Here's some followup from the previous story about the threats of a massacre at Kongsbakken videregående skole in Tromsø. The first is an article in Nordlys, posted Monday (translation following):

New threat against Kongsbakken encouraging people to keep up with the news

On Friday a threat against Kongsbakken was repeated on the forum 4chan.org, according to the newspaper iTromsø. In a discussion thread on the site, someone wrote: "Implying I was kidding when I made that treath. Keep watching the news. I may have been foiled the first time, but time will show my seriousness."

"This sounds very scary, and I'm shocked," said Kongsbakken's Student Council leader, Kristian Støback to iTromsø. He otherwise thought it was good to come back to school to speak with other students and instructors. He believes it is important that the threat does not affect life at school.

Rector Odd Ivar Størkesen was not informed about the new threat on Sunday evening.

"I do not know of any new threat. We have been in contact with the police throughout the weekend and received an update on their work no later than Sunday", he said to iTromsø.

He says that school days rain as normal on Monday.

And another from Nordlys, which was posted Sunday:

Police believe they will find out who was behind the threat to Kongsbakken

So far in the investigation the police have not been able to uncover who is behind the threat to Kongsbakken High School.

"We still have good possibilities to solve the case. Kripos has its own system for mapping who uses the internet illegally. It will take time, but we have good hope of finding the sender of the threats to carry out a massacre at the school, says Tromsø police chief Kurt Pettersen.

He said to Kripos that the police in Tromsø are also driving some of the tactical investigation of the case.

"It is a priority both here and in Kripos to identify all factors surrounding the threat. Kripos has the expertise to identify the technological side, while we here in Tromsø hope the tactical investigation will yield results.

"It could also be someone eventually will realize the seriousness of the matter will report to the police with information," said Pettersen.

As someone who spends a good amount of time reading the news on the internet, I well know what 4chan is. 4chan may be the birthplace of LOLcats and numerous memes that go around the internet, but it's also a cesspool of ridiculousness and shock. It's not too wild of an idea that the original threat may have actually been posted by someone in town, but this follow-up threat was something continued from a random user on 4chan.

As far as the internet intelligence that Kripos is undertaking, I wonder what legal powers they have. Norway is said to have some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world, but it is reasonable that in the interest of investigating crime, Norwegian intelligence agencies may have access to quite a lot of data. If the issue is completely local, there is a good chance they will find out who did it, especially if the perpetrator has no clue what they're doing or how to anonymize their identity on the internet... Norway isn't big, so if they have an IP address, they could much more reasonably find out whose it was than could one in a much bigger country like the U.S.

I wonder what the outcome will be of this, and particularly for 4chan should it manage to be a frequent source of irritation for the police here.

Posted by:

Ryan