Airlines have a new problem: a spike in hoax bomb threats
By N.B. | Washington, DC
OVER the past several weeks, airlines in America have been the victims of a dramatic spike in social-media bomb threats, according to CNN. No bombs have been found, but because airlines and the American airport security apparatus treat every threat seriously, numerous flights have been delayed, diverted or even cancelled.
This presents a big challenge for the American airline industry. Several of the people making the threats have claimed or implied that they support or are affiliated with IS, the rebel jihadist group that now controls large parts of Iraq and Syria. (It is hard to independently verify whether any such claims are true.) Making bomb threats is illegal, of course. But the American government is not about to send troops, let alone FBI agents, into dangerous areas abroad to arrest people for sending hoax tweets. By barraging the airlines with fake threats, IS and its supporters can wreak havoc on America's travel industry.
Perhaps this is the next evolution of asymmetrical warfare. It costs terrorists nothing to send a threatening message. But landing a plane, swarming it with sniffer dogs, and checking all the passengers is immensely expensive. So is scrambling F-16s to escort threatened planes—which is exactly what happened on January 17th. Each F-16 costs about $22,500 per hour to operate, according to the Air Force comptroller.
Unfortunately, there is no easy response to this. The airlines and the Transportation Security Administration have to take the threats seriously, because fake warnings can be used to give cover to real attacks. Some will no doubt argue that social-media companies themselves should find ways to prevent their services from being used by pseudo-terrorists. But flagging potentially threatening tweets and blocking them from being published would present a formidable technological challenge, and do little to solve the problem: in many ways, an unseen threat is more troubling than a fake one. It will be fascinating to see what Twitter, Facebook, the airlines, and the TSA come up with to combat this new crisis.
