So, wait a minute. This kid makes a private joke among friends, and his message is intercepted by security services and obviously taken out of context (in that they failed to realize he was privately joking among friends).
Seems to me that the security forces should eat the cost of this. This is the price you pay for spying on everyone and overreacting.
The kid didn’t say this publicly
Also what’s the goal of scrambling jets when the threat is a passenger inside said jet? Are they gonna ask the pilot to pipe the radio to the PA and say “you better not blow up that plane because we’re in charge and we said so?” Do they have a sniper on the wing ready to take out just one guy meanwhile depressurizing the whole fuselage, potentially explosively? Maybe Top Gun Tom Cruise can hit the guy with a burst of the 20mm? Seems like there’s no point whatsoever. Best case they can say “yep it blew up” or “nope it didn’t blow up.”
The jets are to shoot down the airliner if it aims towards a dense area, sensitive location, etc.
I mean, were there actually a terrorist onboard the plane, I imagine the logic would be “If they hijack it and decide to try to crash it into something 9/11 style, a fighter can at least blow it up in time to prevent more casualties on the ground”
They’d shoot the plane down if they can’t get the pilot to land safely. They’d rather one plane full of innocent passengers gets killed than a plane full of innocent passengers and a building full of even more innocents.
The kid didn’t say this publicly
I’m not sure what this changes. Do actual terrorists make their plans public? IANAT, but I’m pretty sure they discuss and plan their actions privately most of the time.
Besides, look at what he wrote:
“On my way to blow up the plane (I’m a member of the Taliban).”
If he somehow didn’t expect that line of text to get his Snapchat auto-watchlisted, then he’s even dumber than originally thought.
I mean yeah most people kinda assume that their private conversations are private, hopefully this will help more people aware that corporations and governments are spying on us all
Do actual terrorists go around saying “lol I’m a terrorist”? Maybe a little business card with some finely embossed “Taliban Suicide Bomber” printed under their name to hand out to everyone.
That’s really not far off from actual Taliban recruitment and propaganda tactics these days. They have a public Twitter account, if anybody’s forgotten.
Yeah why the fuck were they spying on some 18 year old kid’s snapchat?
He wrote:
“On my way to blow up the plane (I’m a member of the Taliban).”
There’s no way that text doesn’t get automatically flagged for review by Snapchat.
That’s exactly how the Taliban talks. The highly cryptic methods used by this terror organization have been cracked.
Who’s reading these private messages?
I imagine Snapchat read it.
Then checked his location (since Snapchat likely asks users to turn on that permission, or it could’ve been found through photo/video metadata).
Then they informed the airport nearest to his GPS location.
And that’s probably why it got blown out of proportion.
Snapchat says “Hey airport, we found someone at your location who said they’re going to blow up a plane. Here’s a cropped picture of the guy’s face.”
Then the airport staff are looking through everyone who’s checked in, trying to match the Snapchat picture to the passport photos. By the time they found a match, the plan had already departed. (Let’s be real, they probably have some facial recognition, but it was likely double-checked by humans, plus all the communication back and forth, etc.)
So now the airport knows that the guy who said he’s going to blow up the plane is already on the plane, and the plane is in flight. What are your options at that point?
Probably doesn’t need facial recognition even. Snapchat has people’s phone numbers. Which are also used when booking tickets for most airlines. The airport could cross check phone record from Snapchat with their airlines’ passenger info.
Yeah I would personally tell them to eat shit.
This tends to be ineffective in court.
Is anyone stupid enough to think that Snapchat is private? Honest question. It’s still a social media platform.
Private enough to use as the primary communication method for my multi-million dollar drug empire? No. Private enough to make a dumb joke to a friend and not expect to become a terrorist? It should be but clearly not
Even if this was a real terrorist, this is the worst move security services could’ve done.
They could bar a suspected terrorist from entering the plane via a temporary arrest. If they’re wrong, just reimburse the travel costs. If correct, you didn’t let a terrorist possibly hijack a plane.
They could use the “randomly selected for a search” card as an excuse for detailed screening. A terrorist can’t blow up a plane without some sort of smuggled troublesome equipment anyway. If they’re wrong, you spent like 10 minutes searching a random dude. At least you didn’t gave a terrorist chance to hijack a plane.
They instead let a suspected terrorist enter the plane as usual; then tailed him with fighter jets. What the actual fuck was the plan if the suspected person was a terrorist? Blow up the fucking plane so all the civilians inside die?
Imagine the call done to the authorities
“This is airport, we’ve detected a suspicious individual that could be affiliated with a terrorist organization”
“Since you detected him, I assume you’ve detained him? We’ll be sending units”
“Umm… no? Just let him board the plane”
“YOU WHAT?”
One 18-year-old is about to find out the very harsh consequences of being an adult.
The harsh consequences of being in a police state
What should happen if there is an explicit threat by a passenger to blow up a plane? Just hope it’s a joke because it seems like one?
EDIT: As usual, lots of downvotes, but no actual answer to the question.
the article seems to suggest it wasnt even shared publicly, so I suspect that they hadn’t even considered the possibility that anyone who might think of it as a threat might see it. Posting that on a public forum, I can see the reaction, and I can definitely see an argument that the joke was in bad taste, but to be perfectly honest, unless one of their friends thought the message was sincere and reported it (which the article doesnt mention and sounds dubious) a private message like that really shouldnt have been visible to the authorities in the first place.
Holy shit dude it’s only been a few minutes calm the fuck down
If 4 people are going to downvote me within that time and not respond, I’m going to say something about it. I notice you took the time to respond to me without answering the question. Do you have an answer?
I was gonna write out a response (which is why I was back here anyways) but your demeanor is just “I wanna be angry” and there really is no amount of logic you apply to people like you.
It’s just edgy teenagers who think they know everything about how the world works, don’t sweat it.
I guess. It just annoys me when people downvote me a whole bunch when I ask a question but don’t explain their downvotes. I don’t care if I say something and everyone on Lemmy thinks it’s worth downvoting and I get 2500 downvotes or whatever, but I just think people should have the basic courtesy to explain why.
I know they won’t, but it still annoys me.
EDIT: See, in this response (I’m editing just because I saw it already had a few downvotes) I don’t care if I get dozens of downvotes to this comment and no one responds. It’s when I ask a question. I don’t downvote people for asking questions unless I also respond. If I don’t like their question, I’ll explain why. I think that’s just courteous. But maybe I’m in a minority. Courtesy is mostly dead on the internet anyway.
I feel like people downvote like that when they don’t like how the comment makes them feel, but can’t be bothered to think about why that’s the case.
And I have no interest in what those people
thinkfeel.Alternatively, it can make me do a double take, and reconsider my own reasoning, just to make sure I haven’t made an error, in fact or in judgment. I don’t think you need to do that here; what the adult said was most definitely a potential threat.
Now if only we fined companies proportionally for saftey violations…
When you’re in a group chat in Snapchat, Snap always has an ear on the group.
Suggesting anything illegal at an airport or border crossing is off-limits for me, no jokes, even with family/friends. I thought people knew better.
Reminiscent of the Twitter joke trial. Except this obvious joke was made in private, so there’s even less excuse for the over-reaction. Useless timewasters.
So if a terrorist makes a private chat, they’re immune?
“The intention was never to cause public distress or cause public harm,” Verma told the court.
That moment, the kid realised some joke is off-limit and could have serious consequences.
a private joke?
private jokes made in public aren’t private. (this was sent from the check in counter of the airport.)
It was a private chat group message, what’s public about it?
What was private about it?
Unfortunately, an app and justice will not differentiate between a joke and real, once it tripped either of this system then you pay the consequences. If you wanna joke about this, joke irl.
My first thought is what is the point of sending fighter jets to deal with a bomb threat?
“Don’t you blow up this plane, or else… we’ll blow up this plane.”
It would have been nice if they could have stopped him before he got on the plane. If he was serious, things likely wouldn’t have ended well.
