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

[Michael Snow]

David Gerard wrote:
> 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.)
>   
That's generally an appropriate response. I know we've discussed making 
Mike Godwin's cell number available to checkusers in case they need to 
consult about a situation on short notice. The privacy policy is written 
to allow release of information in these circumstances, but we'd still 
like to have an orderly approach. Keep Mike informed so he can 
facilitate responding to proper law enforcement requests.

--Michael Snow