[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] School shooting threats

[David Gerard]

2008/5/22 Delirium <delirium at hackish.org>:
> Nathan wrote:

>  I'm not sure a policy would actually help anything. If something bad
>  actually happened (with any sort of threat, schools or workplaces or
>  subways or restaurants or public parks or otherwise), the only sort of
>  policy that would satisfy people would be the extremist cover-your-ass
>  policy that is used in airports---anything that sounds even vaguely like
>  a threat will be treated as if it were an extremely serious and credible
>  threat, reported to as many authorities as possible, the full available
>  action taken, etc. But in practice most people have to exercise some
>  degree of judgment, lest they spend their entire time giving interviews
>  to police about spurious threats they encountered on the internet. There
>  is no real way to formalize that into a "policy" that will satisfy
>  anyone, though.


In practice it'd have to be a guideline, because it *has* to be
applied with common sense. But that should be enough in practice, it's
not like we're short of volunteers. It strikes me as a bad idea to
somehow require that people act on something that may be a serious
threat and may be a kid just being a bloody idiot.

(I have had phone calls from police asking about edits that could be
taken as assassination threats to public figures. Thankfully they were
also reasonably sure it was a kid being a bloody idiot, but a
policeman showing up at the door and asking them to please refrain
from doing that *ever again* is probably the actual appropriate
action. As a volunteer, I of course refer such calls to the
Foundation, unless it's an IP edit in which case they don't need any
private info to trace it.)


- d.