Government officials say ‘Homeland’ inspired the recent bomb threats that shut down Los Angeles schools.
New York City public schools received bomb threats on Monday but, unlike Los Angeles, the school officials dismissed the email threats and kept schools open. In fact, NYC public school officials considered the email threats as part of a hoax and the perpetrator was a fan of the Showtime drama Homeland.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYC Police Commissioner Bill Braton noted that the creator of the viral email threats most likely watched Homeland.
“The instigator of the threat may be a ‘Homeland’ fan,” Bratton told reporters. “Basically, watching ‘Homeland’ episodes that it mirrors.”
Even though the email threat was traced to an IP address in Germany, the sender could have easily hid his location.
“There has been some initial reporting that it may have come from an IP address out of Germany. We are doing that attribution now back to possibly Europe, where the source of this threat may have come from,” Mike McCaul (R-TX), House Homeland Security Committee chairman, told MSNBC’s Brian Williams. “[S]o we don’t, again, know the source of the threat itself or how credible, but we do know that the terrorists have looked at exploiting this means of social media as a device to shut things down.”
The fifth season of Homeland is set in Germany and centers around the topic of cyber terrorism. Although no episodes deal with bombing schools, the show’s plot lines often mirror real world events.
