They consisted of magnetic signs with blinking lights in the shape of a cartoon character.

And everyone knows that bombs have blinking lights on 'em. Every single movie bomb you've ever seen has a blinking light.

Triumph for Homeland Security, guys. Making America safe from blinky-lights

Wait, wait, wait. Are you sure this isn't Captain D's Aqua Agents? They have teens roaming around underwater righting wrongs.

If you're going to put up blinky promotional lights, they could at least plug Morel Orel.

First I've known about it!

I have no sympathy... the media did nothing to avert the Nightwatch mindset and promote old-fashioned (try Constitutional and Declaration of Independence--stuff like liberty, the pursuit of happiness, freedom of religion, habeas corpus, prevention of searches and seizures without warrants, freedom of speech, etc.) and now the same schnooks who promoted the fascist regime destroying the country and other parts of the world, pulls this stupid trick/blunder that gets Nightwatch negative attention....

I just listened to some of the news conference from earlier today. It was a parade of officials doing their best to congratulate themselves for a massive overreaction. It appears that they alerted everbody short of the Mounties, the Texas Rangers, and the Singapore Harbor Police because somebody called in a light with blinking boxes, that may have been there for weeks (that's not clear yet).

Now they want someone to blame, and if possible punish, for the crime of embarrasing them. I'm sorry, but it is not Turner's fault that so many people cannot find their posterior quarters with both hands and a bird dog.

Err ... a box with blinking lights, rather. (A light with blinking boxes --- hmmm, interesting.)

So, they didn't consider it a tip-off that the devices were in the shape of cartoon characters?

Maybe I shouldn't be laughing, but I'm seriously about to MC Pee in my Pants. (Sorry, Aqua Teen in-joke there...)

I am a huge fan of most of Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" programming, Aqua Teen Hunger Force in particular. The Mooninites are my absolute favorite part of the show.

On the one hand, I want to smack the Cartoon Network marketing genius responsible for this upside the head and ask "What were you *thinking*?!?" But then, I also want to smack every single official who shut the entire city of Boston down because of this upside the head, and ask them the same thing.

I feel *so* much safer now. Not.

CNN reports: "In addition, the Pentagon said U.S. Northern Command was monitoring the situation from its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado, but said none of its units were sent to assist."

Theresa, they may have figured (or retrospectively decided, in an attmpt to justify their utter lack of clue)that making the devices in the shape of cartoon characters was all part of the Cunning Plan of the diabolical freedom-hating terrorists, who sought to outsmart the forces of good by using perverted unnatural container shapes instead of the God Fearin' American Box-Shaped Box.

Having just come from crossing the Charles, I would like to point out the inanity of "closing" a frozen river. And the Charles most assuredly flows from the western suburbs of Boston to the Atlantic.

Also, the MBTA has searched the bags of nearly 2500 passengers, resulting in 27 false alarms and no explosives discovered. However, officials said that they had been effective at thwarting terrorists. Link

Boston overloaded on equipment for the Democratic Convention in 2004 and have been hunting for ways to use it, with at least one fatality so far.

I quite enjoyed a friend of mine's response to the whole madness:

http://community.livejournal.com/b0st0n/4867619.html

Indeed, "strange devices" everywhere!

or rather here

"Can you see this? I'm doing it as hard as I can!"

What a ridiculous situation. Doubtless the creators of ATF are laughing and laughing, though--what publicity!
(Wanna bet it makes it into a future episode? I mean, given the episode on censorship and The J-Man...
"Can't say Jesus on network television, Meatwad!")

Any sufficiently nonsequitor advanced technology shall look like a timer/detonator, and these come with a bonus: they're designed to attract the attention of children! Expect many, many false positives and indignant government officials who can't believe anyone would do that sort of thing in this day and age in America.

via BOING BOING:

MAKE magazine is getting some publicity out of this. Their site references plans for making LED "throwies".

I am not making up this actual headline from the myFOX website:

Network Claims Responsibility for Suspicious Devices

Exactly the phrasing they would use to say "Hamas claims responsibility for rocket attacks". And note that the devices are still described as "suspicious" even though they now know exactly what they are and that they never, at any time, posed any danger. I bet they wouldn't take this tone if it had been a Murdoch-owned company.

Further down in the article:

The device was detonated and determined to be harmless, but as a precaution the station and the interstate shut down temporarily.

Funny enough that they actually blew up one of these things before finding out what they were (note: "detonated" is a bit misleading, since the boxes didn't contain any explosives the authorities would have had to provide them), but it's kind of disturbing that when they find something *completely harmless* they "as a precaution" shut down the interstate. I think a squirrel may have been sighted near my house, should we shut down the interstate there too? Some squirrels carry rabies, making them more dangerous than the Mooninite boxes.

On the plus side, I can't *wait* to see what Jon Stewart is going to have to say about this. Let alone the Onion. This is beyond comedy gold.

IEDs, LEDs, what's the difference?

what moron called the police on this?
Flog them.

[Napolean Dynamite]
Idiots!
[/Napolean Dynamite]

Um.

You'all realize that these things have just become collectors' items, right?

Bets on how long it takes for one of them to get on eBay?

This reminds me of the equally moronic "Guy drops ipod into airplane toilet, flight attendant declares it a bomb, plane diverts, FBI searches plane, and finally tells guy 'don't do it again'".

It was a fricken ipod, you morons.

Well, if Bush wanted to turn this country into a bunch of panic-stricken chicken littles who scream at a drop of rain and call the police, he has succeeded.

And Boskone is in two weeks. Don't do, say, or display anything suspicious.

Good thing it happened after Arisia.

Channel 7 wins the award for Newscrawl of the Decade:

"Suspicious device found at comic book store in Allston".

Best comment (found on Slashdot):

"Isn't it funny that it only took hours to blow up a LiteBrite but it took weeks to respond to a devastating hurricane?"

I'm still trying to figure out if I should be laughing at the absurdity or crying at the incompetance.

OK, maybe it'd be over-reacting if it was one device (and say, planted by MIT students) leading to major transportation shutdowns, but when there's more and more reports coming in of these unexplained devices attached to major bridges and transportation points around a city, what call do you make? Particularly because in very recent memory there's been major terror attacks on London, Madrid and Tokyo transport?

Maybe if I'd been personally inconvenienced on my travels in the Boston area today I wouldn't be so inclined to say that the level of reaction seems about right to me.

*sigh*

Yup. That's my city.

Level of reaction?

Downtown Boston was shut down and the networks were broadcasting panic because some Jack Bauer wannabe in the statehouse was scared by blinking lights.

Ok, so now has security theater gone to absurd enough lengths that we can actually step back and have a real national conversation about what are and aren't sane and effective ways to fight terrorism?

*crickets chirp*

Sadly, probably not. But Christ, if all it takes is some strategically-placed cheap LEDs to throw a major American city into chaos for half a day, we've really lowered the bar. All you have to do is trigger the insane security response, and the authorities will take care of the rest for you.

What disturbs me listening to the media coverage is that the media seems right in step with our Fearful Leaders. They've followed DeVal Patrick's lead in calling this a "hoax." I think they've forgotten that a hoax requires deception. Given that no one claimed they were bombs, and that these LED signs did not do bomb like things, I think this fails the "intend to deceive" test.

The news stories keeps refering the signs as "suspicious devices" even though we know exactly what they are. The descriptions sounded far more menacing than they turn out to be when you look at the picture. The politicians and police (at least as of a couple hours ago) steadfastly refuse to admit that Turner had said anything about these LED signs.

I guess it's all too human, but it's sad to see our leaders lead in the same way that chain letters get propagated.

(Incidentally, I'm not writing out of spite at being inconvenienced. I work outside of 495, so I wasn't in Boston for any of this.)

#27: Sorry, but they blew up a Lite-Brite. Look at that picture and tell me anyone in their right mind would consider that a bomb.

And if someone calls in a bomb, and the cop shows up and sees that it is a lite-brite, he should immediately grow some stones and call it what it is, i.e. NOT A BOMB, and call off the dogs. This is like the ipod-in-the-toilet fiasco: once the bureaucratic machine is set in motion Cover-Your-Ass overrides common-fing-sense.

I feel like I'm slowly turning into a beetle.

There's a least one of these up on eBay already.

There's been an arrest. What are they going to charge this person with? "Planting something an idiot might think is a bomb?" Also, the mayor of Boston wants to sue Turner Broadcasting. (The placement of the "suspicious devices" has now been downgraded from a "hoax" to a "marketing ploy".)

(Note to Fox: It's "defuse", not "diffuse". And you can't defuse something that doesn't have a fuse.)

I'm on a business trip and so all I heard was the scary reports until I got back to my hotel. I was thinking about how Boston still has paranoia and embarassment being the place several of the 9/11 planes took off from, and giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Then I saw the pictures.

What keeps me wondering is that factlet from Turner that these devices had already been up for a couple of weeks in a number of different cities. Now maybe the marketing company got to Boston last, but I can't help but think that thousands of people passed by or under these signs and immediately understood what they were, and didn't hit 911 reflexively. This means that it took someone unusually clueless and panicky to get this started.

Along, of course, with the usual panic and cluelessness from those who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (not to speak of the cost of delays and traffic) to protect us from cartoon characters.

This is just astonishing. The terrorists (Bush et al) really have won.

he Pentagon said U.S. Northern Command was monitoring the situation from its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado,

I bet the SGC was worried about replicators. Think maybe they called Rodney in from Atlantis?

The Pentagon said U.S. Northern Command was monitoring the situation from its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado

All that means is that they get cable at Peterson AFB and sat around like the rest of us laughing their heads off at the fools in Boston.

Oh, what the heck. Part of the problem is that Boston thinks it's a major city, and therefore people believe it _ought_ to be a big ol' target, 'cause they're So Important. The fact that the town ranks with Milwaukee or Louisville as a city is flatly denied by the populace. (Go, populace!) Combine that with a slow news day, and you get hysteria. It's "Waiting for the Barbarians".

Or "Blazing Saddles".

But wouldn't that be the most effective way to plant a bomb?

"It's just a toy, silly..."

:BOOM:

I was at the theater this weekend and was startled to see a mysterious woman with an M-16 for a leg! In the theater! I called the national Guard and they surrounded the theater, shutting down traffic for miles around. Sure, it turned out just to be a movie standee, but, it could have been a terrorist! With a machine gun leg.

I would think that the first thing a terrorist planting a bomb would want to do is to HIDE the thing! You don't want it to be found, you want it to stay in place until it goes BOOM.

From an AP article about the arrest they've made: "Hoaxes are a tremendous burden on local law enforcement and counter-terrorism resources and there's absolutely no place for them in a post-9/11 world," Knocke said.

Dang it...now my brain hurts.

Now they've arrested an Arlington Man for putting these things up as of 8:45 pm tonight.

#40: How are you defining major city? (Note: not an attack; it seems to me that Milwaukee and Louisville *are* major cities)

Welllll, I love that dirty waaaater....

Makes me want to make a bunch of funny boxes with seven red cylinders, an alarm clock, and a little electronic voice that says "I'm not a bomb. Of course I'm not a bomb, don't be ridiculous! How obvious would that be? Silly. I'm not a bomb."

And of course, they wouldn't be. That'd throw 'em.

Mayor Menino said the hoax cost the state and cities about $750,000. He wants Turner Broadcasting to pay for it all.

Hoax? What hoax? They weren't intended for anyone at all to think in their wildest dreams that they were bombs.

What cost the state and cities $750,000 was Mayor Menino's personal stupidity. He should pay it himself out of his own pocket.

And the voters should remember this next election day, and vote in someone bright enough to tie his shoes on his own.

I think the key quote from the AP article linked in #44 is:
"I saw the bomb squad guys carrying a paper bag with their bare hands," Higgins said. "I knew it couldn't be too serious."

This is security theater.

I'm more interested in that the police apparently received four phone calls around 1pm reporting the LED signs on the bridges which span the Charles River. It's hard to believe that four people could see those signs and fail to recognize what they are. If we add that those four people all called around the same time, and it's just not credible.

If the police are telling the truth here (and surely the police would never, ever lie), the guy who put up the LED signs didn't perpetrate a hoax. Turner didn't perpetrate a hoax. The four people who coordinated their prank phone calls did.

By now many of you know we here in Boston have survived a major terrorist incident. Highways were shut down. Bridges closed. River traffic halted. But we persevered. The Boston police called out the bomb squad. Homeland Security is investigating. Some kid with a website is being questioned. The Powers That Be are on tv. Yes, my friends, I am now safe from...a cartoon light box.

While everyone involved is patting themselves on the back, I can't believe how utterly stupid this is, they are and things continue to be. Basically, Turner Broadcasting had this guerilla advertising going for Adult Swim. They hung light boxes of a cartoon character around the city (several cities, actually) and at night they light up. They look like lite-brite toys.

This is hysteria as security. The claim is that because circuit boards, visible batteries and wires were involved, they had to be cautious. As in blow the suckers up cautious. As in probably thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds wasted cautious. For what? To show they are serious about security? ARE THEY SERIOUS? These things apparently were visibly hanging around for weeks until some alarmist, who buys into our public transportation Big Brother campaign, reported one to the police. Next thing we know, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has been made safe from cartoons.

And then the Einsteins got on the news. "We had to be careful. It could have been worse." Really? Like tiny, tiny nuclear weapons hidden in the light bulbs? Terrorists are so stupid they can't manage to smuggle a luggage nuke out of Ukraine where they're apparently lying on the sidewalks over there and I'm supposed to be worried about BATTERIES AND WIRES? And excuse me, if it were a bomb containing, oh, nuclear or biological materials, did it occur to anyone that BLOWING IT UP was not the smartest thing to do? And then, of course, we have the on the street interviews from the clueless "I'm glad it was a false alarm, but it makes me feel safe." Yeah? Your front line of defense against terrorism can't tell the difference between an innocous light box and a block of pasticine and you feel SAFE?

Then the news kept running this headline "Turner Broadcasting admits hoax was an advertising campaign." Okay, kids, let's examine that statement. First, Turner didn't "admit" anything. They ANNOUNCED it. Saying they admitted it implies they didn't want to tell anyone. Secondly, it was NOT a hoax. A hoax, dear vocabulary inept tv headline writer, is purposefully trying to make people think something is real when it's not. The light boxes, in no way, shape or form, did not attempt to appear to be weapons of mass destruction. It attempted to look like a cartoon character giving the finger (suitably pixelated on tv so as not to offend the stupid). The proper headline should read: "Turner Broadcasting announces overblown terrorist delusion was in fact caused by a toy used for advertising campaign ,you f***cking idiots."

I live here. I despair.

The latest version of the AP article has this line:

"We're not going to let this go without looking at the further roots of how this happened to cause the panic in this city," Coakley said at a news conference Wednesday night.

I will be so impressed if they realize the root cause is that those in power overreacted. (e.g., they determined there was no threat, then shut down the transportation infrastructure anyways.) However, I'm not expecting to be impressed.

Sadly, this shows that governments, regardless of political affliation, tend to act alike when caught in an error. Rather than admitting to error, they're behaving as if they can alter reality through willful behavior. They've arrested some poor guy not because he's actually guilty of anything but because they need to behave as if there had been an actual hoax (or terrorist incident).

Xopher 47: Homeland Security would just take a leaf from John Varley and hire a vacationing bomb expert to persuade the funny box to explode after all.

Jose @46 -- I went with population, per this reference.
Then I picked on a larger and a smaller city.

My assertion is that Bostonians think the list of important cities in the US goes something like:
1. New York
2. (tie) Los Angeles
2. (tie) Boston
4. Chicago
5. Maybe San Francisco, I Guess
6. Other places not important enough to name

And that exacerbates other problems.

But not one of those menacing little blinking devices exploded. So, you now, this calls for another "Mission Accomplished" banner.

Say, do ya think the terrorists have figured out if they head fake the administration that they can tie us up in knots for weeks (elevated threat level my arse) and cost us millions of dollars with just a cell phone call and a $5 kit from Radio Shack? And if they have free nights and weekends it won't even cost them that much. Nah, they don't get Channel 2.

Yahoo report says man arrested, article listed under suspicious device.

The list of authorities who need to be flogged for this assinine overreaction is getting longer every minute. A LiteBrite with four D batteries, and you arrest someone for a "bomb scare"? You fricking gutless morons. You overreacted and now you're looking for someone to blame for the fact that you acted as if the emporer new clothes were wonderful.

And someone seriously needs to find out who called the police.

And flog them.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert should make a public mockery of this whole bureaucratic fiasco.

Is the Department of Homeland Security trying to tell me that at no time does the checklist for how to respond to a threat, that at no time does "common sense" come up as a step? Is it not on the checklist? Is it basically "Step 1: Panic" and then "step 2: cover your ass"?

What if some crazy person calls in and says that terrorists are using stoplights to send morse code signals to activate sleeper cells? PANIC! SHUT OFF ALL THE STOPLIGHTS! MY GOD WE"RE UNDER ATTACK! What? No? We're not under attack? WHO THE HELL PUT THESE DAMN STOPLIGHTS WHERE THEY COULD BE MISTAKEN FOR MORSE CODE-SENDING, SLEEPER-CELL-ACTIVATING DEVICES? Doesn't anyone know these sort of hoaxes will not be tolerated?

My god, someone hose the stupid off of me.

#47: isn't that a Varley story?

If Turner Broadcasting hadn't said they were promoting something, my first guess would have been that somebody literate enough to read Wasp decided to see whether Earthlings were as dumb as Eric Frank Russell's pseudo-Japanese. Not surprisingly, they were.

One of the more depressing things about later-Campbell SF is the number of times aliens smart enough to crew starships are dumb enough to fall for every stupid trick in the book.

Connie: no, it wasn't the proper reaction; as noted after you, a real bomb (as opposed to a TV one) is unlikely to be so deliberately conspicuous. Remember what Justice Holmes said about shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater?

#7 So, they didn't consider it a tip-off that the devices were in the shape of cartoon characters?

Imagine how much explosive a suicide bomber could strap on under a standard theme-park cartoon character costume. Better alert Homeland Security to the threat of Disneyland.

#34 It's "defuse", not "diffuse". And you can't defuse something that doesn't have a fuse.

I always get a chuckle out of that (far too common) mistake. The best way to diffuse a bomb is to let it go off. Not sure how you would diffuse a blinky-light advertisement, though.

Oops, I missed #52. I'll go blow myself up now.

Alas, The Daily Show and Colbert Report both tape too early in the day for there to be good coverage tonight ... but I can't WAIT for tomorrow. They're going to be all over this like mold in Carl's sheets.

Apparently, Adult Swim began tonight with a multiple-screen apology replacing the usual text bumps. (I'd meant to switch over to see if they were going to do something like that, but missed it...)

Needless to say, the fan forums on adultswim.com are going nuts. It's all just so, so pathetic.

Mark DF@50: And excuse me, if it were a bomb containing, oh, nuclear or biological materials, did it occur to anyone that BLOWING IT UP was not the smartest thing to do?

Just because the above really needs to be repeated. Because we live in a country where experts on these things do sh*t like, oh, combine all the potentially dangerous substances they've got on hand at an airport in one waste area, so it can become a really toxic soup. *pounds head repeatedly on desk*

I am also really, really annoyed with the use of language here. This was not a hoax. Turner did not 'admit to a hoax'. And arressting the artist who put the things up is a punk move. What odds to we have on them prosecuting him to the fullest extent of the law to cover up their own asshattery?

TNH writes: "They’re also saying that the Charles feeds from the Atlantic into the city ...".

While the net flow is into the harbor from the city (and points upriver), the lower reaches of the Charles are tidal. (Or were, before the dams were built.)

At the diurnal high tide -- assuming the dam near North Station still leaks a little (as I know it used to) -- there is flow from the Atlantic into the city.

And so, like a stopped clock, this statement from Reuters may, in fact, be right twice a day.

If you watch the news and see pictures of the cartoon character - or even of the "bomb"- you will notice that the character's raised middle finger has been carefully blurred out or even airbrushed away altogether.

Need one comment further?

Angry, I expect they'll do exactly that.

I've got some additional material, most of it via a link found in Liz Marcs' LJ. Good piece there. I cherish her line, As God is my witness, I thought that LiteBrites were bombs!

Boston's mayor is being a cmplt dckhd about this--and a pompous one, too.

Brainiac writes about how the bloggers were all over the story in Attack of the Mooninites. Lots of great links there.

Artist arrested. May be the same story mentioned earlier.

Video of the Moominites being placed around city.

A fantasia on the subject of Strange devices reported in Boston.

Traditional internet art:

I'M IN UR BRIDGES SHUTTIN DOWN YOUR CITY.

SOMEONE SET US UP THE BOMB! LOL! BOSTOWNED!

I'M IN UR CITY TERRORIZIN UR PEEPS.

Well, this has been the most exciting
National Gorilla Suit Day in quite a while ...

There was a local Fox affiliate news promo after "Bones" hyping the local angle, since there were Moonites in Seattle, too.

It was so very lame as to make any future Daily Show or Onion parody superfluous.

Poor Deval Patrick.

Whaaa? I saw some of our (Portland's) Mooninites hanging out on the crosswalk signs downtown around New Year's. They're cartoon robot-alien dudes *flipping each other off*. And even if they were all blinking and electric and scary, it's still a LITE BRITE. Boston loses.

Leaving now to put electrical tape over the blinking light on my electric toothbrush charger.

Denny Crane!

Supposedly they are in San Francisco too, but I haven't seen any.

Anyway, the stuff I see lying around on any given day is way more exciting than a couple of blinky lite-brites.

I think we should make noise about the incident, not because we were terrorised by lite-brites, but because our leaders want us to be. They are, so we better be too, according to them. The whole atmosphere they've created, the scapegoatism, is terribly irresponsible. The fact that you can get arrested because somebody misinterpreted your actions--disgusting, and not part of the country I was told I grew up in.

Keith Olbermann brought this up tonight and referred to it as a plot by the Cartoon Terror Network. Where's the Space Ghost when we need him most?

Tomorrow's Boston Globe editorial makes me want to drive up there and kick somebody.

It's only a two-hour drive. I just might do it.

Here are links to some videos about the placing of the Moominites.

http://www.boston.com/news/local/adultswim_video/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shy6pmnDSmM

meredith #73: If you're driving "up" to Boston, that probably means I'm on your way. Could you pick me up? I'd like to kick them too.

IT WAS NOT A HOAX. Jaysus. And the tone that editorial writer takes makes my soul itch.

Im with Greg @55 -- I think there was a hoax but the viral marketers had little to do with it. If I read the news stories correctly, there were two events here. According to the WBZ news story that Teresa linked to upthread:

The first device was found at an MBTA subway and bus station located under Interstate 93 on Wednesday morning. The device was detonated and determined to be harmless, but as a precaution the station and the interstate shut down temporarily.

Then, around 1 p.m., four calls came into Boston Police reporting suspicious devices at the Boston University Bridge and the Longfellow Bridge, which both span the Charles River, and the corner of Stuart and Columbus Streets and at the Tufts-New England Medical Center.

OK, here is what probably happened. The first discovery happened in the morning as described. What that demonstrates that there are people in Boston who don't watch Adult Swim and overreact. that alone would make somebody look a bit stupid, but there are bomb threats like that all the time.

But when word got out about what happened, I wonder if someone decided to have a little fun. Four calls, all at about the same time, reporting the "devices" at various places. Someone in law enforcement was already a bit touchy and embarrased, and these calls came in -- probably before the investigations had reconstructed the "device" and found that they had blown up a battery powered insulting gesture. At that point somebody (and I suspect we will never find out who) leapt from their chair and pulled the Big Red Switch (hey, there's always a BRS) declaring a Really Awfully Big Terrorist Gen-u-wine Emergency. And the rest, as they say, is history.

I wonder if they know where those four calls came from. Could someone from Boston tell us whether those four locations called in form some kind of pattern, say near a high school or MIT? Like I said, I'm just wondering . . .

angry at #62: Call me an incurable optimist, but my bet is that the authorities will spend a week or two harrumphing about how "serious" this incident was... then quietly drop all charges once the spotlight dims a little. At worst, the poor artist might be forced to plea to a misdemeanor.

It's in the best interest of everyone -- the artist, the city government, and my fellow Bostonians, who are now the butt of jokes from New York to Outer Mongolia -- if this whole embarrassing incident is forgotten as soon as possible. If everyone plays the right cards, the laughter might subside within a week or two... but prosecuting the artist could keep the story alive for months on end. Why risk that?

Expect a lot of short-term bluster and posing, followed by a swift and thorough cover-up with pardons for all. That's the American way!

(Of course, if I'm wrong and this poor guy gets the book thrown at him, I'll be one of the first to write a letter of protest.)

#38 Darkrose said: "The Pentagon said U.S. Northern Command was monitoring the situation from its headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado,"

I bet the SGC was worried about replicators. Think maybe they called Rodney in from Atlantis?

What, Carter isn't good enough for you??

That Globe editorial made me see red. (And, also, write a letter to the editor. Whee.)

And, honestly, the four locations don't really form much of a pattern that /I/ can think of, but possibly I'm not imaginative enough.

I wonder if Mayor Menino has figured out yet that thousands of cars go over those bridges every day and any one of them could be a car bomb! Maybe he should sue Ford for the thousands of dollars it would cost to stop and search every one of them?

How long before somebody sees Mickey Mouse at the French Disneyland and claimes ObL is hiding in France?

There's a Mooninite in downtown Manhattan - it's been there for at least a month. I don't recall the exact location, but you can see it if you look north from Houston Street, somewhere between Broadway and the Bowery.

I cannot recall the title or author, but one of my airport bookshop purchases was the memoirs of a British bomb squad veteran. He describes being called to the house of a Member of Parliament, where something suspicious had arrived in the post.

He came up to the front door, in his body armour and helmet, and spoke to the MP, who had evacuated the household. The item was on the table in the hall, he was told. He went in and found nothing larger than a postcard on the table.

Baffled, he went back out and queried. It turned out that the suspicious item in the post was the postcard, which bore all the hallmarks of a suspicious package:
- it was stained with grease
- it had too much postage affixed
- it was from an unfamiliar person

He wrote that he had great difficulty exercising restraint during the remainder of the conversation.

<thinks>
If I were planning a bombing campaign in Boston, I now know exactly how to go about it.

...

Set up a shell company. Come up with a spurious but plausible product that might be advertised on small hoardings (not large drive-by ones, but posters at T-stops and outside grocery stores and similar).

Commission a crinkle-cut 3D plastic ad with a molding of the product extruded from the front. Hollow, of course, to save weight.

Rent some advertising space in suitable locations.

Install ads, with fragmentation bombs packed inside the 3D extrusions. Detonation controlled by cellphone, natch.

(Luckily most "terrorists" are too dumb to walk and chew gum simultaneously -- see posting about the Birmingham Nine for a case in point -- so this won't happen. But it's amusing to speculate how the securitate would respond to real exploding advertisements ...)

</thinks>

Y’know for all the ‘lighten up–it was a JOKE’ postings I’m still irate about the whole thing, and not against the Boston officials.

First there’s the “guerrilla marketing” aspect: I’m sick to death of every fungible urban surface being abused with advertising.

IBM surreptitiously painting faux “graffiti” on city sidewalks, Sony doing the same on buildings for their PSP, now Turner Networks sticking up LED & battery contraptions over subway platforms & bridges. How the hell are these any different from the “Work From Home”, “We Haul Trash”, “Lose Weight Now” etc. sign posters that staple their trash to my neighborhood trees & telephone poles at night?

They’re not. They’re encroaching on my public space and damn it I want to slap their hands hard for trying to grab it. If they want to run an ad campaign then do it on commercial turf, not blots left to rot on my public infrastructure. And emphatically not haphazardly “magnetically attached” over where the public stands while trains race by.

Their insipidity doesn’t excuse their inappropriateness.

Then there is context.

Sure the blinking animated characters can be laughed off as an over-reaction, once one knows what the hell the signs are, when they’re properly photographed. But to J. Random Transit Employee, trying to figure out what the heck this new thing is, where it shouldn’t be, with wires & batteries, stuck in places they’re told to watch for suspicious items, not so easy to feel superior over.

Yes most of Homeland Defense BS really is nothing more then security theater (of the absurd.) On the other hand Boston is where two of the 9-11 flights took off. Tomorrow I’ve a meeting at a suburban Boston office where 5 of their co-workers died on those planes. Folks still do get nervous when they hear aircraft ‘in the wrong place’.

Attaching random circuit-board-ey crap to subways, bridges, that really is just fantastically asinine. What next–mailing envelopes of white powder mailed with a a catchline printed inside at the bottom? C’mon, where didn’t someone think “Y’know, these could really easily be misread”?

Boston & Cambridge have more then their fair history of pranks. Everyone snickers when a plastic cow goes missing from a steakhouse, something improbable appears on top of a campus building, office tower windows start to play out Space Invaders at night. But along with those has been a tradition of responsability–props strapped & buckled down against high winds, disassembly instructions left attached, lookouts ensuring nothing goes awry.

This had none of those. It was intended to be an untracable, responsibility-free, hit ‘n run action. No safeguards, no contingency-planning, no follow-through. Indeed if it hadn’t been for some online bragging I doubt Turner Networks would have been acknowledging their involvement now.

Then there’s Turner’s automatic cliche disavowal, “We didn’t do it, a marketing company did it”.

No, the marketing company Turner Networks hired to do this did it, on their behalf. Signs don’t get manufactured and put up in multiple cities without it getting discussed with the client in context of the impact on the target demographic based on proximal visible locations yadda yadda yadda.

There was a meeting, and an approval, money paid and contracts signed for this to happen. For Turner Networks to after-the-fact hide behind their consultants and project managers is just craven. Sure the contractor will take the hit, that’s what they’re paid for, but Turner Networks was the one calling the shots and really needs to own up to it.

Yeah, I guess I am pretty upset.

I’m upset at the appropriation of my public spaces by marketing companies happy to risk a negligible fine. I’m upset at the disregard for public safety–anyone want to be there when one of these slipped, bounces off a subway car and scythes into a morning crowd? I’m upset at the smug “everyone can tell it’s a joke” of those comfortably looking at headlines & flickr.com photos. And yeah, I’m upset at a nation that has turned into a place where actual funny zany kewl things are now discouraged out of fear.

I suppose its only a matter of time before we find out that the city of Boston probably gave a license (or similar permission) for Turner to place these around the city as advertising.

Congratulations Boston:

You have just reaffirmed your title as "America's Least Hip Large City Not Located in Ohio."

Claude @5 - I have no doubt they'll get an affronted letter from the Australian Ambassador complaining that the Australian Federal Police weren't alerted, as well. Security theatre at its best.

And, in an effort to maintain the highbrow tone of this thread:

I come from the city of Boston
The home of the bean and the cod
Where we don't watch too much Turner TV
So their marketing gestures seem odd

It's the lights and the blink and they're flashing
And the shape is as strange as can be
I don't recognise what that thing is
Well, it could be explosive - let's see!

All right, it goes boom when we blast it
So the whole city needs to shut down
There's been quite a few of these sighted
My god! Ter'ists target our town!

They're what? Just a marketing gimmick?
Well, let's just say it was a hoax
Arrest the poor artist who made 'em
And try to crack down on the jokes

That's the news from the city of Boston
The home of the bean and the cod
Let us hope that they teach the D of H S
To act somewhat less like a tin god!

(I know, it's not a sonnet. Must try harder)

I have to agree with Michael. Ordinarily I'm right there laughing at security theater (the Exploding Shampoo Plot!), but I quote a post on the b0st0n LJ community:

... if I'm reading this community correctly, if someone were to put Care Bears stickers on a real bomb, they'd be able to blow up every hipster in the Boston area, as long as they posted about it on LJ beforehand... because you'd all show up for the LULZ. Good to know.

and funny, I'm reasonably sure you all didn't step forward to check whether any of the devices were real before you saw the pictures.

And Victor S, Jay W, could we lay off pointing and laughing about how lame we always knew Boston was and how stupid all Bostonians are? Some of us, y'know, really like the city.

But wouldn't that be the most effective way to plant a bomb?

"It's just a toy, silly..."

:BOOM:

Melissa, no offense, but have you looked at any of the pictures of the things? They're basically circuit boards--no room to store explosives, not matching even the Hollywood idea of what a "bomb" ought to look like. There's a battery pack, and a thin backing (from the look of it, thinner than my thumb) with lights in the shape of a cartoon character on it. That's it.

They're advertsing signs.

Presumably, the city doesn't give detailed permission for established hoardings, but the company running the site would know what was supposed to be there.

Maybe those companies need to think a bit about how they might be able to provide the info to a bomb squad somewhere. Maybe they'll not accept this sort of self-illuminated add-on.

And maybe the Police need to think about how they can check whether something advertising-like has been authorised.

There's some procedural lessons here.

But if these signs were not authorised, by the property-owner, the city, or whoever might have the authority (I see heardings here in the UK with the name "ClearChannel" on the frame), then the advertising company and their clients should be fined for that breach of the law.

And, going by the pictures of those things, I doubt I'd even guess what was being advertised. Maybe a Windows Vista version of Space Invaders?

Never mind the security theatre, this looks like really dumb advertising.

I swear I saw one of those the last time I was driving around Boston (was it a few weekends ago for Arisia? Or before that? I don't remember.) I was stopped at a light somewhere and there was something suspended from multiple cables that looked an awful lot like the flickr pictures I've seen. I couldn't figure out what the hell it was, but it never even occurred to me that it might be something dangerous -- more likely, some strange and useless thing we'd spent way too much taxpayer money on :-/

What I've learned.

I look around at the LEDs currently scattered around the desk[1] and I realize that Boston is no longer a safe place for me to go, since, well, if they found out I use LEDs (gasp!), who knows what will happen?

BTW, as much as I can speak for GT (which is about the same as you could) we didn't do it either.

[1] Mount a really bright red LED on a heat sink. Heat Sink? Yes, if the LED is bright enough, you'll need one. Six inches away, mount a really bright green LED. If you use the right LEDs, you can mount them both on the same heatsink. Try not

Now, beg, borrow or build drivers for these LEDs, and wire them up. Fiat Lux. Point them at things. Now, don't bother looking at the objects you are illuminating, look at the shadows on the wall. (I said use really bright LEDs.) Interesting, aren't they? These LEDs are the closest thing to a point source you're likely to get, so you get very sharp edged shadows, even at some distance. Wait -- all those shadows have Red and Green fringes. What happens if you put on Red-Green Anaglyph 3D glasses?

#85: Isn't it possible to be angry both at the misappropriation of public space and the irresponsible behavior of Boston public officials? Why must it be one or the other? One can be angry at guerrilla advertising as well as the blatant misinterpretation of such at the same time. It's hard to justify recognizing something as a bomb when there are no explosives involved. Random stranger on the street might not be able to do it. But surely the bomb squad can? The only reason why there was any risk to public safety here was because Boston public officials behaved inappropriately.

#89: The carebear sticker argument is pretty specious. No one has said that the bomb squad should not have gotten involved. If you see a suspicious package, absolutely go call the bomb squad rather than check it out yourself. However, the bomb squad should be competent enough to determine this is not a bomb. Our public officials should be competent enough to treat a non-bomb for what it is, nothing to worry about. The bomb squad's mere involvement should not be enough to shut down Boston's transportation infrastructure. There ought to be some sort of credible positive finding in the chain somewhere.

(Actually, I should point out that some suitably devious and clever person (not me) could orchestrate some sort of DDOS attack on the bomb squad.)

BTW, practically everyone reading this comment is near at least one device which matches the description of the so-called "suspicious devices." I hate how people keep repeating the words "circuit board", "wires", and "batteries" as if anything which contains them is automatically suspect to blow up at any moment. Nevermind that they've just described their computer, PDA or cellphone. What we need here is not more fearmongering, but more information.

#76: I, too, suspect that there was a hoax on the part of those who made the phone calls. (And now some poor guy not involved in the actual hoax has gotten arrested for it.)

(BTW, I agree with #91 that this is stupid advertisement. But like I said, I think "a pox on both your houses" is a valid reaction. But we can't shut the city down every time a marketing agency implements a stupid ad. Now, if it turns out that Turner or their delegates had gotten permission to put up these signs, then Boston public officials shut the city down over a bureaucratic snafu. That would just be sad.)

I live and work in Boston, and if the damn things had been on the visible sides of buildings or hanging from crossing lights, there wouldn't have been as much concern. But the first one was noticed in day light, from a distance where the cartoon nature was not clear, hung where, were it a bomb, it would have damaged part of the city's transportation infrastructure. Many of the others were on bridges. The guys hired by the marketing firm were stupid. They hung them in places guaranteed to make security officials and transit employees twitch. I assume it was a thoughtless choice.

Because I hate security theater as much as the next joe, this pisses me off. The marketing drones' idiotic choices of location only adds to the problem of over-reaction. People who work security have no sense of humor about things like this. They're damned if they do, and double damned if they don't and it was something real. Laugh all you want, but the people on the ground take it seriously because they have to. If you don't like it when the dog barks, don't poke it with sticks.

Oh fewgawdsake.

take a look a this photo.

A flat panel, with no depth to it at all, A bunch of LED's that look like a Space Invader giving you the finger, and a couple of batteries.

If the bomb squad gets called to investigate a "suspicious" device and it turns out to be an iPod in a toilet, then the idiot in that picture is the guy who thought the ipod was a bomb, not the guy who dropped it. The level of idiocy is only amplified when said idiot, rather than admit they were an idiot and a f-ing coward, instead externalize the blame with misdirection.

Joe and Monkey's reaction here.

C'mon, authorities--if you're planting a bomb, you don't put blinking lights on it. Sheesh, have we all gone crazy? But the answer is, no we haven't gone crazy; we've been crazy for a long time.

Just to loop back to a couple of people here who are doing the "they should have known better than to pull a stunt like this" jag.

No.

I work in the Hancock Tower. The building was evacuated on 9/11. I know what the issues are.

I can accept that John Clueless Public might panic about something stupid. What I do not accept, and should not have to, is that my government panics and then tries to justify it.

If a squirrel throws an acorn and hits me on the head and I think it's a nuclear bomb dropped by unseen enemies, I want the people who are responsible for my security to say "That's an squirrel. An asshole squirrel, but just a squirrel."

I'm not afraid of squirrels. Or acorns. I'm afraid of my government trying to make me live in fear of shadows when they should be worried about the things that cast them.

This was on the local news last night; what news people described as "a similar device" had been found and removed in Philadelphia (and it was a Mooninite giving the finger).

Supposedly there are 55 other devices somewhere in the city. Also, last night some city bigwig was talking about something on the order of a $10K / day / sign fine for this.

Thank you, Michael @ #85, for saying a lot much better than I did.

In the cold light of the next day, I'm still not angry at the police and government officials, at least in their initial reaction. One suspicious device could be an accident, two a coincidence, but ten, you'd better react as if it's a terrorist attack.

We pay police to be professionally paranoid. Sometimes, we pay our government officials to look foolish when it turns out to be a false alarm.

My bus this morning took me under the underpass where one of the Mooninite signs was. If I'd actually seen it these past three weeks, I'd probably have wondered that some advertising company had gotten permission for the damn thing. It's not my job to make the call that something is suspicious.

When a bunch of simultaneous (or nearly) calls come in about suspicious devices scattered all over at key points in the infrastructure, I can't imagine a better time than to push The Big Red Panic Button.

More mysterious blinking devices found in Boston.

Unlike the ATHF ones, though, these things are really suspicious:

• Much larger volume, so they could actually contain a meaningful amount of explosive
• Many of them make odd noises periodically
• They display a countdown timer
• They have no apparent purpose

Posting from the hopelessly uncool, loserville, hick town of Boston:

1. Each of these things was in turn quickly identified as harmless. Before noon, it was obvious that the likelihood of any real danger was remote. The police were saying "hoax, not real terrorism" fairly early in the day. However, they were all found attached to major pieces of infrastructure, in non-obvious places for advertising.

2. The demographic of people who'd recognize the figure doesn't overlap well with maintenance and sanitation workers (the people finding them) OR with bomb squad personnel (the people investigating them.)

3. Turner and its advertising company could have taken the wild'n'crazy step of getting permits for these things. Note: Turner's weaselly apology does not claim, makes no suggestion, that they did.

4. Someday, we're going to going to encounter another well-planned terrorist attack. (In fact, we already have. The Shampoo Plot was Security Theater, but the Madrid and London commuter bombings were quite real.) They're not all idiots, and disguising bombs as children's toys is not a new idea.

The main criticism I have of the police and the local media is that, if they'd let pictures unpixilated, this would have been identified and explained sooner. The main criticism I have of our politicians is that, in the embarrassment of finding out it was an ad campaign, they're clinging to the "hoax" language, in an attempt to prosecute the perps under that law, rather than just suing them for terminal idiocy.

But Turner and Interference do seriously deserve to be sued for terminal idiocy.

Ten... and after the first one they examined turned out to be a LiteBrite? Why not stand down then?

Listen, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people saw these things, in ten cities, over the course of weeks, and instantly evaluated 'em correctly.

This one ranks right up with the Orson Welles War of the Worlds broadcast.

Meanwhile, to add to the What Folktale Covers This thread: The Three Sillies.

#99: exactly.

The problem this little fiasco draws attention to is the fact that our government has once again failed to respond at a level appropriate to the actual threat.

(1) Cat 5 hurricane plowing towards Cat-3 dikes. Government response? Sit on its ass for a week before it hits, then sit on its ass for a week after it hits.

(2) panicked civilian calls in a possible bomb that is actually an Etch-A-Sketch. Government response? Shut down the city for a day, call in every possible gvernment agency to respond: the ATF, the Coast Guard, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, ABC, NBC, CBS, and CYA.

Both a complete-lack-of-response to a real threat and a oh-my-gawd-we-are-gonna-die-response to a nonexistent threat are totally inappropriate for the agencies who are supposed to be able to deal with these sorts of things.

I still say that the person who called the police in the first place should be flogged. But people panic. I can at least understand that on some level. If you want to live in fear of any object larger than a grapefruit because someone might have hollowed it out and put explosives in it, fine. It's your life. Be an idiot. Just don't expect me to empathize with your state of eternal panic.

Given that people panic, the government response should be to treat any call as a real threat up front, and quickly establish whether it is a false alarm, and call off the dogs. How this escalated over several hours without getting resolved is beyond me.

That's what really pisses me off about this. The proper phrase to describe this is

false alarm

It wan't a "hoax"
it wasn't even a "suspicious device".

It really was a false alarm.
It really was a chicken-little response to a non threat.
It really was a failure of the government to respond to a level appropriate to the actual threat. And they apparently failed to respond at the appropriate level for far longer than should have taken to figure out it was a false alarm.

JC at #94: (Actually, I should point out that some suitably devious and clever person (not me) could orchestrate some sort of DDOS attack on the bomb squad.)

That's precisely what the IRA used to do every so often. You can cause an awful lot of disruption with very little risk and effort using variations on the theme of "every tenth device is real, and sometimes all ten on the same day are real".

For info on the "devices" in San Francisco, see this (from SFGate).

I guess it's kind of strange that the Charles River was "shut down" for boat travel when the river is actually frozen over right now.

abi @ #83, yes, a fascinating book. That's only one of many good stories in it. It's called Braver Men Walk Away, by Peter Gurney (MBE, GM and Bar). I hope you still have your copy, it seems to be out of print.

The department that Bush has put together resembles a clown car -- clowns pour out and run around doing their clown things that result in no fruitful activity.

I have a friend who works for the IRS. She says IRS employees are grateful because FEMA has become the most hated agency of the government. The silver lining for them, I suppose.