She wasn’t a threat, but cops shouldn’t have to waste their time on a wackly college girl to determine she wasn’t.
It seems muldoonthief already started a thread about this. (and someone started a Pit Thread too). Actually, I was going to start a Pit thread concerning what I felt was a serious over-reaction by security. “She’s lucky to be alive”??? Holy crap, have we become that frigging paranoid that it is better to kill someone on the flimsiest suspicion rather than think something through?
Talk about people not doing their jobs properly, why didn’t the Information Booth employee, in a calm manner, ask the young woman to stay right there, for her own good? He should have spoken with her and said precisely what he was going to do. He then could have alerted the proper security personnel about a woman who was right there at the booth as opposed to “hey someone’s wandering around carrying a bomb”. If the woman ran off in a panic then the odds are much greater that the person is a threat and is more of a cause for the use of deadly force.
As others have said, the real danger is having nut case fanatics get on board an airplane.
Why not? The cops aren’t “wasting their time” in assessing threats - that’s what they’re paid to do.
Or are we all threats until we can prove otherwise?
But the Glasgow attack this year was aimed at the terminal building.
That said, the likelihood of a real bomb looking like something in an episode of The A Team is slim - but I can imagine that the cops, naturally paranoid these days, wouldn’t have time to make that judgement. I just hope the DA reacts sensibly.
It’s worth considering the possibility that the best place (from their POV) for terrorists to kill lots of people at an airport would be the security lines.
The Glasgow attack was stunning in its ineptitude.
If I was in charge of security, I’d pretty much cover my ass and bring the whole thing to the same conclusion.
I’d rather being questioned because I prompted the arrest of a girl with a circuit board and Playdo than be questioned about how this person was able to proceed all the way to ‘point x’ without being stopped.
If you read this article, the info booth worker did ask about the lights:
“Simpson walked away from the desk when the airport employee asked her about the device.”
True, she didn’t run away in a panic, but if she did just ignore the question and walk away, then I don’t see what the worker could have done other than call the police. I’m betting the run-of-the-mill airport workers have it drilled into them pretty thoroughly that they are not to attempt to restrain anyone who they think is a threat - just inform security and possibly keep them under observation.
If that’s the extent of her breadboard wiring skills in her second year of MIT, maybe MIT is not as upper-crust as they think.
By this point she should have been able to 1) set the resistors and LEDs flush with the board, 2) use a timing circuit to sequence them so that they light up in order, 3) have them finish their sequence by them all being lit, 4) hide the board under some kind of fabric so all that is visible on the outside is the LED star and 5) make it actually recognizable as a star from distances like five feet away.
Unless she didn’t want to. I mean, flashing lights through fabric is something a grandmother would buy at a souvenier shop. Showing the ‘works’ – especially if they’re crude – is ‘ironic’ and/or an ‘artistic statement’. Such a thing might be appreciated by her circle of friends. For example, I often wrap gifts in old sectional charts for friends who are into aviation. Once I had a friend who was into the Industrial/Indie scene and his Christmas present was wrapped in a paper grocery bag and decorated with globs of tape. If I were to see this girl on the street, wearing her breadboard, I’d appreciate the joke. (But obviously it’s not appropriate in an airport.)
If the person whose threat level has to be assessed is unwittingly causing concern, then I agree- surely you’re not implying that its ok for people to willfully and needlessly do questionable things like this for shits and giggles? Its a cops job to handle real problems, not ones invented as gags by bored coeds.
You mean your version of airport security would be to assume that people with real bombs only head for airplanes? So if someone’s walking around with something I think might be a bomb, or someone tells me they think might be a bomb, as a security person I should say, “Nope, they’re not headed for a plane, must not be a bomb.”
I don’t think it’s an overreaction at all. If I were the info desk personnel and someone came up to me wearing an odd electronic device over a cryptic picture of a person on fire, asked me, in effect, “When is this part of the terminal going to be full of people with their guard down?”, and walked away wordlessly when I asked about the device, I’d be on the horn in a nanosecond.
My observation was not a prescription for airport security. Instead, it was an observation as to what 9/11 should have us consider threats. And I would advocate a different cost/benefit analysis than is currently applied, where any amount of inconvenience to any number of people is okay so long as it can be argued that any additional increment of safety is obtained.
If anything, I mean that my idea of airport security - as well as security just about anyplace else, should reflect some minimum of common sense as to the magnitude of the threat. This person, carrying no baggage, seems to have been exactly the same threat standing outside of an airport terminal as a person standing along just about any street. Less of a threat than someone inside a bus or train station, or concert or dance performance, crowded restaurant, or countless other places.
I have no objection to security questioning her about something they considered somewhat suspicious/unusual. But nothing I’ve seen yet causes me to believe there was any reason to expect a risk existed that warranted having automatic weapons drawn.
It seems that outside of the first article, the playdoh has all but disappeared. Are we sure there ever actually was anything more then the breadboard?
Here’s an article from todays Boston Globe that mentions the Play-Doh. I don’t think it’s disappeared. Initial reports said something about wires sticking out of the Play-Doh, and that particular piece of info hasn’t shown up since.
Also from the above article - she was wearing the breadboard “hoping to attract prospective employers visiting MIT for a weeklong career fair.” Again, if that’s the best breadboarding she can do as a sophomore, she doesn’t deserve a job in EE.
As I’ve said, it seems clear to me that this wasn’t a hoax. She threw together this star thing pretty quickly – even with tape used as she did, LEDs and resistors tend to come out of those experimenter breadboards pretty easily, and I can’t believe a Course 6 student spent more than 5 minutes on that thing – attached it to her shirt, and went to pick up her boyfriend. She asked when his flight came in, then went out of the building, from the reports. No way, as I say, was this a bomb hoax. If she’d done this at MIT, or even in downtown Boston, nobody would’ve cared or noticed.
But she went to the airport, where people are alert and jittery, and I’ll bet she didn’t think at all about jow this would appear.
I’m still not sure how I feel about the reaction. Airport security folks ought to be alert and ought to respond to anything that sets off their mental alarms. But this wouldn’t have set off mental alarms at the Institute – it would’ve been immediately obvious to most people there what it was.
This is why they don’t want Hogwarts students practicing magic in front of the Muggles.
demonstrates that intelligence is not an absolute requirement to getting into MIT.
So this is what NadaHappyCamper was talking about!!! He was right all along!
Since she’s trying to be all impressive with her EE skills and get job offers, I’d have definitely hidden a breadboard wired as poorly as she did that one. Shit, I thought MIT was supposed to be all hard and only take the best, but damn. My grama could breadboard better than that.
Well that and the fact that it might ruin the illusion that MIT students are miles and miles above all other engineering students - especially when they do such a poor job of actually wiring their idiotic art-piece pranks.
If that was her goal in this case. If this was meant to be a private joke between her and her friend, then a crudely made device exposed to the world is more amusing than a hidden super-device.
Let’s say I was picking up certain friends at an airport, and I tell them I’m going to wear something distinctive on my head. Knowing that I like pork pie hats and that most people don’t wear them, they might expect me to wear one. This would be similar to expecting an MIT EE student to wear an impressive electronic device showing off that student’s prowess. Instead I wear a bald-head wig. My friends would find it funny, since they’re expecting a hat and I show up with something no one would reasonably be expected to wear. If you’re making a joke, it’s more effective to do the unexpected.
Now I haven’t been following this incident very closely. I’ve no idea if her idea was to be funny, or if she’s just a crappy thing-maker, or if she’s a crappy thing-maker who didn’t want to put holes in the hoodie she wears all the time, or if it was a last-minute idea that she came up with five minutes before she left for the airport and she just slapped it together as she drove to there. But assuming she’s an OK student and she had no intention to cause a fuss with airport security, then putting a crudely made device on the outside of her sweatshirt looks like a joke between friends to me.
Major Scott Pare of the Massachusetts State Police stated:
I agree with catsix as regards the crappiness of her project. It’s the kind of thing that you’d see in a Radio Shack “Electronics for Beginners” book, and one might be really proud if one’s 10-year-old kid made it. I agree that it would be marginally OK as irony, Johnny, but I doubt if it impressed “career day” recruiters.
I’m also rather wary of self-described “inventors”:
[I wonder what the project was for which she [“received a Congressional citation for her work in robotics”](Breaking News in Tulsa, Oklahoma)? AFAIK, although that honor usually rewards meaningful work or service to the community, the nomination / citation process can also be abused just to get someone a pretty certificate.]