3 ms·
OTOH we occasionally read the story: Terrorist posted comments on Twitter feed before smuggling bomb onto plane. In a way, it's our fault (us being the public)
by RyanMcGreal 17y ago
OTOH we occasionally read the story: Terrorist posted comments on Twitter feed before smuggling bomb onto plane.
In a way, it's our fault (us being the public). When we demand childishly that our security systems be comprehensive and infallible enough to catch every single would-be attacker, we inevitably end up catching a bunch of false positives in the net as well.
- mquander 17y agoI have to say, I am quite skeptical of that "we." There's a small media feeding frenzy every time there's any kind of "security" hubbub, but how many normal people actually support these measures after reading accounts of them? How many would support them if the media climate were more levelheaded? Precious few, I suspect. (Based purely on my anecdata talking to friends and family, it's 0%, but I'm sure there's a minority of folks around who really do support such things.) Look at the recent "underwear bomber" escapade. There, we had much more credible circumstantial evidence pointing at the suspect in advance (e.g. the dad's phone call about him.) That is a hundred times more damning than this Twitter post -- although still not terribly damning, if you ask me -- and yet, he flew. Was there some great popular outrage that we didn't catch him in advance of his flight? Not as far as I can tell; mostly, there was a great CNN and op-ed outrage.
- garethm 17y agoI'd guess the way the Paul Chambers incident was dealt with was as harsh as it is because the underwear bomber story happened about three weeks before his tweet. No one in the chain of people he dealt with wanted to be in the position the person who said don't worry about the underwear bomber is in.