Bomb threat Tweets must draw serious jail time

A couple of weeks ago a pair of Noble High School students are said to have conspired together in sending a social media message saying they had planted a bomb inside the school.

The threat was deemed credible and the school was evacuated costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars, while students lost a day of schooling.

Now in the past week more than a dozen flights have been disrupted because of threats made that there were bombs planted onboard.

Airline officials and the TSA take all of these threats seriously because they tend to err on the side of caution rather than expediency.

Imagine the thoughts of one of the flight passengers who was in the air - and on Twitter - as the threat was Tweeted.

Homeland Security and other government intelligence agencies can trace the messages using the IP address of the computer or smartphone, but many of these social media messages are from kids, while some may be from Al Qaida or ISIS.

One airline security analyst said he's never come across a single bomb threat posted on social media that was deemed to be founded.

"In the history of aviation sabotage, I don't believe there's ever been a threat called in where there's actually been a bomb," said Douglas Laird, a consultant who is a former security director at Northwest Airlines.

Still, airlines refer all threats to their security divisions, which evaluate their credibility based on confidential criteria, Laird said. Depending on the merit of the threat, a flight could be diverted to the nearest airport, so it could be searched with bomb-sniffing dogs, he said.

Airlines are required to report any security threats to a plane that is in or headed for the USA to the Transportation Security Administration. The guidelines for what requires a report were deliberately left vague because the TSA preferred that airlines report too many incidents rather than too few, according to a Government Accountability Office report in 2007.

And then, again, if you were on a plane that got a threat, would you be happy if the airline pooh-poohed the threat and flew on to its destination?

Clearly, something has to be done to stem the tide of airline threats by would-be terrorists and teen pranksters.

The Noble High suspects were both arrested on felony terrorizing charges and face up to five years incarceration.

Let's hope some of these miscreants who disrupted all the recent flights can be shown how dim a view we take of such cyber hooliganism. There needs to be some lessons taught.

- HT