Via BuzzMachine<\/a>, the story<\/a> of a media sting that went very bad (or actually, very good). Two Middle Eastern men tried to charter a helicopter in St. Louis. They acted suspiciously, the FBO operator called the cops, the FBI showed up and cuffed the men – and then<\/p>\n …the FBI verified that the two men were employed by NBC New York and were on assignment to get a story of how easy it is to charter a helicopter for a terrorist attack.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Actually, it appears that it isn’t.<\/p>\n I strongly believe that we – the alert citizens – are the first line of defense (as opposed to offense, which let’s leave to the military, OK?) against terrorist attacks. Points to the alert charter staff, and points to the police and FBI who responded quickly.<\/p>\n Others are less sanguine about our ability to stop attacks. But an alert, informed, and un-panicked citizenry – with responsive police on the other end of the phone – seems to me like the most effective tool we could have. And this story shows how it ought to work.<\/p>\n Be interesting to see if NBC makes a story out of it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Via BuzzMachine, the story of a media sting that went very bad (or actually, very good). Two Middle Eastern men tried to charter a helicopter in St. Louis. They acted suspiciously, the FBO operator called the cops, the FBI showed up and cuffed the men – and then …the FBI verified that the two men […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}