More than a year before the deadly shooting at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga., the FBI told the sheriff in a neighboring county of school shooting threats that a student was believed to have posted on the internet chat site Discord. An investigator interviewed the student, who was 13, for under 10 minutes, and came away saying he could not determine whether the teen had made the threats. His supervisor said the teenager would be monitored. Now, that teen is accused of carrying out the rampage that killed two students and two teachers. His earlier encounter with the police has raised questions on whether more aggressive intervention then could have prevented the deadly shooting. Cybersecurity experts say that the Jackson County Sheriff’s office gave up too quickly and that the handling of the case underscores a lack of training and expertise among rank-and-file officers in the nation’s 18,000 police agencies. Those officers often the first line of investigation into online threats of violence, working in an ever-shifting universe of apps and chat rooms.
Seeking information from social media platforms has become routine for police agencies, who use it to piece together timelines and behavioral profiles. Instagram, YouTube and TikTok have divisions dedicated to responding to law enforcement inquiries and complying with subpoenas that officers have obtained for user account information. The Georgia investigator did not seek such information. “If I had subpoena power, which law enforcement officers do, with a very high degree of confidence I would be able to identify who the author of those threats was,” said Paul Raffile, a cyber-intelligence analyst. Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum County, defended the investigation. “We have somebody here that specializes in that kind of stuff,” she said. “We investigated this crime in May of ’23 every way it could be investigated at that time.” Mangum challenged criticism that arresting the teenager in 2023 would have prevented the new shooting. “I just wish the media would stop trying to blame people for this boy doing this,” she said. “If we had charged him last year, it wasn’t going to keep him from being in a school.” The FBI receives thousands of tips a day and refers many to state and local agencies. “We cannot pretend this is not the cyber age,” said John Bandler of John Jay College for Criminal Justice, a co-author of “Cybercrime Investigations: A Comprehensive Resource for Everyone.” “We can’t be in an era where we call local law enforcement and they say, ‘Sorry, we don’t do cyber.’”
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