"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

[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.