4 ms·

This is pretty exploitable though. Someone could just spam the police with fake reports to waste their resources. I remember that once someone reported a bomb o

This is pretty exploitable though. Someone could just spam the police with fake reports to waste their resources. I remember that once someone reported a bomb on a railway station - but he didn't say which railway station, so they closed and search all of them (in a 10 mil country), lol.

eeZah7Ux 10y ago
Millions of innocent people are at risk of having their home invaded, being beaten, shot, even killed by this small private army after a prank phone call and you talk about wasting resources? In various other countries half of the swat company would be in prison after this.
Cthulhu_ 10y ago
I remember that happened not too long ago, lots of schools getting fake bomb threats. The problem is that you can't ignore the threat, just in case one of them is correct. That's why I think terrorism isn't nearly as big a problem as people claim it to be. It's relatively simple to create bombs; a malicious actor could first bomb a lot of places already, but also send bomb threats for weeks on end until nobody believes them anymore, then do the real thing. So IMO, either terrorism isn't that big a deal, OR, all of the security measures and secret services are actually working and defusing (ha) the situations before they can act; the only recent terrorist attacks were ad-hoc things (grabbing a truck and driving through people) or from unexpected angles (the occasional school shooting).
- vidarh 10y ago
  Frankly, terrorism both isn't that big a deal and they're clearly not particularly smart. If it was a big deal and they were smart, there'd be a lot of escalating fear by combining lots of fake threats with a certain, low, proportion of actual attacks: Enough attacks that every threat causes fear and contributes to a siege mentality, and exploiting fake threats as a threat multiplier. I think part of the reason we're not seeing that is that a large proportion of the attacks we see are not the work of terrorist "masterminds" pulling strings, but mentally unhinged people who decide tying their murder-suicide to a political cause makes it "mean something". Because it'd be easy to multiply the fear in various ways if they were planning this out properly.

eeZah7Ux 10y ago

Millions of innocent people are at risk of having their home invaded, being beaten, shot, even killed by this small private army after a prank phone call and you talk about wasting resources? In various other countries half of the swat company would be in prison after this.

Cthulhu_ 10y ago

I remember that happened not too long ago, lots of schools getting fake bomb threats. The problem is that you can't ignore the threat, just in case one of them is correct. That's why I think terrorism isn't nearly as big a problem as people claim it to be. It's relatively simple to create bombs; a malicious actor could first bomb a lot of places already, but also send bomb threats for weeks on end until nobody believes them anymore, then do the real thing. So IMO, either terrorism isn't that big a deal, OR, all of the security measures and secret services are actually working and defusing (ha) the situations before they can act; the only recent terrorist attacks were ad-hoc things (grabbing a truck and driving through people) or from unexpected angles (the occasional school shooting).

vidarh 10y ago
Frankly, terrorism both isn't that big a deal and they're clearly not particularly smart. If it was a big deal and they were smart, there'd be a lot of escalating fear by combining lots of fake threats with a certain, low, proportion of actual attacks: Enough attacks that every threat causes fear and contributes to a siege mentality, and exploiting fake threats as a threat multiplier. I think part of the reason we're not seeing that is that a large proportion of the attacks we see are not the work of terrorist "masterminds" pulling strings, but mentally unhinged people who decide tying their murder-suicide to a political cause makes it "mean something". Because it'd be easy to multiply the fear in various ways if they were planning this out properly.