http://www.bradenton.com/2011/02/11/2949112/facebook-chat-leads-to-police.html
When I was a sophomore, I went to a national conference in Washington, D.C. that taught all its participants about national defense and security. So all week we (the students) were going to different seminars and places to learn about diplomacy, national policy, etc. I got to go to the Danish Embassy and the State Department building. It was pretty cool. Anyway one night there were different sessions we could go to that had speakers from different agencies, and I went to the one that had the representative from the FBI. She told us that if we were talking to someone on AIM and we wrote "I'm going to kill the President" then we would have FBI agents on our doorstep within 48 hours. I thought that was pretty neat.
So it kind of surprised me a little (and took me back 4 years) to see in this article that because a kid made a threat on Facebook Chat he was taken into the police station the next day and questioned about the threat of taking a weapon into school.
It wasn't like anyone was monitoring Facebook Chat or anything. The guy got into a fight with his ex girlfriend and her sister, and ended up making a threat about taking a weapon to school the next day and the girl's sister showed the message to her mother, who then called the school.
It just amazes me how technology can hurt people so badly that they would make threats like that. He wasn't really going to take anything to school, he was just angry at the girl for posting what she'd said about him and then saying he wasn't man enough to do anything about it. Anyway...so this tells me that no matter what your temper may be, you should never say anything you don't mean online. Or ever, really. But especially online, because once you do it's out there forever. It cannot be deleted, and honestly, it can come back and bite you badly.
Peace and love,
Caitlin
WOW. That is crazy. I was looking at the article and i feel bad for the boy, but in a way i think he should control his temper a little... The point of my comment was to remind you that you need to see the movie Conspiracy theory and its all about how this guy (mel gibson) thinks the government is after him because he knows all these secrets (which they arent really after him) and then it turns out they are... That was a bad description of the movie but still... it reminds me that even through converstaions on the internet we can get in trouble...like the governement is constantly watching us... like our freedom of speech isnt exactly allowed to be freedom of speech because we can get into trouble with it.... WERID?!
ReplyDeletesorry that was my rambling for the moment