Cell Phones and Hostage Situations
I haven’t read this book on the Columbine school shooting and massacre, but the New York Times review had an interesting paragraph about cell phones in a hostage situation:
Fuselier is one of the people Cullen spotlights in his retelling in order to clear up the historical record. Some of the confusion generated by Columbine was inevitable: Harris and Klebold started out wearing trench coats, for instance, but at some point removed them, giving the illusion that they were four people rather than two. The homemade pipe bombs they were tossing in all directions—down stairwells, onto the roof—only seemed to further the impression that there were more of them. And then there were the SWAT teams: students trapped inside the building would hear their rifle fire, assume it was the killers and report it to the media by cellphone, complicating the cops’ efforts to keep them safe. “This was the first major hostage standoff of the cellphone age,” Cullen notes. The police “had never seen anything like it.”
Mike B • April 27, 2009 7:22 AM
The FBI needs to being in the Numb3rs guy to do one of those “thought models” to quickly analyze the cell phone data points and determine what is real and what are shadows, reflection and duplication.
Do I see an business opportunity for the Bruce Schneier Threat Analysis and Hostage Rescue Team?