| ▲ | mikeocool 6 hours ago |
| > a flight attendant told passengers over the PA system that they "must turn off Bluetooth immediately," or else the aircraft would have to turn around. So if the person just takes back their bomb threat everything is ok? Or did they think the terrorist labeled their Bluetooth bomb “bomb” and this would disable it? |
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| ▲ | thih9 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I guess they assumed there were two scenarios: 1. It was unintentional; someone had a bluetooth device called BOMB for some reason that made sense before boarding the plane. They would turn it off. 2. It was intentional; someone wanted to send a warning and chose this channel - they would leave the device on. |
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| ▲ | stefan_ 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 3. The level of tech illiteracy combined with airplane security theater is an affront to all thinking people. | | |
| ▲ | kube-system 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | 4. A normal level of risk aversion in one of the most risk averse industries If airlines ignored every threat that was “probably not” a real threat, they’d ignore all of them. It’s better to inconvenience a few thousand passengers than it is to kill a few hundred. | | |
| ▲ | Haven880 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | How many threats did actually turn out to be real to date? I couldn't find this being published. But how many threats did happen without any indication (only after the perpetrators tell). I can easily recalled maybe 3-4 incidents. So the issue here is do knowing threats really help? | |
| ▲ | basilikum 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There was literally no threat. | |
| ▲ | Skunkleton an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | In the simplest possible terms: this is total bullshit security theatre. At no point has there ever been a bomb or even a bomb threat carried out via usb device names. There is absolutely no reason to even look at the names of Bluetooth devices on a flight. |
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| ▲ | jychang 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It wasn't a bomb threat: https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake... |
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| ▲ | lazide an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apparently it wasn’t a threat - a kid had a commercial Bluetooth speaker that names itself as ‘bomb’. No one on the plane did anything intentionally. |
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| ▲ | root-parent 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | jmisavage 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is wildly inaccurate to the point of being dangerous advice. The goal during a bomb threat call is generally not to challenge, mock, or provoke the caller into a reaction. It is to keep the caller talking for as long as possible and gather information that could help assess the threat and assist law enforcement or security. There is no reliable rule that says a "real terrorist" will hang up if laughed at or that a hoax caller will stay on the line. People making threats behave in many different ways and simplistic tests like this are not a dependable way to determine whether a threat is real. | | |
| ▲ | PearlRiver 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You are supposed to take every threat as real. Which is also why calling in a fake threat is considered a big federal crime to deter clowns. | |
| ▲ | root-parent 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] |
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| ▲ | jamwil 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I was talking about this with someone the other day… How many real terrorism threats have been preceded by the terrorist telegraphing their intentions with a phone call beforehand? My prior is that this number is essentially 0 and we should ignore bomb threats as a society. | | |
| ▲ | echoangle 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Here's one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omagh_bombing Two: https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/nye/pr/2012/2012nov08.h... Three (not sure if the caller was the one planting the bomb here): https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/01/bomb-aimed-a... Probably not super common but it does happen from time to time.
And imagine ignoring a bomb threat and then it's real, you probably would not want to be responsible for that. | |
| ▲ | robrain 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The IRA (Irish terrorists, for Americans confused at the acronym, or maybe confused at what the IRA did) did occasionally phone warnings and occasionally the information was accurate. Code words were used to authenticate the threat. | | |
| ▲ | roryirvine 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | The PIRA actually do seem to have intended to give accurate warnings when they planted bombs, in Belfast at least. There were inevitably cases when the information was garbled or misunderstood but the use of codewords & the practice of delivering the warnings to a known set of media outlets was at least an attempt to minimise these. The downside was that the vast majority of warnings were hoaxes - bomb scares were dozens of times more common than actual bombs. The other main groups - INLA, UVF, and UFF/UDA also got in on the hoax game, but didn't often do real bombs (and didn't always give proper warnings when they did - see the UVF's Dublin & Monaghan bombings for a particularly grim example). But real bombs were just common enough that the hoaxes from whatever source had to be taken seriously and so they caused huge amounts of disruption, probably more than anything that actually exploded. |
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| ▲ | hoppyhoppy2 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The Weather Underground often warned the targets of their bombings via phone call. (I guess their goal was to attack gov't institutions and make a political statement, not to kill lots of people.) This was in the late '60s-'70s. | |
| ▲ | SteveNuts 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Logically that probably makes sense, but it would require everyone in the chain of command agreeing to that policy, and there’s no way that would ever happen from a liability standpoint. | |
| ▲ | rndmio 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The IRA bombs in civilian areas in the uk almost always had phone calls that preceded the bombs going off. |
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