"Might" does not make right

[unixronin]

"The FBI has warned police that al-Qaida cells might use fuel trucks as weapons to attack Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, but officials stressed Thursday the warning was based on uncorroborated intelligence."

Yeah.  "Might."  A completely uncorroborated, unsubstantiated assertion.  And the Earth "might" be about to be eaten by a giant mutant space goat.  What security threat level is this -- lilac?  Teal?  Burnt sepia?

If you don't have anything to back it up except some analyst's unsubstantiated speculation, if you have nothing you can even give a reliability level on, this isn't security; this is scaremongering and crying wolf.  But then, a lot of it is about scaremongering, isn't it?  Scared people do what authority figures tell them to do.

Comments

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

hell, it would be easier to just pop an RPG into the oil storage tanks in the south bay area of socal. it's somethin i thought about when 9/11 happened, because a lot of my family, and my ex wife's family lives that way.
i don't place much confidence in the word "might"

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I thought about a lot of things on 9/11. We kept our daughter home from school that day just because we didn't know what else might be in the works, and upon hearing from the friend in SF who woke up to F18s with live missiles on the wing pylons overflying his apartment, we made contingency plans for him to evac to Berkeley, rendezvous there with another friend, and then both of them evac over the Altamont to us in Tracy. Between the lot of us, we'd have been equipped to fight a small war if need be.

[olafthunderfoot.livejournal.com]

hehe, i know what ya mean there. i have a decent arsenal myself.

[ttocs.livejournal.com]

I'd be upset if they weren't looking at it.

Publicizing it however....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah. There really are no good outcomes of publicizing something that vague and nebulous except from the viewpoint of cover-your-ass. The best case is "no effect"; in the worst case, it'll decrease faith in any future warnings, have half the drivers on the road afraid of every tanker truck they see, and any poor bastard who gets in a wreck driving a tanker truck during the next few days may get shot by some yahoo who's convinced he must be a terrorist.

[ttocs.livejournal.com]

Yet we walk a very fine line between overseeing what all the government is sticking its fingers into, and things being publicized uneccessarily.

I'm not sure where the lines need to be drawn, though I am sure that ratings based news is NOT the way to provide any of it.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

I saw this scenario proposed on a website not long after 9/11, giving truckers a "heads up" on possible things to look out for, such as suspicious behaviors on the road. It also mentioned truckers should keep an eye out for suspicious behavior from truckers, as there could be a possible scenario of trucks packed with explosives, etc. I'd say the alert level has gone to "gray" by now.

Funny thing about scaremongering...if you cry "wolf" enough times, people start to ignore it. I wonder how long it will take...