Being a digital citizen and our freedom of speech

When Sarah a 14-year-old Dutch girl (aka @queendementriax_ on Twitter). tweeted a bomb threat to American Airlines a few weeks ago she didn't realise the consequences of her actions.

Her twitter account was disconnected on Sunday night the 20th of April 2014 (so there is no point in checking her account) shortly after she gained 20,000 followers, and 15 minutes of internet fame.

Here is a quick recap of what happened...

Sarah: “@AmericanAir hello my name’s Ibrahim and I’m from Afghanistan. I’m part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I’m gonna do something really big bye.”

American Airlines: “@queendemetriax_ Sarah, we take these threats very seriously. Your IP Address and details will be forwarded to security and the FBI.”

Sarah: “@AmericanAir pls pls pls can I do something to make it good pls I’m so scared I’m just a 14 year old white girl I’m not a terrorist pls.”

she later tweeted that she was very "sorry" and her desire to be famous was for different reasons; “but I meant like Demi Lovato famous, not Osama bin laden famous”.

She was later arrested and her mugshot taken by the police in Rotterdam.

Parenting the online generation

My first reaction to this was that she was a very silly girl but I soon started to feel sorry for her and more so her parents. In recent times I have given a lot of thought about my responsibilities as a parent of a twelve and 8 year old to educate and guide them in an online world. I am still struggling with what path to take and how to approach this as it is a parenting mine field.

We are getting weekly if not daily requests for accounts to be set up on Youtube, Facebook, twitter, snapchat etc. etc. etc. The list is literally endless and changes as regularly and quickly as the weather here in Ireland and is driven by what is the flavour of the week on the school playground.
How can we keep our children safe and prevent them from making these guffaws, we no longer just need to consider how to keep them safe in our house, on our streets and in the schoolyard but we now need to protect them from a global online community and it's police force.

Anyway my parental journey on the treacherous path as the guardian of an online child is worth an entirely new blog perhaps.

How to configure Parental Control for websites in Kaspersky Internet Security 2014

Twitter rebellion

I didn't give Sarah and her story much more thought until a few days later when the news channels reported that Twitter was 'on fire' with hundreds of your twitterers tweeting to her defence and protesting by posting similar bomb-threats. I thought this was quite amusing and at the same time quite ingenious. I mean are the police / FBI and Interpol now going to have to arrest all these teen-twitter-anarchists? Surely not! 

It also makes you think about why law enforcement agencies are so Gung-ho about going after these cyber threats? I mean, what is the harm of a Dutch 14yr old girl saying something 'silly' on twitter? Do we really have to believe that the FBI etc are looking at twitter for the next terrorist threat and rely on social media to be forewarned and take preemptive action? And if so is going after the Sarahs of this world with prison sentences justified to keep Twitter 'clean' from jokers and only allow real terrorists to make real threats!?

Are we, as an online community and people, to be policed in that way?

What's the harm?

We all know and understand (i hope) that Law Enforcement agencies use supercomputers to crawl the interweb for keywords that are associated with threatening and / or terrorist behaviour. So tweets like Sarah's are picked up quickly and actioned by the police. But what if we all tweeted such threats on a daily basis? Would these supercomputers start overheating and combust with digital excitement? Would the world be a better place for not having the NSA looking over our digital shoulder? Or would we jeapordise innocent lives because the next tweet from an actual terrorist is now hidden amongst those from Demi Lovato fans?