Man Found Guilty After Twitter Joke About Blowing Up An Airport

In June 2008, while I was working part time security at a baseball stadium, I was confronted by a belligerent fan who was angered at my request to search his bag, which was and remains standard practice. The fan told me that he had a bomb in his bag and that he hoped it "blew me the [expletive] up". My first instinct was separate his head from the scrawny shoulders it sat on, but instead I gritted my teeth and escorted him to my supervisor and had him banned from the ground for a year. In this day and age, these types of idiotic remarks are not tolerated and in certain circumstances can be deemed very serious indeed. Certainly enough to warrant the intervention of criminal law.

For example: A man who threatened on Twitter to blow up Doncaster airport in England has been found guilty of sending a “menacing electronic communication”. He is thought to be the first person in the United Kingdom to have been arrested for comments on Twitter. He is now the first person to be found guilty for being “menacing” on Twitter. On January 6, 2010, Paul Chambers joked on Twitter “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” He was annoyed that snowfall threatened to delay his plans to travel to Ireland on January 15.