The police in Britain have credited a group of young Internet users with alerting them to a Web posting by a 16-year-old who said he planned to attack his high school with “arson and other forms of violence,” enabling officers to arrest the teenager as he approached the school carrying a knife, matches and a plastic can of what the police described as “flammable liquid…”
In the Attleborough case, the teenager’s use of a Web forum to announce his plan appears to have been the step that made it possible for the attack to be foiled.
Still more notable, the first alert to the police in Norfolk, the largely rural county where Attleborough is located, came in a telephone call from a 21-year-old student in Montreal, more than 3,200 miles away, after he read the posting threatening the school attack while eating his breakfast in a university dormitory.
Only 50 minutes elapsed between that call and the arrest of the youth outside the school, according to a timeline drawn up by J.P. Neufeld, the Montreal student, who said he drew on his own computer records and the accounts given to him by the Norfolk police. In that time, Mr. Neufeld said by telephone on Friday, two other people browsing on the same Web site, newgrounds.com, which is used for sharing music files and user-created animations, provided the information that enabled the police to identify the school that was the target of the planned attack, and the would-be attacker…
A police spokesman, Superintendent Katie Elliott, credited the arrest to Mr. Neufeld and the other Web browsers who provided warning of the attack. “It goes to show that things written on the Internet can be viewed across the world,” she said, “and we thank the person who has read this and done something about it.”
Credit to the student in Montreal for acting upon his understanding of what he read. And credit to the coppers in Norfolk for paying attention and responding.
The Geithner plan has now been 
