Snow joke as man is held over airport bomb tweet

A man who jokingly tweeted that he would blow up a snow-clogged airport has been arrested by anti-terror police in the UK.

Paul Chambers decided to vent his frustration on the social-networking site after his plane was cancelled by the recent snowfall. "Robin Hood airport is closed," he tweeted. "You've got a week and a bit to get your s**t together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

The joke backfired a week later when anti-terror police arrived on his doorstep and arrested him. "My first thought upon hearing it was the police was that perhaps a member of my family had been in an accident," Chambers told The Independent. "Then they said I was being arrested under the Terrorism Act and produced a piece of paper. It was a print-out of my Twitter page. That was when it dawned on me."

Mr Chambers was reportedly questioned for seven hours, before being bailed until 11 February, when he'll learn whether he'll be charged with conspiring to create a bomb hoax.

In the meantime, police deleted the bomb message from his Twitter account and have confiscated his iPhone, laptop and desktop computer. He's also banned from the Doncaster airport for life.

You know, I wonder if every UK-based Twitterer and Facebooker started extensively making these kind of joke threats whether the entire security services would be so overloaded they'd implode.

and have confiscated his iPhone,

This whole thing is ridiculous, I mean how come it took the black bastards a week to feel his collar, how can he be charged with conspiracy if no one else is involved,

Disgusting, arresting this guy is simply a misguided PR stunt by the filth.

Technically, everyone who read his tweet is 'involved'.

I doubt even Plod would be mental enough to consider this a good idea as a publicity stunt. It is my experience (which is actually more than average) that plod's knowledge of tech is bordering on zero and that therefore he tends to over-react whenever it's involved. Add together the two things he fears most - technology and terrorism - and over-reaction is pretty much inevitable.

Jon

Whether or not the police were right to track this guy down is largely irrelevant.
Anyone who thinks the police, airport security or the security services have even the smallest sense of humour where airports and bomb threats are concerned obviously hasn't been paying attention for the last 30 odd years. The guy is a moron for putting this on twitter.

The sad thing is of course that proper terrorists are somewhat unlikely to put something so blatant on the internet anywhere. Unfortunately the security services have to honour the threat because if they didn't and there was some sort of attack that had been notified there would ten kinds of hell to pay as a result.

Carpet bombing twitter, facebook and the like with bomb threats just to see the reaction might be quite amusing for a short while but it would cause such an increase in the background noise MI5 and the like have to sift through that the probability of an actual attack would have to go up.

In summary, this is only a massive over-reaction by plod because the guy isn't a terrorist (yet anyway).

There hasn't been successful bomb attack on an airport in the last 30 years. There have been a tremendous number of false alarms and wacko plots that had no chance of success. There is definitely a point where paranoia overtakes practicality in security terms.

...

And slamming him in the clink and taking his stuff for such spurious reasons, is that going to make him more or less likely to become one?

Jon

Whether or not the police were right to track this guy down is largely irrelevant.
Anyone who thinks the police, airport security or the security services have even the smallest sense of humour where airports and bomb threats are concerned obviously hasn't been paying attention for the last 30 odd years. The guy is a moron for putting this on twitter.