If an airline can't differentiate between a teenager goofing around and a credible threat, then that's the airline's fault. A girl posting nonsense on twitter getting arrested just shows that "the system" is inhuman and it just chews people up and spits them out. I won't be surprised at all if this girl gets a long prison sentence and her life gets ruined. Nor will I be surprised when legions of pundits come out of the woodwork exclaiming it wasn't punishment enough, and all the copycats should be treated the same way.
The thing is, if you think for 30 seconds about the problem of defending infrastructure from crazy people, your best bet is to lurk where crazy people congregate, and keep a finger on the pulse of the ones who are poised to "do something". How often do these people actually make a threat? Don't they normally just execute the attack? Of course, even this is imperfect, and the best response is to rebuild when something gets blown up. Hurricanes happen, earthquakes happen, crazy people who hate you happen, and in every case your best "revenge" is to just outproduce entropy.
Overreaction to human threat is a symptom of a much deeper illness, and one that plays directly into the hands of real terrorists. The lives and treasure lost on 9/11 was trivial to the number of lives and treasure we've spent trying to prevent the unpreventable. We could have built the Twin Towers 10,000 times over for the money we've spent on war and the TSA and the NSA. It's fucking stupid, and I'm tired of it.
The thing is, if you think for 30 seconds about the problem of defending infrastructure from crazy people, your best bet is to lurk where crazy people congregate, and keep a finger on the pulse of the ones who are poised to "do something". How often do these people actually make a threat? Don't they normally just execute the attack? Of course, even this is imperfect, and the best response is to rebuild when something gets blown up. Hurricanes happen, earthquakes happen, crazy people who hate you happen, and in every case your best "revenge" is to just outproduce entropy.
Overreaction to human threat is a symptom of a much deeper illness, and one that plays directly into the hands of real terrorists. The lives and treasure lost on 9/11 was trivial to the number of lives and treasure we've spent trying to prevent the unpreventable. We could have built the Twin Towers 10,000 times over for the money we've spent on war and the TSA and the NSA. It's fucking stupid, and I'm tired of it.