Emailed Threats Less Crazy Than Snail Mail 113
SoyChemist writes "Psychologists at the University of Nebraska have read 300 threatening letters and 99 angry emails to members of Congress. They concluded that the authors of the electronic messages show less signs of serious mental illness, but they are more profane and disorganized. The report was published in the September issue of the Journal of Forensic Sciences."
Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
A duh to go please.. (Score:5, Insightful)
To sit down, find an envelope, and actually put 35 cents on the thing requires more forethought and commitment than firing off an email. It also takes at least several minutes to do, so there will be a bit more composition of thought than in an email.
Email can be a much more heat of the moment thing, as evidenced frequently by this forum. I guarantee that if replying to this thread, or even this forum required me to mail an envelope it would not have happened.
Re:A duh to go please.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Its not uncommon to see discussion threads weeks/months after an original article appears.
The main difference however is the amount of filtering due to space constraints.
The point is, its not uncommon.
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Goatse trolling -- scratch-and-sniff style!
Stamps are 41 cents now. (Score:4, Insightful)
Dropping off a letter in a different city is an easier method than anon proxies for most people.
duh indeed (Score:1, Funny)
Re:A duh to go please.. (Score:5, Funny)
To say nothing of the time it would take them to look up current postal rates...
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if they were threatening over half of congress, then renting a machine, and getting the bulk rate, on a post card, could get the price below a $.20
Re:A duh to go please.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Sanity and functioning aren't the same thing. You can be completely insane, but wholly functional. Think Adolph Hitler -- he might have been totally nuts, but if he were living today I doubt very much he'd have any trouble opening or using an e-mail account.
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First, nice Godwin
Second...unlikely, I don't think any historians really think Hitler was completely insane, perhaps a small deviation from the norm, but it's quite difficult for a truly insane person to convince others to follow them. How many people in the loony bins were even decent leaders before getting there? Probably very few, course I'm neither a historian nor a psychologist so that's just my basic knowledge.
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This is just a pet peeve... (Score:1)
I could understand it if it were a non-Romanized name (Mao Zedong? Mao Tse-tung?). But come ON. Adolph? Why not just make it Adolphus of the House of Schicklgruber?
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why oh why oh why? (Score:5, Funny)
well duh (Score:5, Funny)
Cap'n Obvious (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Cap'n Obvious (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cap'n Obvious (Score:4, Funny)
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Stop linking to shitty sources! (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent up (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. The article is typical blogodreck, and links to a blog.
The research itself has serious problems. These weren't samples from incoming mail. They were samples from Capitol Police files, which means they'd already been considered potential threats by at least three people.
Consider what happens to incoming e-mail at a congressional office. First, it's spam-filtered automatically, so any bulk threat e-mailed to every member of Congress probably was dumped at the filters. Then some junior person reads it and sorts it. (The people who do that job for the White House are unpaid interns.) The basic sort is "opinion", which is just tallied; "casework", constituents of that Congressman who want some specific help; "office matters", something that the office staff actually needs to deal with, and "threats". The threats may get a quick look by a more senior staffer, who decides whether they need to go to the Capitol Police. Then, at the Capitol Police end, someone has to decide if it's worth opening a case file for the letter.
So a study based on Capitol Police files reflects what gets through the automatic and manual filtering. The study may say more about staff thinking than the incoming content.
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You condosconsing prock
Yrs
angery Slishdoter
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From the Article (Score:2, Funny)
My armchair analysis (Score:5, Interesting)
The results were that postal threats were more extreme than email threats. This is hardly surprising. The barrier to writing a snail mail letter is higher, so this inherently selects for the more passionate people (whether truly concerned about an issue, or incredibly angry, or truly dangerously threatening). Writing an email is so easy that just about anyone will do it if they are slightly bothered by something. As such, I would expect email to, statistically, have fewer of the "fringe cases" of people who are being truly mentally ill, and more "normal people" just venting (in a profane and disorganized way, apparently).
I do wonder a bit about the sample size, mind you. I would have thought that there would be far more emails than postal letters sent to members of congress (and far more 'threatening' ones, too), but instead they analyzed more conventional letters than email. I wonder if this is a result of the relative frequency of the two types of threats, or if the researchers had some other reason to focus on postal mail.
Easier to trace. (Score:2, Interesting)
Snail mail is much much harder to trace than email. Therefore, the most extreme nutjobs are smarter: they realize that it's easier to be anonymous with snail mail than email.
We all know here that tracing an IP and then bullying an ISP for an identity is quite easy and becoming easier everyday.
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http://www.google.com/search?q=send+anonymous+email [google.com]
For example:
http://www.sendanonymousemail.net/ [sendanonymousemail.net]
That's going to be a lot less traceable than some paper you actually bought.
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Yeah but that is harder than catching a bus to another city and dropping your anonymous letter threat in a mail box.
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As you noted, emails lend themselves to rapid sending. However, I think it is more than just a case of how much you have to want to send the message involved. I think it is also partially the failure of email to have a way of retracting the message after cooler heads have prevailed.
With email, you don't have five minutes to rethink the letter while you're licking the envelope. Similarly, you don't have to spend as much time composing an email. (I'm assuming most of the snail mail messages are written
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Time (Score:3, Funny)
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It's not like Congress would be doing anything else otherwise.
Dear Congress, (Score:5, Funny)
Love,
The Associate
Snail Mail is cheaper and seems "more serious" (Score:3, Insightful)
The truly paranoid probably don't trust computers.
The functional-but-unstable ones probably heard that snail-mail and faxes are taken more seriously than email. That was true back in the late '90s. I don't know if it's still true now.
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Ever been to a 9/11 truther site?
Or a site claiming Iraq was involved in 9/11? (Score:2)
Why the discrepancy in amounts? (Score:1)
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Oh I can.
Emails can be traced back to the sender. If I was going to threaten someone, a "real" letter would have much more impact and be non-tracable. (Unless of course you write your address on the top, in which case the proof of "crazy" has already been made.)
'corse[sic] you'd have to take a few basic precautions: never, ever touch the paper/envelope. Use a common type of printer (no handwritten stuff for analys
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I can't imagine the total amount of emails was smaller than the total amount of letters...
Oh I can.
Emails can be traced back to the sender. If I was going to threaten someone, a "real" letter would have much more impact and be non-tracable. (Unless of course you write your address on the top, in which case the proof of "crazy" has already been made.)
'corse[sic] you'd have to take a few basic precautions: never, ever touch the paper/envelope. Use a common type of printer (no handwritten stuff for analysis, naturally) and don't lick the envelope or stamp, so they've got no DNA. Post it where there are no surveillance cameras, preferably at night to reduce the chance of witnesses.
Have I forgotten anything?
Nah. Post it in broad daylight, when it's crowded, along with two or five more letters.
Look busy and in a hurry; no-one will remember you, and even if you're recorded, what, you posted several letters. Can they find them all?
If you should send it at night, any witness would be more likely to remember you. If you send it during the rush hour, though many would see you, no-one would care.
OTOH, use Tor. Open a gmail or similar free account. Send a threat. KTNXBYE!
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Premeditation (Score:3, Insightful)
Letters require more forethought and more steps (finding envelope and stamp, going to mailbox, etc.). They require premeditation. Snail mail letters are also harder to trace and thus less likely to result in a visit from the FBI.
Someone with a real mental delusion, making real threats is obviously more likely to use snail mail when compared with the average angry constituent who just wants to let out their frustration.
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Snail mail does have advantages... (Score:2)
And on another note; only with snail mail can you take the time and loving effort to compose it entirely from words and letters clipped from a selection of gun magazines, to give it that little extra something....
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Totally offtopic, but related to your .sig: I only have 3 degrees of separation (maybe even 2) from George W.
Not really something to brag about, but funny how it seems to work: I'm not even an American.
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However, the possible reasons you point out don't apply to the post that was actually modded down. Neither do I feel that using the word 'redundant' twice, the way I did, was actually redundant (ironic though that would be).
That makes sense... (Score:2)
our tax dollars (Score:1)
The art of letter writing is not dead (Score:2)
Probably something we all know in our hearts. When we write emails (including non-threatening ones) they tend to be more impulsive - stream of conciousness stuff. Whereas when people write proper letters they think about what they want to say. Even if they are crazy.
Simple Reason (Score:2)
Duh (Score:2)
Nebraska tax dollars (Score:2, Insightful)
What if ... (Score:2)
Self Selection (Score:2)
This study is a tautology.
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Try "intractable" some time and watch the fur fly.
The Office (Score:2)
Everyone is (Score:1)
What abot age of the sender? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of the people I've known who rant on with horrifying opinions from within their own delusional, disconnected world, there's a sharp tendency that the more loony ones were older. Not always, but there's a trend that way. I don't know if it's due to too many years of witnessing and magnifying perceived falsehoods, early onset dementia, a build-up of heavy metals in their systems, or what causes their buildup of paranoid ramblings to burst forth, but I think there's a strong age factor at work here, and that the snail mails are much more likely to come from older, and therefore more hard-core lunatics than the email, which more often originates from young lunatics-in-training who are not yet as comfortable and confident in their insanity.
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We're too old and dumb to figure out that there's no point in trying anyway and also tend towards long sentences when angry.
It's a Matter of Focus (Score:3, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:2)
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It's what your composition teacher always said (Score:2)
If you are disorganized how do you expect to effectively express your serious mental illness?
But... (Score:1)
Potentially flawed method (Score:2, Insightful)
From the abstract: "[letters and emails] were randomly selected from the United States Capitol Police investigative case files and compared." [Emphasis mine]
Handwriting (Score:2)
Of course, the criteria used to determine relative sanity (or other factors) in these letters is largely subjective anyway. What qualifies as profanity, for example? So while the study is not invalid because of
Simple explanation (Score:4, Funny)
And it's obvious: the glue on envelopes causes mental illness.
Excuse me, I have to put on an eyepatch and commandeer a freighter now. I'm trying to slow down global warming.
Avast!
University Of Nebraska (Score:2)
Spam threats (Score:2, Funny)
Soft tabs cheap, buy in bulk. We will make your penis explode.
Hi, my name is Courtney. I live in Ukraine. Marry me or the bitch dies.
Seriously, email threats creep me out.