University of Pittsburgh Deluged With Internet Bomb Threats 238
Posted
by
timothy
from the other-than-that-how-was-your-valentine's-mr-moran? dept.
from the other-than-that-how-was-your-valentine's-mr-moran? dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The University of Pittsburgh has been plagued with 78 bomb threats (and counting) since February 14. It started low-tech, with handwritten notes, but has progressed to anonymous emails. Nearly every campus building has been a target. The program suspected is anonymous mailer Mixmaster. The university has been evacuating each building when threats come in (day or night), and police departments from around Allegheny County have offered assistance with clearing each building floor by floor with bomb sniffing dogs. There is a popular tracking blog set up by a student as well as a growing Reddit community. Is there any foreseeable defense (forensic or socially engineered) to a situation like this?"
Defense (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
And how do you know which ones ARE credible?
Who is to say this isn't a program of desensitisation, imagine the headlines "Bomb threat ignored, 300 dead"
Re:Which is why you don't respond to threats (Score:4, Insightful)
The IRA often called in ahead of time about bombs they had placed.
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
And who do you blame when the one you didn't take seriously is real? The Boy who Cried Wolf has two morals, you know. One for the child, to not make frivolous cries for help because someone may not come when you really need them to, and one for the adult, to treat every threat as credible, because this one could be it.
Re:Defense (Score:3, Insightful)
Easy formula: No bomb threats are credible. Actual bombings are in the vast majority of cases not preceded by threats. You might as well evacuate a building every time a squirrel shits on the lawn, because the correlation between that event and an actual bombing is about as strong as it is between bombings and bomb threats.
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop and use your head. Consider the result, if just once, they don't evacuate and something horrible happens.
Now you understand the problem.
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
This "desensitization" theory is something I keep hearing, and it's absolutely silly. Ridiculous.
You're saying that someone who wants to maximize impact by catching people off-guard would:
1. Sensitize people to a potential threat
2. Work for a long time to then re-desensitize them to said threat
3. Act.
It seems the net result would be exactly the same if one skipped straight to step 3 without making any threats in the first place.
Re:Defense (Score:3, Insightful)
People spend too much time watching movies.
Bombers don't warn people.
Pitt != Penn State (Score:2, Insightful)
University of Pittsburgh is NOT Pennsylvania State University.
And for what it's worth, why would you want to punish an entire school for what a couple administrative and athletic folks have done? There were a lot of people who went to Penn State who were revolted by Sandusky's behavior. These are people with lives, with bills to pay, with careers to start. If anything, punish the athletic program and the administration, which were both complicit in the scandal. But don't punish the professors and students who are just trying to make a living, and who did nothing to contribute to the scandal.
Power Grab (Score:4, Insightful)
Soon enough someone will catch on that they can really increase their law enforcement power/budget/detail/department, pass some laws, and maybe get rid of some civil rights because of this. If enough people get pissed off enough, they will happily trade some freedoms for making this all go away.
I'm surprised the TSA hasn't jumped in on this, setting up checkpoints and searching people anywhere they want on campus. Its the perfect situation to lend credibility to their viper program.
Re:Only if you want to ruin your administration (Score:5, Insightful)
Virginia Tech found a domestic murder case in a dorm five years ago, police came, followed standard procedure. Four hours later 30 more students and the assailant were dead after a horrific shooting spree on the opposite side of campus. Nothing like it had ever happened before on any US campus, and probably had never happened anywhere in the US in historical memory. Two of the victims parents sued the school for not notifying the student body earlier to warn them that the domestic violence case they had contained earlier that morning would erupt into the worst school shooting in US history, and won.
You want to know how to destroy a school - stop responding to any threats, credible or not. If a real bomb does go off, the school will never survive.
Re:Defense (Score:2, Insightful)
I believe he is right. If someone wants to bomb, they will not warn you, they will just do it. Evacuating on a bomb threat is different than evacuating on a bomb tip. If someone tips that there is a bomb, or that they saw something suspicious, they will usually come forward with their name, you'll be able to track them. An anonymous bomb threat is just that, it means nothing. It's as real as the end of the world scenario, and I better hope that you don't let those control your life.
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone is going to get nabbed and sadly, it might not be the person who started the chain.
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop and use your head. Consider the result, if just once, they don't evacuate and something horrible happens.
Now you understand the problem.
Okay. Someone is talented enough to make a pipe bomb, but not something to destroy an entire building.
So, they make a whole bunch of them and bury them in the grass on the quad where everyone assembles in an evacuation.
Then, after everyone evacuates and follows the rules...
Re:Only if you want to ruin your administration (Score:5, Insightful)
You want to know how to destroy a school - stop responding to any threats, credible or not. If a real bomb does go off, the school will never survive.
The real threat seems to be the lawyers.
Re:Defense (Score:3, Insightful)
Consider this: sometimes there are casualties. That's a fact of life. If something is highly unlikely, then it can probably be safely ignored.
Re:Defense (Score:4, Insightful)
Why don't you blame the perpetrator? The person who planted the bomb?
Despite common beliefs, it is actually possible to blame more than one person for the same event.
Re:Defense (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
Then start up with the threats again, and now what do they do?
The idea that a real bomber won't call in the threat to maximize impact isn't valid, because this scenario involves calling in the threat, and maximizes fear over a random non-reported explosion.
For very few actual bombs, you will cause much more fear and inconvenience this way.
Re:Defense (Score:5, Insightful)
One amateur bomb in a field full of people can kill a LOT more people that a bomb of similar effort in a building. You wouldn't have to bury it either. Just walk through the crowd and drop a duffel bag in the middle.