The “credible” threat that caused the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to close all schools on Tuesday was sent from cock.li, the “meme” e-mail host that also provides e-mail services for 8chan, the 4chan splinter site. School officials in New York and Los Angeles reportedly both received threats from madbomber@cock.li but only LAUSD took it seriously. All 640,000 LAUSD students were unable to attend classes on Tuesday.

NYPD Chief William Bratton told local reporters that his agency did not take the threat seriously in part because of how Allah was spelled in the message.

“The language in the e-mail would lead us to believe that this is not a jihadist initiative,” he said. “…That would be incredible to think that any jihadist would not spell Allah with a capital ‘A.'”

On Twitter, the NYPD continued:

"We are very comfortable that this is not a credible threat…concerned with people overreacting to it," says @CommissBratton

— NYPD NEWS (@NYPDnews) December 15, 2015

Vincent Canfield, the founder of cock.li said:

While people that abuse cock.li are actually the scum of this site and waste so much of my time, it’s amusing that an administration can take a few E-mails and shut down a school district of hundreds of thousands of students as a result. This is an administration problem and the fact that NYC didn’t close schools it wasn’t a “credible” threat is especially telling of the subjectivity that goes into making sweeping decisions like this that effect [sic] countless people.

We live in an age where anonymous messages can be sent with extreme ease (not just through cock.li). When someone uses a meme E-mail provider to threaten your organization, pulling the plug on all students and wasting over 1,800 combined YEARS of student-classroom time is a PR stunt and another example of officials employing security theater to make their students and parents feel safe. This cannot be demonstrated clearer than the fact that when something like this happens, and copycat threats inevitably come soon after, the same response is not deployed.

All of this over from an E-mail from a meme email provider. Sorry for the political E-mail, hopefully this situation adds more kek to your day than it has added me stress.

It seems like the NYPD knows what’s going on, the LAUSD, that’s another embarrassing story.

Source: All LA schools shut down over message sent from 8chan’s e-mail host, cock.li | Ars Technica