Comment by mikeocool
1 day 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?
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.
3. The level of tech illiteracy combined with airplane security theater is an affront to all thinking people.
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.
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It wasn't a bomb threat: https://hellottec.com/product/bomb-portable-bluetooth-speake...
Why are people not reading the article!!!! It was a Fitbit. Best not to get news based on Reddit conjecture. It's wild how many people are running with the speaker thing.
> This website has been temporarily rate limited
The url conveys the relevant information.
Was wondering the same thing. Maybe there's some regulation about this, but the flight crew wanted to bend the rule to keep the plane going, figuring it was just a poorly named device.
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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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
The IRA bombs in civilian areas in the uk almost always had phone calls that preceded the bombs going off.
It was standard practice during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, for example.