indessed roscivs

Some of you may recall my previous post entitled, Boston: We Put The Error in Terror. Well, they’ve managed to do it again.

Newest on their list of items-mistakenly-thought-to-be-a-bomb (which includes Aqua Teen Hunger Force blinkenlights and a traffic counter): a solderless breadboard, friend to hobbyist electronics geeks the world over.

Here’s the story: naive MIT nerd has a sweatshirt that says “Socket to me” and “Course VI” (referring to MIT’s Electrical Engineering major)^[1], along with a breadboard with a 9V battery and some LEDs in the shape of a star (her name is “Star”) that she made “to stand out on career day”. She goes to the airport to pick up her boyfriend who’s flying in, asks a question about the incoming flight at the information desk, then heads back outside the airport to wait for his arrival. The result?

State troopers with machine guns surrounded her at a traffic island in front of the terminal, ready to blast her head off.

“She was immediately told to stop, to raise her hands and not to make any movement, so we could observe all her movements to see if she was trying to trip any type of device,” [Major Scott Pare of the State Police] said. “Had she not followed the protocol, we might have used deadly force. … She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.” ^[2]

Currently, Star is being charged with “possessing a hoax device [and] could face up to five years in prison or a $5,000 fine, if convicted”^[3] for wearing her breadboard sweatshirt to the airport. Fortunately, even though the Boston police force has difficulties with these “bomb or not” puzzlers, legal experts don’t think a sensible jury will.

“The odds of obtaining a conviction are slim,” said legal analysts, including Harvey Silvergate, a criminal defense lawyer. “I don’t think you could get 12 out of 12 jurors to agree this student actually meant for people to think she had a bomb,” Silvergate said.^[4]

Now, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to wear a breadboard with LEDs to an airport, especially in paranoid Boston, even if you’re just there for a few minutes to pick up somebody. If I were a police officer there, I’d recommend that she take off the sweatshirt because it might look to the untrained eye to be something suspicious. She’d probably say, “Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!” and a potential crisis would be averted.

But “we almost used deadly force” and “lucky to be in a cell instead of the morgue”?! Absolutely ridiculous. But what’s even more ridiculous are the people saying how the police did the right thing—what if it really had been a bomb? “A suicide bomber wouldn’t wear the thing on their shirt, they’d hide it under their shirt or in a bag,” is the obvious answer. Aha, but then the evil terrorists could simply put some LEDs on their shirts and then nobody would be suspicious!, cry the police apologists.

The fact of the matter is that anybody can already walk around an airport with a suitcase or a backpack full of explosives without anybody being suspicious. If somebody’s walking around with what appear to be explosives in plain sight, when they could be hidden in their backpack, then even if you walk up to them and say, “Excuse me, but what you have might be mistaken for explosives, could you please put them in your backpack?”—they’re not being less suspicious than just hiding them in the first place! It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

But maybe Boston is right. If it’s not an American flag, it’s probably bomb.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.