instructor at the University of Southern California School of Aviation Safety and Security.
At least 10 threats were made Monday, some by hacker-type accounts. One led to a JetBlue flight from Boston to Palm Beach being returned to the gate before takeoff. The flight was canceled. The plane was searched and luggage rescreened; nothing hazardous was found.
That followed a weekend of Twitter bomb threats against flights. Sunday, one commercial flight was diverted, and two others were evacuated. Saturday in Atlanta, two flights in the air were escorted to their landings by military F-16 fighter jets after bomb threats were tweeted.
A Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Orlando was diverted to Dallas on Sunday after a bomb threat was reportedly made via Twitter.
In Seattle, two arriving flights — a JetBlue flight from Long Beach, Calif., and a regional SkyWest jet from Phoenix — were evacuated away from other aircraft after they landed Sunday. “We’re still assessing the online threats,” said Ayn Dietrick-Williams, spokeswoman for the Seattle FBI office.
A former head of security for Northwest Airlines says in the history of aviation sabotage, there’s never been a case in which a warning was provided ahead of time.
SchoolSafety.org identifies three criteria for establishing credibility.
Three common questions to begin assessing school threats can include:
What is the motivation of the threat maker and credibility of the threat?
Could the threat maker have the information on how to carry out the threat (such as information on how to make bombs or homemade weapons, for example)?
Could the threat maker have access to the tools, and the capability, to carry out the threat?Today, we know the answers to questions two and three could easily be, “Yes.” Information on how to carry out many threats is as accessible as a few strokes on a keyboard to search the Internet. The tools to carry out the threat can be as close as the local hardware, discount or other home supply store.
So educators and safety officials are often left focusing on the first question: What is the motivation of the threat maker and credibility of the threat? Unfortunately, this requires assessing human behavior and making a judgment call accordingly, which is not an easy task for even the most skilled criminologist, psychologist, psychiatrist or other student of human behavior.
Southwest will reopen on Thursday unless the “copycat” syndrome strikes. That was less a possibility in the old days, too, because media had a policy of not putting bomb threat stories on the air or in the paper; it just encouraged more bomb threats.
Those days are over, too.
