What Should Happen To A 14 Year Old Girl Who Makes A Terrorist Threat?
If you were listening to the show early this morning we talked about this story. A 14 year old girl for some reason decided to Tweet to American Airlines a fake terrorist threat. The girl, Sarah wrote, "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." Why she thought that this was OK to post to the airline , no one knows at this point but American Airlines did not find any humor in it.
The Airline responded to her tweet with, "Sarah, we take these threats very seriously. Your IP address and details will be forwarded to security and the FBI." It was at this point that Sarah said she was sorry and that it was a joke. She tried to blame a friend for it and said that her parents would kill her if they found out. This of course would lead you to believe that the girl may now understand the gravity of what she had done right? Wrong.
It seems the story blew up and people were tweeting , re-tweeting and commenting like crazy and Sarah for some reason began to see the whole situation in a much more positive way. She later tweeted, "Wow! Because of this I gained 1,000 followers." Then she tweeted, quote, "Okay, today was the highlight of my Twitter days."
Ugh.
So our question this morning was this, "What should happen to this girl now? What sort of punishment should she receive for making a terrorist threat, especially since in the end, she seemed more interested in getting more Twitter followers than what she had done wrong.