Bomb Threats and New Jersey and Schools and Increase

Shortly after he became police chief of Princeton, N.J. in 2014, Nicholas Sutter noticed that schools were reporting a "dramatic increase" in mysterious phone calls. In each of them, a computer-generated voice threatened violence.

Sometimes the voice was recorded and sometimes it was live, but each time it was a digitally synthesized, "robocall" voice. Most of the calls warned that bombs had been planted in schools, or that an active shooter was in the building. The threats never materialized, but police responded anyway.

What was different, Sutter said, was that the calls didn't seem to be your typical kid trying to get out of a trigonometry test or harass a high school principal. They were "very descriptive in their nature, in terms of the destruction that they wanted to cause."

Most troubling of all, they were coming from outside of Princeton.

"We knew we were dealing with something different," he said.

Princeton's experience is not unique. Schools across the USA — and across the world — are experiencing a sometimes dramatic uptick in high-tech threats, educators and law enforcement officials say. Those include a rash of bomb-threat calls last January in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Virginia, and a flurry of e-mails last December to schools in New York City, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

In the December case, L.A. officials closed all of the city's 900 schools for one day, handing 640,000 students a day off just 10 days before Christmas. Police in New York dismissed a nearly identical threat from the same sender as a hoax — Mayor Bill de Blasio called the threat "so generic, so outlandish" that it couldn't be taken seriously.

But in an era when terrorists target public places such as Paris cafes and theaters and, more recently, a rented banquet hall in San Bernardino, Calif., law enforcement and school officials say they can't ignore most threats.

"It's a terroristic threat against our most vulnerable in our society, our children," Sutter said.

The threats send "panic through a community," said Ohio school safety consultant Ken Trump, who last year looked at more than 800 violent school threats and found that in 30%, schools were evacuated; in 10% schools were closed.

Last October in Fairfield, Conn., a caller warned of a bomb at a high school and a man with an M16 assault rifle headed to an elementary school. The latter was a so-called "swatting," designed to trick police into responding. The threats prompted the district, located just 25 miles south of Newtown, Conn., to lock down all 17 schools.

Blame increasingly accessible digital technology, which gives perpetrators the ability to stay anonymous in new and, frankly, strange ways.

In one case last month, an international group using a Russian e-mail address and using the now-suspended Twitter handles @Ev4cuati0nSquad and @SwatTheW0rld claimed responsibility for hoax threats across Australia, with plans to target schools throughout Europe.

"We do these threats because they are funny to us," a spokesperson for the group, who uses the name Viktor Olyavich, told the tech website Mashable Australia via e-mail. "We don't worry about the consequences, because our main threat-makers are based in Russia and Iran," Olyavich said. The group was placing the calls via a stolen Internet phone account "that has a trove of calling credit," he said.

The group even offered a price list for its services, payable in non-traceable Bitcoin: $5 for threatening a school or business; $10 for a courthouse or entire school district; $50 for a major sporting event.

"I don't think that we're talking about a tremendously sophisticated technology that's being used, but it's technology that's nonetheless difficult to trace," Sutter, the Princeton police chief, said. Police elsewhere have made arrests in cases that he believes are connected to the Princeton cases. "They were definitely coming from elsewhere," he said.

Amy Klinger, an Ohio-based consultant with the Educator's School Safety Network, said U.S. schools this year have seen a 143% increase in bomb threats, with about eight to 10 bomb threats per day.

"You can spread out the chaos significantly with the robo-calling," she said. "The scope of the disruption can be so much greater."

Though the vast majority turn out to be hoaxes, she said, "You have to evacuate, or you feel you have to evacuate, and you perpetuate it. You get into this vicious circle."

Like Trump, Klinger said schools need to update their training to deal with the new kinds of threats. Evacuating a school for a bomb threat isn't the same as a fire drill, for instance: Guiding students to a school parking lot or football stadium could be bringing them to the very place where a bomb is planted, Klinger said.

"If you're going to evacuate to the stadium, has anybody swept the stadium?" she said.

Contributing: AP; Follow Greg Toppo on Twitter: @gtoppo

Bomb Threats and New Jersey and Schools and Increase

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/03/08/schools--computer-bomb-threats/81489322/

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