Seems to me like she did the airport security and her nation a favor. They now know they can handle what appears to be a major security threat. Bloody quickly as well. Give that girl a medal for keeping the police on their toes !
(Then give her a thorough talking to)
Ah, to be young again.
Well, actually, I would have said just the opposite: now they think they can handle a major security threat. But she wasn’t trying to blow anything up–she was just standing around, by the shuttle buses. She didn’t run away or try to evade them, they didn’t have to chase her.
If she had been genuinely trying to blow something up, she had plenty of opportunity at any point during the morning. She could have simply blown up the information booth, for starters, or the shuttle buses, or the gift shop (dunno how far into Logan she could have gotten before there’s a genuine security checkpoint, not just a staffed information booth).
But it takes time for security to show up with those sub-machine guns, and during the interval between the attendant spotting her and calling security, and security actually showing up, she could have done whatever she wanted with her bomb, run outside and toss herself under a plane, whatever.
(I dont think she would have made it under a plane).
Up to here you are just proving that a threat can happen anywhere that security is not present, and security is not in these places because they decide there is nothing worth protecting.
If she just wanted to blow up some folk she could have gone straight to McDonald’s or the cinema and taking out 100 or so people.
Unless you are interested in having security and armed police covering every square meter of public land 24/7 you cannot protect against a national security alert in any better way than the police did. When the got there they did well.
It seems to me that the phrases “Lighten up,” “get over it,” and similar lines show a severe unwillingness to accept personal responsibility.
Especially for the past six years, how does someone get the idea that “testing” airport security is a good idea? And what the heck has happened to the prank culture at MIT? These people know not to attempt stunts that piss off security personnel.
The Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED stickies did not look like bombs. The available images of the souped-up hoodie* she was wearing might possibly maybe look more like a bomb than the LED signs did, but it doesn’t really look like the real thing. I’m going to guess this was not an intentional hoaxing.
Still, I wouldn’t wear that hoodie to an airport.
*note that the hoodie, which is clearly sleeved, is erroneously referred to as a “vest” in the caption.
I might buy that, except that they’re also reporting she had play-doh in her hands as well, with wires sticking out of it. If that’s true, I can’t see this as anything but a hoax. That can’t possibly have anything to do with the light-up hoodie - I can only figure it was to spook people into thinking it was an explosive.
This just in via Boing Boing:
“FYI, friends at MIT say she wears the hoodie on a regular basis- it’s just unfortunate that she had it on while trying to pick a friend up at the airport. MIT students don’t really do mornings, or worry about what they’re wearing, so I can’t imagine she’d even think about her clothes before heading out to pick up a friend at the airport before 8am.”
Hmmm…after looking at those pictures, I’m beginning to lean towards the “hysterical overreaction” camp. The “device” was a breadboard with 9 LEDs in the form of a star. Oooo, really bomb-like. I don’t know what the story is with the playdough, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were something like therapy for RMS or something like that.
This doesn’t absolve the girl from being a total dumbass for wearing something like that to an airport, but I doubt very much that she was actually intending to commit a bomb hoax.
Having seen those pictures, I have to revise my opinion. I doubt that this was a hoax bomb – that’s very clearly a pretty common and obvious piece of Experimenter Board with only LEDs and resistors on it. It’s clearly intended to light up and show off that star. I don’t even see enough components to make this do anything as exotic as blinking on and ogff, or sequencing the LEDs. And the play-doh is not attached to it. The initial reports suggested that she had a PC board attached to Play-Doh, with wires in the Play Doh, intending it to look like a bomb. This does NOT look like that.
I think we have here a case of a young student who wanted to show off her lighted sweatshirt board to an arriving friend, and didn’t think how it would look to non-technical people.
If she wanted it to look like a bomb, she would’ve done it very differently. It WOULD’VE looked like a bomb.
And anyone who wanted to sneak a bomb in probably would’ve gone to pains to make it NOT look like a bomb. At the very least, they’d have worn it inside the sweatshirt.
But it was still a stupid thing to do, especially bringing along the Play Doh. (Although leaving it home would not have helped her)
I flew from Seattle to Boston this past Saturday.
I arrived at the airport a little over an hour ahead of time, as usual, checked in, and proceeded through security to the appointed gate, where I boarded my plane. Routine travel; nothing out of the ordinary.
Maybe five minutes later, a woman appeared at my seat with a bewildered expression: her boarding pass had the same seat assignment as mine. Somewhat out of the ordinary, but not, as the experienced traveler will recognize, an atypical airline screwup.
The woman decided not to make a fuss, and sat in the empty seat next to me. After a few minutes, of course, the passenger with that seat assignment arrived. Flight attendants were summoned to deal with the situation, whereupon closer inspection of the woman’s boarding pass revealed that not only did it have my seat assignment, it didn’t even have her name on it: it had mine.
This passenger – a small, middle-aged Korean woman, not that it matters particularly – was issued a boarding pass at the airline counter with my name (a heavy-stock agent-printed pass, mind you, not one of the flimsies from a self-service kiosk), and then she got through security and onto the airplane with it. She had no boarding pass with her own name, only a printed itinerary.
Anyway, after a few minutes of consideration, flight attendants elected to leave the woman in the seat next to me, and found another seat for the second passenger. This was, from a practical standpoint, not a big deal; there was neither a significant delay nor further trouble. Our flight departed more or less on time.
But: How is it that the airline was able to issue two separate boarding passes for the same traveler? And even more importantly, HOW THE FUCK DID THIS WOMAN GET ALL THE WAY ONTO THE AIRPLANE WITHOUT A VALID BOARDING PASS?
Practical considerations aside, the implications here are, I think it’s fair to say, rather troubling.
So you’ll have to forgive me when, given my first-hand experience of TSA officials being unable to handle the FUCKING BASICS, I react to any assertions of their competence with an aggressively sarcastic eyeroll. Yeah, somebody shows up with something that looks a lot like a bomb HANGING ON THE OUTSIDE OF THEIR CLOTHING, and security springs into action. Way to go. Whoop te fucking doo. Color me confident.
Missed the edit window. Add this to my post–
ETA: Details of the device were added to the thread while I was writing the above. Amend my statement in the final paragraph to “something that could potentially be interpreted to be an explosive device by somebody who doesn’t have a rudimentary knowledge of electronics.”
I’m beginning to think you’re right. The LEDs were in the shape of a star, which of course is her name.
But she’s a sophomore course 6, and that’s the best she can do for her sweatshirt? She damn well should have been able to get the lights to sequence or blink. She should be embarrassed by that art, not proud of it.
I’m still waiting to hear more about the play-doh though.
Yep. Clueless, thoughtless, rather dumb. But not a hoax terrorist. I feel kinda bad for her. I hope she doesn’t get a lot of jail time.
Yes, that’s clearly the most likely scenario. She went into an airport, wearing a sweatshirt that had a vague resemblance to a bomb (though not completely) and was rolling Play Dough around her hands that had wires sticking in it. What part of the therapy requires the puddy to have wires sticking out of it?
Cite for the “wires in the putty” claim?
The more I read on this, the more I think that the only thing this girl is guilty of is not being all that good at breadboarding electronics. I think there’s about a 0% chance that she was actively trying to hoax anyone and about a 100% chance that she just had no clue.
Yeah, so it seems. She’s too young to know that the C students are the ones in charge of security, and that she’s not surrounded by the MIT crowd out here in the real world. Still, she’s lucky someone didn’t put a round in her.
I agree, she was pretty stupid for wearing that to an airport. I’m glad I stressed to my kids at an early age that airports were one place where having a sense of humor could get you arrested or killed.
But the more I thought about this, the more the official response bothered me. The common statement is, “How could she have done this post 9/11?” I must have missed the part of 9/11 where young women blew up airports with bombs strapped to the front of their hoodies.
Just wanted to say I’m not all that happy about our society thinking the appropriate dynamic is to have silly college students be happy they didn’t get killed by machinegun-wielding cops. My personal preference would be to assume the risk of being an innocent bystander who gets injured/killed by a sweatshirt bomb, than as a bystander/target of an over-reacting cop with an unrealistic sense of what constitutes a threat warranting deadly force.
Just going on record to register that this is not MY personal preference. If someone dies due to their own stupidity to keep me and my family safe, I’m pretty much okay with that.