SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

The email that shut down Los Angeles schools on Tuesday [soylentnews.org] came from an email host linked to 8chan [arstechnica.com]:

The "credible [twitter.com]" threat that caused the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to close all schools on Tuesday was sent from cock.li [cock.li], the "meme" e-mail host that also provides e-mail services for 8chan, the 4chan splinter site [arstechnica.com].

School officials in New York and Los Angeles reportedly both received threats [twitter.com] from madbomber@cock.li, but only LAUSD took it seriously. All 640,000 LAUSD students were unable to attend classes on Tuesday.

Vincent Canfield, the founder of cock.li, posted a copy of the subpoena [cock.li] he received from a New York detective on his own website and included audio recordings of polite but brief conversations [cock.li] with two officials from the New York Police Department (NYPD) Intelligence Bureau.

[EXTENDED COPY]

The founder of cock.li explained in an email to users:

While people that abuse cock.li are actually the scum of this site and waste so much of my time, it's amusing that an administration can take a few E-mails and shut down a school district of hundreds of thousands of students as a result. This is an administration problem and the fact that NYC didn't close schools it wasn't a "credible" threat is especially telling of the subjectivity that goes into making sweeping decisions like this that effect [sic] countless people.

We live in an age where anonymous messages can be sent with extreme ease (not just through cock.li). When someone uses a meme E-mail provider to threaten your organization, pulling the plug on all students and wasting over 1,800 combined YEARS of student-classroom time is a PR stunt and another example of officials employing security theater to make their students and parents feel safe. This cannot be demonstrated clearer than the fact that when something like this happens, and copycat threats inevitably come soon after, the same response is not deployed.

Note that the 1,800 year calculation seems to be based on an assumption that 640,000 students missed nearly 24 hours of school each.

Two students from Danville High School near Indianapolis, Indiana were arrested for making separate threats [reuters.com] to schools on Wednesday.

Original Submission