In the wake of last night’s fatal shooting at an LA Fitness outside of Pittsburgh, PA, a thought occurred to me that I felt I’d write a quick entry about, perhaps to generate some discussion particularly with my UW MCDM counterparts. Within 24 hours we get news that the alleged shooter, George Sodini, blogged for months and months about his “exit plan”, or his plan to end his life and take as many people at the gym he worked-out at with him. His shooting rampage plans were right there on the web for all of the world to see, but it seems no one took notice, either because no one saw the blog or cared to read the thing, or because Sodini himself did little to promote his writings anyway. However, this isn’t the first time that plans for such rampages have surfaced on-line before the events took place – it’s just that usually the posts are discovered by people after the fact. In light of this and other examples of different killers’ obvious pre-meditations posted on-line in advance of the deadly events they carry out, the general question I pose is thus:
With the tools we now possess to get vast quantities of data from user interactions on-line, to monitor chatter on blogs and in social networks like Myspace, and to trackdown to the very minute just what people are tweeting about, should government and law enforcement agencies attempt to do more to monitor the web for death threats and talk of plots to carry out murderous rampages? And then, to what extent can they respond within the law? Sure, I’m a staunch proponent of free speech of all kinds, and the thought of the NSA warrantlessly wiretapping my telephone makes me cringe, but the questions people will be asking in the coming days deserve some serious consideration. It’s not just what could have been done to prevent this needless violence, or even what is being done now by various agencies, it’s SHOULD we monitor and then HOW do you deal with obvious threats? We have the tools to find out, right now, what people are saying about Coke or Pepsi, so why not track chatter on shooting threats and the like? Nobody wants to be policed on-line, but if you have the tools and wherewithal, why not?
Note:
Special thanks to Mashable’s post about the Sodini blog, which helped spur this entry.
More examples of the discussion and killers’ posting to the web before they carry out their deadly attacks:
Threats against San Francisco area BART cop
Tea Party Death Threats on Twitter
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Tags: death threats, metrics, monitoring, monitoring the web, shooting rampages, social media, social media tools, Sodini, tools, tracking