Stupidity rocks Boston

[prusik]

I was going to blog about the LED displays intended to plug Aqua Teen Hunger Force that have been in place in 10 cities for over two weeks now, but have caused a crisis only in Boston. However, Uncle Jim at Making Light has already done a good job of pointing out how stupid this is.

Ok, perhaps someone got overanxious and called it into the police. The police have to treat it seriously when they first get word. That's understandable. However, once the police determine that it's not a threat, I don't understand why they can't just stand down. As near as I can tell, what happened was they figured these things were not bombs and then proceeded to treat them as if they were and as if there were a viable terrorist threat anyways. I totally fail to see how this is helpful.

They determined the boxes had no explosives in them, and then blew them up anyways. Actually, I'm not sure that they determined the boxes had no explosives in them first. But that's screwy either way. If they knew there were no explosives, why blow them up? If they didn't know, wouldn't they have figured it out rather quickly?

If WBUR quoted the authorities correctly, they were reduced to saying that these boxes "had elements in common with improvised explosive devices." This is sort of like saying, "Terrorists breath air. Human beings breath air. Ohmigod! We have to treat all human beings as terrorists!" Actually, now that I've put it this way, I guess they're actually being consistent (even if the logic is faulty).

We seem terminally incapable of saying that this was a false alarm and there is nothing to worry about. Even after Turner made its press release, the police seemed unwilling to admit that there was no nefarious plot involved and Mayor Menino was still threatening jail time for those involved with this "hoax." This is an awful lot of tough talk for a bunch of signs which displayed cartoon characters with LEDs.

And that's the other thing that bugs me looking at the news coverage. It's now a meme that this incident was some sort of "hoax." This is not a hoax. A hoax requires deception. There was no deception here. If those who placed those boxes claimed they were bombs or if the boxes did bomb-like things, then this would be a hoax. As it is, the only people who thought these might be bombs were the people who found them and discovered they weren't. Just because they jumped to a wrong initial conclusion does not mean some outside agent deceived them. They deceived themselves. That's not a hoax. That's a somewhat embarrassing valuable life lesson which we should all learn from.

Update: OMG, they've arrested someone. At least Fox News is calling it a "marketing ploy" rather than a "hoax." The negative connotation is still there but at least they're no longer implying that anyone wanted anyone to think the LED displays were bombs. I'm still a bit sad that they're still calling those displays "suspicious devices." One would have thought they would have stopped being suspicious once everyone knew exactly what they did.

OTOH, we're talking about people who determined there was no threat and then shut down the transportation infrastructure anyways, just in case. It's sad to see our leader lead with the same reasoning that causes people to propagate chain letters and urban legends.

Comments

[elizabear.livejournal.com]

I don't think they overreacted.

As my friend rufinia said: "The bomb squads are doing their jobs. Things that may or may not be explosive were placed in areas where they should not be. The bomb squad's job is to make the thing go away, as safely as possible. If they looked at one of these devices and said, "Doesn't look like a bomb..." and then it blew up, that's when they f--k up. "

And a comment to her post said: "Putting on my paranoid hat (the finest commercial grade tinfoil available) speaking to a friend who worked in CT (and still consults), he said that often hoaxes have been used to desensitize the public. 'Prank' often enough, and get a higher body count later."


Yes, *now* we know the boxes were harmless and had been in place for a while before being reported, but I hope this doesn't mean people who see something like that in the future just write it off as nothing to be concerned about. If they do, at some point that attitude is likely to bite us in the butt.

[avocadovpx.livejournal.com]

According to Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/31/aqua_teen_hunger_for.html), someone is now selling T-shirts with a pic of the cartoon character (including the middle-finger salute that is being photoshopped out of some news footage) with the caption "ATHF [Aqua Teen Hunger Force] is the bomb."

I'll be interested to hear whether the boxes actually were distributed in other cities (http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6384356,00.html), and not taken as threats there. (via Uncle Jim) Has the ritual passing of blame started?

[prusik.livejournal.com]

I don't think we actually disagree. You're saying that the bomb squad should get involved and people need to call in suspicious packages. I agree. All I'm saying is that we should get better at spotting suspicious packages and once it's clear that a package is not suspicious, people should not, just in case, behave as if it were anyways. Otherwise, we get the sort of fear mongering that leads people to pass on stupid urban legends about people's kidneys being stolen.

My beef isn't that the bomb squad got involved. That was correct. My beef is that instead of standing down once we realized there were no bombs, the powers that be continued to amp up the panic level in the public. They treated the LED signs as if they were real bombs after they knew that the signs were just signs.

(As a comment to Making Light pointed out, they had to realize it had no explosives in it before they blew it up. What if it had been a nuclear, or biological threat? Blowing it up then would have been a really bad idea. If I were being cynical, I'd say they were destroying evidence of the non-bomb.)

Did you see pictures of the supposed "bombs?" They really are just LED signs. Not only did we know now that they were harmless. Lots of people have known for weeks that they were harmless. This is a picture of one of the signs uploaded on January 15th (http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanderlin/358742603/).

Yes, this doesn't mean they can't also have explosives. So if someone calls it in, the bomb squad has to get involved. I totally agree (as I originally wrote) that when they first received the phone calls, the police absolutely must take them seriously and treat them as credible threats. However, once they realize that there is no threat, I think shutting down Boston's transportation infrastructure, just in case, is an overreaction.

This sort of behavior just encourages terrorism. It lowers the bar on what has to happen in order to shut a city down.

I also have a beef that people are referring to this as a "hoax." This implies that Turner wanted people to think their LED signs were bombs. I obviously can't speak for them, but it seems to me that they wanted people to watch their cartoon, not to think they had placed bombs in 10 different cities across the country. (Whether this was a wise marketing campaign is a whole other discussion.)

I can not buy, at all, the argument that Turner did this to desensitize people to the notion of actual bombs. If anyone is desensitizing the public, it is the powers that be, who insist on treating this as a grade A security incident and perpetuating the myth that this is some sort of "hoax." Once they recognized that this was not a threat, instead of shutting down the city, they could pointed out that there was no threat, thanked the people who called the signs in, and reiterated the importance that they do so. What desensitizes the public is when there is a big production over a non-bomb. The way to fight this is to not have the big production over a non-bomb. Why do we want to make things easy for the terrorists?

(As it is, they've now arrest someone for putting up LED signs. I hope they have to prove that he intended to make people think they were bombs in order to convict him because they'll never be able to do that. We don't get more free by treating people as terrorists, just in case.)

BTW, I believe as a marketing ploy, Nintendo had once mailed reviewers packages which they did intend for the recipients to think were bombs. That would qualify as a hoax (and stupid).

[dfable.livejournal.com]

We've had sightings of the "Bombs" in Philly. They showed the finger. I thought it was pretty funny. They also showed some red wires coming out of what looked like a rolled piece of dynamite at the bottom. It did look kind of threatening. Kind of like, F.U. America. Still, I was a bit annoyed that the media kept going on and on about the thing. We need to be alert, no doubt, but when does common sense come into play? Are we all so afraid now, that even a prank is going to work us into a tizzy?