The police in Britain have credited a group of young Internet users with alerting them to a Web posting by a 16-year-old who said he planned to attack his high school with “arson and other forms of violence,” enabling officers to arrest the teenager as he approached the school carrying a knife, matches and a plastic can of what the police described as “flammable liquid…”
In the Attleborough case, the teenager’s use of a Web forum to announce his plan appears to have been the step that made it possible for the attack to be foiled.
Still more notable, the first alert to the police in Norfolk, the largely rural county where Attleborough is located, came in a telephone call from a 21-year-old student in Montreal, more than 3,200 miles away, after he read the posting threatening the school attack while eating his breakfast in a university dormitory.
Only 50 minutes elapsed between that call and the arrest of the youth outside the school, according to a timeline drawn up by J.P. Neufeld, the Montreal student, who said he drew on his own computer records and the accounts given to him by the Norfolk police. In that time, Mr. Neufeld said by telephone on Friday, two other people browsing on the same Web site, newgrounds.com, which is used for sharing music files and user-created animations, provided the information that enabled the police to identify the school that was the target of the planned attack, and the would-be attacker…
A police spokesman, Superintendent Katie Elliott, credited the arrest to Mr. Neufeld and the other Web browsers who provided warning of the attack. “It goes to show that things written on the Internet can be viewed across the world,” she said, “and we thank the person who has read this and done something about it.”
Credit to the student in Montreal for acting upon his understanding of what he read. And credit to the coppers in Norfolk for paying attention and responding.
It begs teh question…why can;t the coppers do anything about Nigerian scams?
Sure, inform the world about the heinous crime you’re going to commit. This is BRDDA material, from both sides– the idiot’s will to commit destruction and his stupidity for writing about it.
Teenager, just horsing around. Brits lost their sense of humor?
Reasonible and prudent people acted wisely.
That is how you’re supposed to act.
#5–Bill==”That is how you’re supposed to act.”
Well, I can see sending an email, or making a free computer based phone call–but a toll charge?
Under the power and magic of group inaction, I’d assume someone closer would make the call.
The MfS infiltrated almost every aspect of GDR life. In the mid-1980s, a network of civilian informants, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs, Unofficial Collaborators), began growing in both German states; by the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, the MfS employed an estimated 91,000 employees and 300,000 informants. About one of every 50 East Germans collaborated with the MfS – one of the most extensive police infiltrations of a society in history. In 2007 an article in BBC stated that “Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens.” Additionally, MfS agents infiltrated and undermined West Germany’s government and spy agencies.
I once called the UK from the USA regarding an emergency and I ended up being bounced around to four different police departments before I finally got someone to listen. Total call time was well over one hour and I didn’t hear back from the UK police for well over three weeks after I placed the initial call. Dreadful. Even worse was trying to deal with the NHS on the weekend, it’s nearly impossible to find an NHS doctor on the weekend in the UK. So much for socialized medicine.