I heard an interesting bit of, well, gloating, on NPR's on the media last night, about how Turner's own CNN was running off with this story, and encouraging the panic, while Turner's own marketing was the ultimate cause of the problem.

http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/02/02/06

Posted February 5, 2007 10:22 AM by Ursula L

You say Interference Inc. could have stopped the scare earlier, but I wouldn't bet money on it. Several years ago the HAZMAT people were sent out in response to a suspicious white powder on the floor of a locker room. Despite someone telling them it was the residue of their daily application Gold Bond Medicated Foot Powder they insisted on doing whatever it is you do when the jihad decides they hate America and our American showers.

More recently there was the flight that was diverted when someone didn't realize his I-Pod had fallen out of his pocket and into the airplane toilet. He told one of the flight attendants what was going on as soon as he noticed it was missing and realized what must have happened, but that didn't stop a bomb squad from doing their thing to the airplane toilet.

If Interference called the authorities first thing I'm not sure it would have changed a thing. (I'm not sure the authorities would admit it if they did, either.)

Posted February 5, 2007 10:27 AM by Avery

We aren't big fans of "guerilla marketing" (see The Pitch Bitch, for-pay blog posts, comment spam, astroturf et al.) in general.

Whenever guerilla marketing is recognized, it goes sour fast.

The nice folks at Interference Inc. could have avoided a lot of problems by putting stickers on the backs of their LED panels that said, "This advertisement was put up in the dead of night by Interference Inc. Call 1-800-LITEADS for all of your viral-marketing needs."

Except then the fine folks in Boston would have decided this was a biowar attack, because of the word "viral."

Posted February 5, 2007 10:32 AM by James D. Macdonald

We know that Interference knew about the bomb scare before 1:25 p.m. on Wednesday

I've been looking for a timeline of what happened. This is the best I've found so far, from the Boston Globe,

The ordeal began around 8 a.m. when an MBTA worker spotted one of the devices affixed to an Interstate 93 ramp near Sullivan Square in Charlestown, forcing the shutdown of the northbound side of the Interstate and tying up traffic for hours. The State Police bomb squad blew the object apart with a water cannon at about 10 a.m. Then, in quick sequence just after noon, reports of similarly suspicious devices flooded police lines, sending anti terrorism forces to over a dozen locations in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville.

Sometime between 2 and 3 p.m., according to a public safety official, a Boston police analyst recognized the image as a cartoon character, and police concluded it was likely a publicity stunt.

So, those claiming it was half an hour, your myth has been busted. It took two fricken hours for the bomb squad to show up fergawdsake. If it had been a real device it probably would have blown up already.

The article also notes:

The deployment of scores of state, federal, and Boston police specialists, from bomb experts to terrorism analysts, exceeded $500,000, according to Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

Apparently, the money was pure labor expenses. Half a million dollars in overtime charges.

Posted February 5, 2007 10:35 AM by Greg London

On this morning's news: Turner and Boston have settled. For a $2 million payment, Turner is free of all legal liability.

So I guess that's the amount Stevens and Berdovsky have to raise ...

Posted February 5, 2007 10:37 AM by Jon Meltzer

Avery, the iPod in airplane toilet is reported here.

Posted February 5, 2007 10:38 AM by Greg London

More linky trivia: Peter David's daughter works at the comic book store where one of the "devices" was found.

Posted February 5, 2007 10:42 AM by Jon Meltzer

I've been taking a "pox on both your houses" stance on this. I don't like viral marketing. I think it acrosses a line which should stay uncrossed. However, charging viral marketers with terrorism is not good way of dealing with them. Charging them with the crimes they've actually committed is. Exposing them for who they are is.

I think it's unethical for Interference Inc. to value their campaign's secrecy over the police investigation. Yes, the investigation oughtn't have gotten to the point it did. But once it did, they should 'fess up and calm the police down.

I think there is enough blame to go around. One can decry security theater and viral marketing at the same time. Security theater is viral marketing for terrorism, or at least the fear of terrorism. So I think one ought to decry both.

I hope the police and Interference Inc. don't scapegoat Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky in the process.

Posted February 5, 2007 10:54 AM by JC

The splutterings of the Ravenna police chief sound remarkably similar to those of Mayor Merino.

O gods, what have I done? But if you're going to call him Merino, you can at least refer to his "bleatings" rather than his "splutterings."

Posted February 5, 2007 11:17 AM by Xopher

OK, before you ask, I can't find my tinfoil cap this morning, which may explain my suspicions.

From Greg @ 4: The State Police bomb squad blew the object apart with a water cannon at about 10 a.m. Then, in quick sequence just after noon, reports of similarly suspicious devices flooded police lines ...

OK, maybe I just need my meds adjusted, but now knowing which bunch was behind this stunt makes me wonder just who made those noontime calls. Maybe it was just when a detailed description hit the news, and people started to recognize them. Or maybe, could a "guerrilla marketer" see the reaction to their "campaign" as superb additional free publicity? I wonder what their phone records would show, and I also wonder if the Boston authorities have thought of this.

Eisner and Co. could not be stupid enough to think this was a good idea. Right?

Posted February 5, 2007 11:18 AM by Claude Muncey

(Eisner is Disney. Dick Parsons is TW.)

Then, in quick sequence just after noon, reports of similarly suspicious devices flooded police lines

The original report stated four calls came in about the same time. Is that really a "flood"?

Posted February 5, 2007 11:27 AM by Liz

Claude, there's extremely little info to go on to know with certainty. my guess is that once the news began bleating warnings of the end of the world, bombs, city shutdowns, terrorist threats, panic and fear pretty much took over and folks turned off all common sense and started calling in the other devices.

It's possible that the spammers decide to use it to their advantage but that would attribute to malice that which can easily be explained by stupidity.

Posted February 5, 2007 11:27 AM by Greg London

But any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

Posted February 5, 2007 11:32 AM by Xopher

that was meant to parse as:

malice: spammers called 911 to pump up the publicity stunt.

stupidity: panicked/clueless public called 911, frightened by the vision of LiteBrites.

Posted February 5, 2007 11:35 AM by Greg London

Wait just a ding danged second! From Greg London #4, first they blew one of the LiteBrites up, and then they started getting all the calls? Color me simple, but at that point my response to the calls would have been, "Oh, yeah, we blew one of those up. It was a LiteBrite. It looked pretty cool as it exploded, but it's perfectly safe."

And Teresa, do you really have to drag Providence into this? Hilariously, the Providence Journal's article about Foresman's visit doesn't mention anything about Boston, but does say that he thinks we're prime targets for terror (duh!) and that we might get a fireboat. Which will give children a whole new class of people to want to be when they grow up, and will help put out fires from explosions caused when LNG tankers try to fill up LNG tanks during apocalyptic thunderstorms, because that was such a good idea that I'm sure they'll keep doing it.

Posted February 5, 2007 11:41 AM by ethan

I detest street spam. I make a point of tearing it down any time it appears in my neighborhood. But these signs just don't trigger that reaction for me. Maybe it's that there's some artistic/cool/original factor to them; they aren't just paper or plastic signs, and they weren't cheap to run off. They don't have any kind of text, just a cartoon image -- I am a bit irritated by the gratuitous rudeness of the gesture. If one recognizes the characters, it's probably a cute thing; if one doesn't (like me) it's a harmless bit of weirdness. Unlike most street spam, these aren't blanketing an area, and unlike a lot of street spam, they aren't particularly difficult to remove.

I can't judge how effective these signs would have been as a marketing device if the Boston Silliness hadn't happened. For me, at least, sonething like this doesn't have the negative effectiveness ("I'll never buy from them or have anything to do with them") of most advertising posted in public spaces.

Posted February 5, 2007 11:52 AM by Joel Polowin

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that my take on viral marketing is different from everyone else’s. In my mind the Sony Brava Superball commercial, OK Go's treadmill video and Halo 2's "I Love Bees" game were viral in nature. They were cool things you wanted to tell your friends about.

The stuff I'm seeing cited here is often dressed up with the term viral by the people selling it but, well, they're selling it. And probably using the phrase "information superhighway" while they do it.

Posted February 5, 2007 12:00 PM by Avery

The timeline is also incomplete in that it doesn't include the two, unconnected "pipe bombs" that were discovered a little while after noon -- the quotation marks because they both turned out to be fakes... and it's much harder to tell a fake pipe bomb from a real one.

The best thing about all this in my opinion is that the Boston metropolitan area got to have a full dress rehearsal of a major public emergency... and got somebody else to pay for all of it.

Posted February 5, 2007 12:00 PM by Connie H.

I find the "pipe bomb" story to be suspiciously convenient, frankly, and wonder why it didn't come to light earlier. It might actually have happened, but I don't think it can be used as an extenuating circumstance because, the people giving interviews didn't mention it at the time, so if it figured in the thinking of the people responding to the toys, its contribution doesn't appear to have been particularly prominent.

To Greg London, thanks for the update on the time-line --- I was one of those who thought the bomb-quad had arrived and recognized the device in maybe a half-hour. I see I was wrong (I didn't realize things got started as early in the morning as they did, either). However, I don't propose to second-guess the bomb-squad on the scene, I suspect that they know their job and how long it takes to do it properly.

As to "whether reasonable people" could mistake these things for bombs, one of the articles linked here earlier talked about "Object placement may have aggravated concerns", and quoted a police officer from (Atlanta, I think?) as saying, "If we'd found it stuck to a bridge we would have thought it might be a bomb, too". That may have been professional courtesy, I suppose.

I do apologize for making my first contributions on this forum on this subject, and in substantial disagreement with my hosts, at that. I've been a long-time reader of Making Light.

I think the City of Boston should put the things up for auction. If they can get Mayor Menino's as well as the artists' autographs on them, all the better.

Posted February 5, 2007 12:42 PM by dm

Ethan (15), I dragged Providence into it so that I could have a version of the Foresman quote that wasn't behind a registration firewall and wasn't from a Fox News outlet.

Avery (17), those were all nifty. I showed the OK Go Here It Goes Again video to a friend just the other day. I didn't mind them either, because they gave more than they got. It's a shame the "herding cats" commercial wasn't tied to a more identifiable product, because it has that same virtue.

Blinkylight Mooninites aren't in that class of bonbon, but they are kinda cool, so I don't mind them. On the other hand, most self-described viral marketing is dreary -- as Joel Polowin says, it's street spam.

dm (19), it would be awful if people thought they couldn't disagree with me. I'd have to have a second identity in the comment threads just to have decent conversations.

Posted February 5, 2007 12:57 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Well, the pipe bomb piece is interesting in and of itself, if for no other reason than to notice how the police chief describes when things happened, i.e. this article says:

“There were two conventional pipe bombs that were found at the same time that this started to unfold,” said Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.

The pipe bomb-like devices were reported at both locations just after 1 p.m. ... police officials said.

Er, the Mooninites were reported at 8 AM. It's convenient that the police commissioner describes that as "the same time" as 1 pm, when the pipebombs were reported.

Posted February 5, 2007 1:06 PM by Greg London

"BPD Lies About Timing, Suspicion, Everything Else"

or

"Sun Rises In East; Trend Expected To Continue"

Which headline would sell more papers?

Posted February 5, 2007 1:15 PM by Xopher

I think in this case, the viral marketing was intended more to increase the coolness cache of ATHF and [adult swim] than to increase viewership. If you're in on the joke and you get it, you're going to think it's cool, and maybe finally get around to checking out the fan forumz on adultswim.com, and then maybe you'll finally get around to buying that Mooninite t-shirt you've been eyeing for a while.

If you don't know what it is, you're going to either a.) ignore it or b.) go "huh, what is that?" And then sometime later if you see an actual advertisement for ATHF with a Mooninite on it, you're going to go "oh, *that's* what that thing was!" Whether or not you actually tune in to ATHF after that is incidental.

Posted February 5, 2007 1:15 PM by meredith

The timeline I have to date: and yes, it appears that the "flood" of calls was actually "four".

ref1
ref2
ref3

8 a.m. MBTA worker spots one of the mooninites affixed to an Interstate 93 ramp near Sullivan Square in Charlestown, forcing the shutdown of the northbound side of the Interstate and tying up traffic for hours.

10 a.m. The State Police bomb squad blows the object apart with a water cannon

Noon: reports of similarly suspicious devices flood police lines (perhaps as few as FOUR calls), sending anti terrorism forces to over a dozen locations in Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville.

1pm: two pipe bombs were reported

1:25pm: Interference Corp sends email to keep quiet about mooninite advertising campaign.

2pm - 3 p.m.: a Boston police analyst recognizes the image as a cartoon character, and police conclude it is a publicity stunt.

Posted February 5, 2007 1:21 PM by Greg London

Teresa #20, I guess that's a good reason. (I hope you didn't think I was actually mad. Just a joke.)

Posted February 5, 2007 1:39 PM by ethan

I'm still obsessing on one small detail: first they blow it up, then they decide it wasn't a dirty bomb.

Posted February 5, 2007 1:42 PM by TexAnne

Re dirty bomb -- wouldn't it be elementary to wave a Geiger counter wand near the suspect device to determine if that was a possibility? I'm certainly not a bomb squad technician, but I can't imagine that professional practice would skip that very useful and quick step.

Posted February 5, 2007 1:53 PM by Connie H.

You know, I could forgive almost anything to do with this matter except for the actions of Martha Coaxley. The number of nice things I could say about her I could only fit on the head of a pin to be better clogged by angels.

Interference Inc. do strike me as cowardly viral marketing scum, but honestly, given the competence (not!) of the BPD, I somehow don't think that they gave Berdovsky and Stevens bad advice to "keep it on the dl," because if anyone residing in Boston had called the police to say "Yes, we put them up, but they're harmless Lite-Brites," what are the odds that the gun-ho Fox News luvvin' BPD officers who arrested and tormented a kid for a political protest would hear anything past "Yes, we put them up--" and come and kick down some doors, guns blazing, and declare after a blood-spattered tragedy that they'd had good information about a terror cel, including a dreadlocked Belarusian?

Likewise, if I was a small business in New York, I wouldn't much want to deal with the police either, especially when Turner has bigger lawyers and deeper pockets and I've got them on the line saying they'll deal with this.

Someone should have called the police, but it was a lot safer for that someone to be all the way in Atlanta, barricaded by lawyers, private security and just plain distance, than to be in a city where the cops were in full-on panic mode.

Posted February 5, 2007 1:55 PM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

#27: OK, I admit it, I used the phrase "dirty bomb" as shorthand for "bomb containing substances which one should avoid spreading all over a major metropolitan area."

Posted February 5, 2007 1:59 PM by TexAnne

I've seen an interesting comparison between what happened in Boston and the 1938 War-of-the-Worlds-inspired panic. While there's a lot of blame to spread around, and the splash radius of the event is wide, I tend to apportion the largest share to Boston, followed by Interference, and a dollop left over for Berdovsky and Stevens.

Of course, not everyone agrees.

Posted February 5, 2007 2:01 PM by Stephen G

Stephen G: That Herald column is...tacky? Awful? Mean? I can't think of a word that sums up how I feel about it.

Posted February 5, 2007 2:04 PM by ethan

#22 Xopher
"Sun Rises In East; Trend Expected To Continue"

More likely, the paper will also interview someone from a big conservative think-tank who hotly contends that it rises in the West, and either split the difference ("Sun Rises in Kansas...") or run the controversy ("Will Sun Rise In East? Experts Disagree").

Posted February 5, 2007 2:24 PM by Kip W

Xopher @ #22:

I think the first headline is probably more interesting. There is, as of yet, nothing we can do about the Sun.

Posted February 5, 2007 2:41 PM by A.J.

I'm guessing the timeline is this:

8 AM weird device reported on bridge; road closed, traffic snarls, reports go out on radio

10 AM bomb squad shows up, examines it, pretty sure it's not a bomb but to play it safe they destroy it. By this time, radio has been talking about it for a couple hours.

10 - 12 Word starts gets back to city hall, and thereby to radio, that it's not a bomb, but radio continues to mention it in recaps of the news of the morning and traffic reports. Police + city proceed, thinking it's an isolated unidentifiable weird device, not a bomb but still noteworthy. Dealing with logistics of reopening roadways; everyone in town now primed to keep eyes peeled for weird things on bridges.

12 Four phone calls (from cautious citizens, from funny citizens in the know about ATHF, from sleazy Interference Inc?) reporting more mystery devices on bridges etc around town. Police now think, pretty reasonably, what the hell is going on? We don't know what these things are. The bomb squad said they weren't bombs, but it's awful weird for unidentifiable electronics to pop up on important infrastructure all over town, overnight (so far as we know now). Maybe they're just detonators, or relay points for a detonation signal, or something else -- we don't know what they are, and they're all over the place in places where they could really do harm. We'd better treat this as the real deal, while trying to figure out what the hell they are.

1 Two apparent pipe bombs found (to the person upthread who finds that too convenient: these were being reported on internet news sources at 2:00 Wednesday, which is when I started following the story).

2:30 Police analyst figures out what the ATHF signs are, and police realize it's not an attack.

If this is right, the police response actually seems to me like a reasonable approach. The unreasonable part comes from the radio and TV chatterers pumping it up, so the city then feels the need to bluster about, and find a fall guy for, the inconvenience caused by its totally reasonable cautious response.

Posted February 5, 2007 2:49 PM by Anne

Re #27 Connie:

"... wouldn't it be elementary to wave a Geiger counter wand near the suspect device..."

Yes and no. Yes it should and would be a good move to test for radioactivity. But, as the saying goes, this is a situation where absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Consider the recent poisoning of Mr Litvinenko using Polonium 210 in London. The reason Po210 was so effective, is that it is easily shielded, being an almost pure alpha emitter. (Yes, the London authorities found traces after the fact, when they knew what look for. That doesn't invalidate the point.)

Posted February 5, 2007 2:50 PM by John Aspinall

TexAnne:(26)

I'm still obsessing on one small detail: first they blow it up, then they decide it wasn't a dirty bomb.

Posted February 5, 2007 3:05 PM by John Houghton

#34:The unreasonable part comes from the radio and TV chatterers pumping it up, so the city then feels the need to bluster about, and find a fall guy for, the inconvenience caused by its totally reasonable cautious response.

Blaming the media is a time-honored thing that politicians have done for years. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the police were behaving perfectly reasonable and the problem was the evil, evil media whipping the public up into a mindless frenzy. Why wouldn't the city leaders just blame the media rather than trying to puff themselves up? It's simpler, much less embarrasing for them and nothing they haven't done before.

Also, your description of what happened at 12 does not strike me as reasonable behavior for a few reasons. One, it smacks of "Hollywood terrorist movie plot." As Bruce Schneier points out in his blog, this is inconsistent with what terrorists actually do. Two, the same bomb squad which was so competent to figure out these weren't bombs should have figured out that none of those scenarios you suggest applied either. Your description of what happened at 12 is consistent with people assuming the worst case scenario just in case, despite the lack of any credible threat.

Posted February 5, 2007 3:12 PM by JC

John, 36: Thanks. That's what I wanted to know.

Posted February 5, 2007 3:17 PM by TexAnne

Regarding what happened at 12:00 by Anne's time-line:

One false alarm in the morning gives you no useful information about a call that comes in later in the day, regarding a different location. Particularly if the calls described something odd seen as you drive by at high speed, (few details) as one would do under an expressway overpass. The best one can do is to treat it as what it is, a new call, and draw conclusions about any connections once you have specific information. After the second or third identical "device" you can probably draw conclusions that the fourth is related, but you can't draw conclusions from a sample of one. But after the first call, you can't judge the second by "the bomb squad said 'they were not bombs'" because the bomb squad hasn't said that, they only said that the thing they responded to this morning wasn't a bomb.

I don't really blame the Boston media. This is, properly, a local traffic story, about why there was a temporary disruption in the roadways. How local traffic became national, or international, news, is another story. There is a lack of proportion in the coverage that is troubling.

One would home that 24 hour national news would involve in-depth coverage of the national government, international politics, and the like. But done on the cheap, it winds up just being the most melodramatic local news re-broadcast nationally. With no additional analysis, or even thought, going into the matter.

And it also becomes a matter of the media making the news, rather than just reporting it. The Boston officials' reaction might not have been so extreme if they hadn't known that they were being watched so closely, with every action, right or wrong, about to be immediately ripped apart by talking heads. You can't really handle a local matter in a proportionate way when it is drawing national attention.

Posted February 5, 2007 3:35 PM by Ursula L

Yikes, just heard on the radio that Turner is paying Boston $2 million. Half of it is to reimburse costs. The other half is to go to Homeland Security programs. In return, neither Turner nor Interference will be charged with anything. As for the two men, Martha Coakley said that their charges will likely be "resolved," whatever that means.

There's a part of me that wonders if the Boston politicians deliberately played up their response in an attempt (successful) to fund their projects.

Posted February 5, 2007 4:39 PM by JC

Tort reform!
Deep pockets==guilt

Posted February 5, 2007 4:47 PM by Greg London

Tart reform? Sounds good to me.

Posted February 5, 2007 4:50 PM by Serge

Sorry, I got too much stupid on me for a moment there.

Posted February 5, 2007 4:52 PM by Greg London

#37: I definitely think the whole thing is silly, and I'm not at all saying "the politicians acted honorably all the way, a pox on the nasty nasty media". I'm just saying that the police response considered in isolation is not necessarily an overreaction. The politicians then get in on the act, needing to look tough and like there's nothing false about a false alarm, and the whole thing is made bigger by, as #39 Ursula says, national media flapping a local story into national hem-and-haw fodder. All I meant is that "overreaction" more accurately describes the rhetoric being used by officials and press, not the actions of the emergency teams.

Posted February 5, 2007 4:54 PM by Anne

But when there’s a citywide bomb scare blowing up and you sit on your duffs for hours, not telling the authorities and keeping other people from telling them—yeah, that starts to look like intent.

Given the political climate and legal situation, the only phone call they should have made was to their lawyer.

If they'd called the police and said "They're just lite-brites, deal with it", they'd basically have confessed to violating MA's stupid hoax bomb law. This would have not only destroy Mr. Berdovsky immigration chances, it would have basically put both of them on the spot for five years imprisonment.

I can believe that *any* organization facing this would do the right thing, as defined in America: Shut the hell up and call the lawyers first, because Doing The Right Thing can get you in seriously hot water.

This sucks -- but you play the game by the rules that are in play, not the rules you'd like to be in play.

Why do you think Turner settled?

Posted February 5, 2007 4:54 PM by Erik V. Olson

#30 & 31 - The Herald's Nasty Bit of Spew

The whole column was a nasty bit of work, which I suspect was written with Limbaugh's audience in mind.

And, I take personal exception to "fellow “artists,” the synonym for which is “unemployed.”"

Fegh. There are columnists who should be unemployed shortly.

Posted February 5, 2007 5:33 PM by Margaret Organ-Kean

I'm just saying that the police response considered in isolation is not necessarily an overreaction.

Except there's a million dollars that just went unaccounted for. A million bucks on a false alarm?

I'm sorry, but the only way I can see that as NOT an overreaction is coming from a place of fear.

AT MOST, you have the first litebrite called in at 8. The bomb squad takes TWO FRICKEN HOURS (never mind how slow a response that is) to hose it down. At two hours and five minutes, they should have looked at the pieces and easily figured out that it contained no explosives. All subsequent calls (and apparently there were only FOUR) should have AT MOST been dealt with in similar fashion. i.e. send a cruiser, send the water cannon. Done.

This is giving a lot of the benefit of the doubt in just the fact that any call of a possible bomb, no matter how NOT like a bomb it looks like is handled like a bomb.

But at NO TIME did anything ever warrant shutting down the city, calling the FBI, calling the coast guard, calling the terrorist experts, whatever.

Unless a person looks at it in terms of "fear everything until proven safe", their reaction, especially when viewed on the timeline, shows a massive overreaction. There is no "normal" response to a false alarm that should have racked up a million dollars in expenses.

If that's normal, then terrorists don't need to bother with real bombs, they'll just keep phoning in the false alarms until we go broke.

Posted February 5, 2007 5:42 PM by Greg London

The Herald columnist. Feh. I've now got someone I dislike even more than Martha Coakley.

I hope he and his paper go as bankrupt financially as they are morally.

Posted February 5, 2007 6:08 PM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

General geeky comment: the "water cannon" mentioned is known as a disruptor. It's more a kind of water shotgun, shooting a slug of water into the mechanism, fast enough to disassemble the fusing mechanism without risk of setting it off by fire or explosive compression. Also fast enough to disassemble any likely anti-handling device. I think they were first used by the British Army in Northern Ireland, but they're commonly sold around the world now. (I have a friend who's a salesperson for a company that manufactures and sells anti-terrorist equipment.)

Posted February 5, 2007 6:20 PM by NelC

What a delicious typo -- or is it?

Mayor Menino -- a Merino is a kind of sheep.

And yes, I kept reading his name as "merino", too, just because it was so fitting.

Posted February 5, 2007 6:31 PM by Scorpio

Does anyone else feel the urge to turn Howie Carr's name (I hope he's not a relative of mine...) into the top Google search for smug asshole?

Posted February 5, 2007 6:46 PM by PixelFish

and could have stopped the panic hours earlier than it did

I'm not entirely sure about that. Telling people what was going on didn't help the guy with the iPod ...

Posted February 5, 2007 7:08 PM by inge

What I'm finding particularly weird, and more than a little disturbing, is the incidence (mostly online, but at least once in an NPR interview) of the word "hypervigilance" as a term of approval in discussions of this piece of security theater. It's a pathological reaction, a state of mind where one cannot discriminate between real danger and the shadow of a branch on ones bedroom wall, and whereas it might be an appropriate description of what happened in Boston, it's not a good thing.

Posted February 5, 2007 7:15 PM by JESR

#2/#52: I should read first, post later, and not the other way 'round. Sorry.

Posted February 5, 2007 7:15 PM by inge

Thank you so much for ceasing to jump to conclusions, she said sarcasticly. The City of Boston in no way "Shut down". There were a few street closings, a few subway closings, but ONLY in the affected areas. I depend on the T for my transportation. I was in unaffected area, the MBTA web sight had timely, posted advisories for the affected areas, and my train was less than 5 minutes delayed.

And as someone who colaborated on explosive pranks during college, creative decoration in NO WAY indicates that a device is harmless.

Posted February 5, 2007 7:45 PM by Kristin

I'd be happy to turn him into the Google search for "smug asshole," but it's even more heartening to find that, since I read it this morning, the "rate this article" rating for that ghastly bit of dickery is remaining steady at one star out of five (and you're not allowed to rate lower than one). I somehow think the readership is just as offended, which is good for getting the smug asshole canned.

If you haven't left your one star out of five, please do so.

Posted February 5, 2007 8:26 PM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

#47: a million bucks on a false alarm?

I agree but I'd be interested to hear where those numbers come from. It sounds to me like the $1 million figure is a product of the lawyers negotiating (with a mind to make Turner settle by thrownig around bigger numbers even than that), not a real accounting number. By the time Menino's initial $500,000 number came out, we were already to the threats and recriminations phase, so he had every incentive to emphasize the Seriousness of the Crime by inflating the number.

(Let's do some math with fake numbers. How many hours are involved? Say 8am - 5pm, so averaging 9 hours. How many city workers needing to be paid overtime - say around 1000? How much is their overtime - maybe say an average of $30/hour? That would give us $270,000 in overtime.)

Posted February 5, 2007 8:31 PM by Anne

The "Herald Pulse" poll next to the smug asshole's article has 53% voting "Made the Media look like dolts" in response to the question "What do you think ad pranksters Sean Stevens and Peter Berdovsky accomplished most with yesterday’s courthouse press conference?" That made wading through Mr. Carr's blather worth the effort.

Posted February 5, 2007 8:48 PM by Dawno

Is the Boston Herald generally a right-wing, anti-immigrant rag? Or is it just that Howie Carr is an asshole?

Howie Carr is an asshole.
Howie Carr is an asshole.
Howie Carr is an asshole.
Howie Carr is an asshole.
Howie Carr is an asshole.

Just to say that a bunch of times.

Posted February 5, 2007 8:49 PM by Xopher

I don't want to take this too far off topic, but Xopher, if you go to Howie's website (easy to Google) you'll find he also has a (eye assaulting) site about Ted Kennedy and another (more eye assault) one about John Kerry (which I found particularly vulgar).

Posted February 5, 2007 9:02 PM by Dawno

So he's a RIGHT-WING asshole. I find that phrase redundant, frankly.

Posted February 5, 2007 9:04 PM by Xopher

Re the Herald column:

I am over 35 (ok, only by a few months, but still).

I am gainfully employed.

I have never in my life even tried an illicit substance.

I *love* Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Suck on *that*, Smug Asshole.

Posted February 5, 2007 9:46 PM by meredith

OK. As a born and bred Boston-area-person, let me tell you some things.

Boston Herald = tabloid.

Boston Herald = Right wing tabloid. (The equation isn't perfect, but it's certainly generally a hell of a lot more conservative than the Globe.)

Howie Carr = Reactionary asshole who goes after anyone who's not his definition of "a good guy." He's, um, kind of a jerk.

So in other words, yes, Xopher.

Posted February 5, 2007 10:06 PM by kate

Xopher (#59):

As kate noted in #63, the correct answer is "both". Let's put it this way: Rupert Murdoch used to own the Herald, and it wasn't that long ago.

Posted February 5, 2007 10:30 PM by Christopher Davis

kate: He's, um, kind of a jerk.

Why be nice to him? Howie Carr is a spherical asshole; that's his job, and it's a job he's done for a very long time.

Chris: The Horrid owned by Murdoch? I've been avoiding too much of the ugly side of the news, I guess; IIRC it became a tabloid when Hearst (Inc.) bought it. Never thought I'd see the day when I looked back on Hearst as a relatively decent organization.

Posted February 5, 2007 11:07 PM by CHip

#57: It sounds to me like the $1 million figure is a product of the lawyers negotiating

Anne, if that's true, then it simply reflects WORSE on Boston government. They basically blackmailed Turner into paying two million dollars for Boston's overreaction. If it didn't cost two million dollars why is Turner paying two million dollars not ringing up in anyone's mind as anything other than polictical "grease"? Dirty money? Slimey politics?

Lemme tell ya something, "we won't press charges if you pay our expenses" followed by an insanely inflated list of expenses is CORRUPT.

So, EITHER Boston REALLY DID blow two million dollars overreacting to a false alarm, OR the Mayor is essentially blackmailing Turner not because Turner did anything wrong, but because Turner has deep pockets and the mayor saw an opportunity to cash in.

Those are the ONLY two possibilities.

Overreaction or political opportunistic blackmail.

I don't care which one it is. Both prove bad government.

Posted February 5, 2007 11:25 PM by Greg London

If they're going to be hypervigilant, they should get rid of all the public trash cans, or at least make sure that no one puts in a container that's bigger than 3 ounces. And while they're at it, they should move MIT to some other M state. (I'm expecting that some time, this cartoon character is going to show up in the lights of some large building, or buildings, and visible to a large number of people. Possibly on the 4th. During the fireworks.)

I have some sympathy for the two guys, cause people I know and like are the sort of people who would do the sort of things that normal people miss and some people think is cool. But the things they do could blink or otherwise send the authorities into conniptions.

Posted February 6, 2007 1:08 AM by eric

Here's a press conference with Stevens and Berdovsky. They talk about hair.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:07 AM by Martin GL

Real-world spam is a terrifying prospect...

Imagine total strangers roaming the streets, shouting to everyone they walk by: "Your penis is too small! Buy cheap Viagra! Make your breasts bigger! Dear Friend, I represent the exiled Defense Minister of Liberia!"

Where does one draw the line between spam and terrorism...?
:-S

-A.R.Yngve
http://yngve.bravehost.com

Posted February 6, 2007 6:34 AM by A.R.Yngve

Another geeky note about the two hour delay between the first call and the disruption of the first device: there is a concept called "soak time". Some bombs are planted with a view to killing the EOD crew, timed to go off as they're examining the bomb (the original call being by the terrorists to ensure that the crew arrive in the appropriate window). To counter this the crew either use a Wheelbarrow-type ROV to position the disrupter, or if they don't have an ROV they wait a while to see if the bomb will go off on its own before setting up the disrupter on a frame. (Cutting wires Hollywood-style is passé.)

Posted February 6, 2007 7:01 AM by NelC

Greg London, #47:

AT MOST, you have the first litebrite called in at 8. The bomb squad takes TWO FRICKEN HOURS (never mind how slow a response that is) to hose it down. At two hours and five minutes, they should have looked at the pieces and easily figured out that it contained no explosives. All subsequent calls (and apparently there were only FOUR) should have AT MOST been dealt with in similar fashion. i.e. send a cruiser, send the water cannon. Done.

I disagree. The timeline says that two hours after the call the first "bomb" was detonated with a watercannon; that doesn't mean the bomb squad only showed up then. You do not hurry bomb disposals, no matter how innocent a device looks. Once the bomb squad is called out it WILL follow its own protocols for dealing with a worst case scenario.

Similarly, anybody who decides based on the false alert they just dealt with that a NEW call is also bogus needs to look for a different job. Even if it was clear these calls were related, could they exclude the possibility that the first device was a dud in order to lure them into thinking the real bomb is also a dud?

Posted February 6, 2007 7:40 AM by Martin Wisse

A.R. Yngve #70: It wouldn't be shouting, it would be sidling up to people and making those statements...

Posted February 6, 2007 7:55 AM by Fragano Ledgister

#70:Where does one draw the line between spam and terrorism...?

Are you saying that the Nigerian scam inspires fear within you? That you take the Nigerian scam as a threat upon your life?

#72:Similarly, anybody who decides based on the false alert they just dealt with that a NEW call is also bogus needs to look for a different job.

Did anyone say that? I thought the argument was that it should be easy for the bomb squad to identify all of these things as not bombs due to the lack of necessary components (e.g., detonator, explosives etc.)

(I'm reminded of the story "Eric and the Gazebo.")

The only problem, off hand, they might have run into (as I mentioned in a different thread) is a DDOS. If that is what happened, in this case, it was a problem of their own making, caused by having amped up the fear in the first place. They chose to go public with this right away before they knew anything.

Contrast this with the fake pipe bombs which didn't merit a mention in the news until the next day. Even then, the spin was that these things, which, unlike the LED signs, actually intended to be mistaken for bombs, were not noteworthy in and of themselves. They were only noteworthy because the police found them while they were dealing withe LED signs.

Ironically, if they had treated the LED signs like they had treated the fake pipe bombs, none of this would have happened.

(Also, if the problem was a DDOS, I'm not sure how Turner is responsible unless they were the people calling the sightings into the police.)

Posted February 6, 2007 8:28 AM by JC

Not so much fear as loathing.
(And a "secondary fear" that spam will eventually destroy society by making any meaningful communication impossible -- which is a kind of terrorism...)
;-P

Posted February 6, 2007 9:42 AM by A.R.Yngve

72: great. I said "never mind the two hours" and thats exactly what you harp on. So, whether or not two hours is acceptable time frame for the bomb squad to disable some explosives, I'm not sure. I'd have to look into some other city statistics. But the NEVER MIND was a flag that the two hours was irrelevant to my main argument. The incompetance is the two million dollars in expenses for a false alarm.

TWO MILLION DOLLARS FOR A FALSE ALARM.

Either the city overreacted.

Or the city overbilled and forced Turner to pay to avoid going to court for a non-crime.

Posted February 6, 2007 10:55 AM by Greg London

There has been much discussion of the timeline. Having lived (and driven) through some of it, this is what I know:
"Police activity" was reported in the area where the first device was seen, starting shortly after 8am, and local street traffic was delayed. A bit after 9am, the report changed to "possible bomb," and that's when the highway was shut down.
It is quite possible that the real chain was MBTA worker notices device, decides to call cops, a cruiser comes by, decides to play it safe & calls HQ, they decide to call the bomb squad. In Boston traffic, the bomb squad, if located downtown (a safe assumption) would take at least 30 minutes to get to that area. The chain of calls would also take about 30 minutes, so the bomb squad did reply with a decent speed.

By noon, it's hit the news, and the locals are scared. The locals don't know that the first device is harmless; they only know what the news reported as they came into work. So, on their way to lunch, a few people see things, and decide that the cops should be called. This time, the cops respond faster, because you never know.

By mid-afternoon, it's apparent most of the devices are ad boards. Then the call from Turner comes, 'fessing up. Meanwhile, cops and city workers (paid in excess of $50/hour, plus time-and-a half for overtime--and the bomb squad people probably get hazardous duty pay in excess of $100/hour) have been working OT since 8am. That's at least $600 apiece, mind you, so it doesn't take long to reach $500,000. (Local police make 100K a year easily; living around here is expensive. With OT, a cop can clear over 200K/year.)

The next day, the guerilla artists are hauled in, and, instead of apologizing, crack jokes and are basically wise-asses, endearing them to nobody.

Now, if CN had just paid for ad space--indeed, they had a large billboard ad near where the first device was found up until a couple of weeks ago--all this would have been avoided. Instead, they decide to be cheap. Didn't pay off, though they did get publicity.

Posted February 6, 2007 11:12 AM by Lisa Hertel

so, 5,000 man hours of work in half a day is a reasonable response to a device that doesn't even look like a bomb?

And this should be 5,000 man hours of additional work, excluding the normal police force that is usually on duty at any given time.

Whatever. Some people live in panic and fear and are willing to give their government carte blanche money and overlook the most assinine behaviour simply because it makes some people feel safe. Yes. Take away my liberty to make me safe. Yes. Spend a half a million dollars chasing a false alarm to make me feel safe. Yes. Do whatever you need to do, but for gawds sake, make me feel safe.

There's just no arguing with fear.

Posted February 6, 2007 11:31 AM by Greg London

Maybe guerilla marketing firms do things differently than above-board marketing firms -- but every time I've worked on any project that got within of a whiff of anyone's licenced characters, everyone is required to sign work-for-hire agreements.

If the agency "owns" Stevens and Berdovsky's work, it would seem like they should also own any illegal aspects of that work as well.

Posted February 6, 2007 11:36 AM by Karen Sideman

"licensed." Sorry.

Posted February 6, 2007 11:40 AM by karen Sideman

#77:The next day, the guerilla artists are hauled in, and, instead of apologizing, crack jokes and are basically wise-asses, endearing them to nobody.

So you're saying that if they had just said that they were sorry, everything would have been ok? That is, if they'd just said that they were sorry, you'd overlook the overreaction by the police. If not, this isn't relevant to the argument. (i.e., if you're reaction would be the same regardless of how they reacted, then their reaction obviously has had no effect on you.)

The locals should have known the first device was harmless because the police knew. Oh, the police didn't inform the media... Oh, well. Also, "because you never know" is a horrible reason for doing anything. This is the reasoning that propagates chain letters and urban legends about kidney thefts. All "because you never know" does is the unsubstantiated propagation of fear. If this is your best argument, you are admitting that the Boston Police acted out of panic. I would hope better of them.

I don't like the idea that mistakes or boneheaded moves by one group of people excuses mistakes or boneheaded moves by another group. The guerrilla marketer didn't behave intelligently. But that doesn't excuse a sheer panic response from trained professionals who know better.

Posted February 6, 2007 11:51 AM by JC

I guess the whole Boston thing will get a few Al-Qaeda donors thinking.
In Iraq they have to finance bombs that kill hundreds of innocent people to facilliate the political climate they favour and still only barely register on western news while in Boston the could have a similar thing with just two dudes and a couple of blinking lights.
It's as if Boston had put up a sign inviting them to hit them with their lamest attack possible and promised them to react exactly like they would if they had executed some fancy 24/Jack Bauer plan.

If your goal is increased fearmongering, the cost/benefit analysis of the DHS/BPD/Media reaction must be a terrorists dream.

Posted February 6, 2007 12:32 PM by Andreas

Yep. Boston has EMBOLDENED THE TERRORISTS. Who are, as Jon Stewart has pointed out, apparently quite an emboldenable bunch.

Posted February 6, 2007 12:38 PM by Xopher

karen 80: I just thought you were British.

Posted February 6, 2007 12:39 PM by Xopher

Greg London:

"Take away my liberty to make me safe. Yes. Spend a half a million dollars chasing a false alarm to make me feel safe. Yes. Do whatever you need to do, but for gawds sake, make me feel safe."

They should get themselves shipped to Gitmo like they always wanted. Or not.

Posted February 6, 2007 1:55 PM by bi

What Turner has done is an out-of-court settlement for $2 million (described as $1 million to cover the cities' expenses and $1 million in contributions for more equipment and training). Money well spent, it does sound like more training would be a good thing.

I've been trying to make the original $500,000 figure make sense --- at $100/hour that's 5000 staff-hours. Assume most of those people were active for ten hours, that's 500 people? "More than a dozen sites" means 40 people per site?

That seems like it might be excessive, but it's not too outrageous for a sizeable event, particularly when you factor in the cost of specialized equipment and things like helicopters, and I suspect bomb squad members bill out at somewhat more than $100/hour.

$1 million in expenses doubles that, and seems odder. I wonder what the city spends to support things like the 4th of July Esplanade Concert or First Night. I suspect that those costs are more likely the basis for the estimates we've been hearing than any accounting of the actual costs.

Posted February 6, 2007 2:00 PM by dm

DM, the first moonite was 8-10 am. They got four calls around noonish for more devices. By 2, they realized it was an advertising campaign. I have yet to find enough detail of a timeline to figure out when the moonites were taken down, but I don't think twelve moonites got the full bomb squad treatment before 2. The numbers I read seem to point to the first one getting a massive response 8-10. A few getting a smaller response 12-2. and the others taken down by cops in cruisers after 2.

I haven't read hardly anything about the two simulated pipebombs, how many people responded to that, etc. But that shouldn't get counted in.

But it's really a stretch to add it up to a million samolians.

Posted February 6, 2007 2:39 PM by Greg London

Re "hypervigilance" -- another point which should be noted is that it's a condition which cannot be maintained for very long. And then, when people are worn out by always having to be hyper-alert for any sign of danger, when they're tired and have jumped at too many things that turned out to be false alarms and are starting to slip, THAT is when a well-prepared enemy will strike.

You just can't stay at "crisis alert" effectively for any length of time. That's Tactics 101.

Posted February 6, 2007 2:48 PM by Lee

Turner could make that money back with a TV movie about the farce . . . although they might have trouble getting permission to film in Boston.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:03 PM by Stefan Jones

My daily commute involves Sullivan Square, the subway station under the elevated highway where the first LiteBrite was found. When I got there, about 9AM, the subway was closed. The MBTA had a workaround in place where they ran trains from Oak Grove, the north terminus, for three stops to Wellington, the stop before Sullivan. Then passengers were herded off the train and onto shuttle buses, which stopped at Sullivan and Community College to pick up and discharge passengers, and then let everybody off at North Station to continue by train.

They'd set up an ad hoc platform at Sullivan across the parking lot from the station proper, probably a good idea if the bomb was for real. There were some policemen helping with crowd control, pointing people to the right platform. I asked one of them what was going on, and as I recall he told me that the bomb squad had just shown up.

The buses have radio communications with MBTA dispatchers. From what I heard it seemed to me that they were trying to figure out what other routes they could divert buses from, during rush hour, to add to the Orange Line shuttle service.

I don't know what all this cost, but diversions from routines generally have costs. Certainly it contributes to the half million we're trying to tally up.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:04 PM by squeech

Stefan at 89: Turner could make that money back with a TV movie about the farce . . . although they might have trouble getting permission to film in Boston.

I bet Toronto would be happy to help.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:06 PM by Lizzy L

The next day, the guerilla artists are hauled in, and, instead of apologizing, crack jokes and are basically wise-asses, endearing them to nobody.

These guys are hauled in and charged under a terrorism law. The charges are pretty blatantly false. However, apologising could be taken as an admission of guilt, or whatever.

They can't really say anything meaningful, because it's an ongoing court case, and they don't want to say something that could harm their case. However, the media want a sound bite, so instead of saying `no comment', the accused say, `that's not a hair question.'

They don't say anything possibly harmful to their case, and they point out just how stupid the whole carry on is.

These guys were mainly concerned about getting released, not making Boston look good.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:14 PM by Keir

#92 - Also, standard advice these days, as I see it in the various trade magazines that cross my desk, is to NEVER say "no comment". It's taken by most readers as an admission of guilt (as you mention), or as showing that you have something to hide.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:31 PM by Lexica

Stefan @ 89... Turner could make that money back with a TV movie about the farce...

Or Law & Oder will rip it from the headlines. Ah, if only Jerry Orbach were still among us, I can well imagine he'd have the appropriate comment about the BrightLites of Death.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:43 PM by Serge

If the two guys were being paid for exposure, the hair question bit was genius. It got everyone talking about them and how they avoided questioning in a weird and interesting way. They got another round of publicity from the hair questions, as well as some Internet admiration.

Posted February 6, 2007 3:44 PM by Diatryma

Lee at 88, on the results of hypervigilance: yup, it's self-limiting, and not in a good way. In the human body, it pounds the hell out of the adrenals and the circulatory system, and messes up the central nervous system with neurotransmitter breakdown products. In a political entity, it uses up resources in closely analogous ways, and eventually makes it impossible to keep the 911 dispatch center and vehicle maintenence staffed, not to mention the hell of paying overtime for first responders.

Posted February 6, 2007 4:06 PM by JESR

#89 Stefan:

Hey, if they do it, I have a great idea for a guerilla marketing scheme to promote the movie....

Posted February 6, 2007 4:58 PM by albatross

#66 ::: Greg London ::: (view all by) ::: February 05, 2007, 11:25 PM:
It sounds to me like the $1 million figure is a product of the lawyers negotiating....

Anne, if that's true, then it simply reflects WORSE on Boston government. They basically blackmailed Turner into paying two million dollars for Boston's overreaction. If it didn't cost two million dollars why is Turner paying two million dollars not ringing up in anyone's mind as anything other than polictical "grease"? Dirty money? Slimey politics?
Lemme tell ya something, "we won't press charges if you pay our expenses" followed by an insanely inflated list of expenses is CORRUPT.
So, EITHER Boston REALLY DID blow two million dollars overreacting to a false alarm, OR the Mayor is essentially blackmailing Turner not because Turner did anything wrong, but because Turner has deep pockets and the mayor saw an opportunity to cash in.
Those are the ONLY two possibilities.
Overreaction or political opportunistic blackmail.

I don't care which one it is. Both prove bad government.

I agree with everything you say here -- I think the overreaction and badness is on the part of the politicos after the fact. I absolutely think it's sleazy that Boston made Turner pay that much -- what HAS to be a fake number -- and I'm surprised in a way that Turner paid it. (I guess it's good that there's more money in city coffers so that money doesn't get taken from necessary services, but still.) My quibble is with saying that the police or bomb squad overreacted by halting traffic for a few hours while they tried to figure out what was going on.

#74 ...this was a problem of their own making, caused by having amped up the fear in the first place. They chose to go public with this right away before they knew anything.

Contrast this with the fake pipe bombs which didn't merit a mention in the news until the next day.

I don't think either of these claims is right. First of all, they stopped traffic at the site of the first device. That's totally reasonable, seems to me. Once they've stopped traffic, there is a traffic change, delays, etc that merit reporting on, on the morning commute shows. It's not like they have the option to keep the traffic flow a secret. So they say to the radio stations "We've stopped traffic at this location because we have a weird device. The bomb squad is taking care of it. We'll let you know more soon. Commuters should detour around this location." And the radio stations put this out and start talking about what the device might be. Radio stations monitor police radio, and their helicopter or whatever would see that the bomb squad truck is at this location, and listeners will call in to say "hey the bomb squad is outside my house, do you know what the hell is going on?" So I don't think the police have the option to say nothing.

And the two pipe bombs were mentioned in news reports alongside discussion of the signs, by 2:00 on the day of the incidents. The news reports (eg CNN internet) said that they seemed to be a separate thing from the signs... so already this is the word they were getting from police. Also, already the headline at 2:00 was along the lines of "Unidentified devices snarl traffic", with the story reporting that the police knew the devices didn't contain any explosives.

I really think the overreaction here was after-the-fact from politicans, lawyers, and media -- not from the police/bomb squad response.

#77 (Local police make 100K a year easily; living around here is expensive. With OT, a cop can clear over 200K/year.)

Wow - I'm surprised by the numbers. On the Boston police application (googleable) they say the starting salary is $45K, that's what I was basing my numbers on. And yeah, I was figuring on not as many high-paid bomb squad members, and lots of low-paid transit employees and cops working traffic control duty rather than hazard duty.

Posted February 6, 2007 6:02 PM by Anne

The Boston police are now saying that Berdovsky and Peters filmed the police taking down one of the signs, and are claiming that their failure to immediately tell the police that the sign was not a bomb proves that they intended to cause the chaos. Only a few problems with that reasoning:

1. Berdovsky and Peters had no way of knowing whether someone else had attached something bad to the sign, or knowing that the police were worried simply because of the sign itself. Remember, the police were being far too secretive about what they knew.

2. Berdovsky and Peters may well have thought that the police could not possibly still be thinking that the sign was dangerous, since the sign was obviously harmless. (At least that was obvious to everyone else who saw one over the previous 3 weeks in 10 cities and didn't call 911.) Again, the police were being far too secretive about what they knew.

3. If they had told the police what they knew immediately, it may well not have changed the police response. Many police officers simply don't believe people who aren't wearing suits, and many lawyers will tell you that you should never offer information to the police. The police reinforce that message every time they arrest people who do try to do the right thing.

According to the news reports, Peter Berdovsky called the people who hired him and they said they'd get in contact with the authorities. He later directly told the police what he knew, and the police responded by arresting him on obviously false charges. Now the prosecutors are stretching for every justification they can find to support the charges, because they're embarrassed by how much of the public doesn't actually want to a lynching.

No matter what he said or didn't say, no matter when he said it or didn't, the prosecutors would spin it to make it sound bad. And they know that he can't respond directly.

Posted February 6, 2007 6:15 PM by Michael

Ah, Sam Ewen. A gentleman who does a piss-poor job reselling stuff to other people and skimming off the top while leaving others holding the bag since 1995.

Why, yes, he did business with my company, and yes, he ticked off his client and us by being lazy and sloppy and screwing up computer systems. Why do you ask?

Posted February 6, 2007 6:50 PM by Glenn Hauman

Given Berdovsky's immigration status, and the fact that in the paranoid post 9/11 world we live in, you don't want a single blemish on your record if you're applying for citizenship, I expect what is happening is the prosecutors are rattling their sabres as much as they can while the defense is simply holding tight for a trial, which the city does not want because of the gross embarrassment factor, and Turner etc. won't want because it will look like them hanging the guys out to dry, which is of course very bad for their demographics. So I expect that after things die down a bit more, charges will be dropped without prejudice. Or there may be a plea bargain for the misdemeanor "public nuisance" nonsense with community service entertaining kids at some hospital, to give the state a figleaf. But only if that doesn't mess with Berdovsky's immigration.

Posted February 6, 2007 8:05 PM by Kevin Andrew Murphy

#98:And the two pipe bombs were mentioned in news reports alongside discussion of the signs, by 2:00 on the day of the incidents. The news reports (eg CNN internet) said that they seemed to be a separate thing from the signs... so already this is the word they were getting from police.

Ok, I can believe that I didn't hear the news reports which mention the pipe bombs. It is interesting to note that the spin on the pipe bombs in the day after was they weren't sure if it was a separate thing from the signs or not. (e.g., it was the lead on the Boston Herald article which I had linked to earlier.)

I really think the overreaction here was after-the-fact from politicans, lawyers, and media -- not from the police/bomb squad response.

I would separate the rest of the police from bomb squad. I agree that the bomb squad did what they were supposed to do. Based on what I was hearing on the radio even at 5pm, after Turner had explained the situation, I think those who weren't the first responders were still grasping at some terrorist scenario which didn't exist.

(I will also say that if people really are starting to panic over LED signs, it's ok to tell them not to panic and it's ok to get that word out. That was not what I was hearing from officials.)

Posted February 6, 2007 8:57 PM by JC

CHip (#65): According to the Wikipedia entry, which is reasonably congruent with my memory on this particular topic, Hearst sold the Boston Herald to Rupert Murdoch in 1982, and he sold it in 1994 due to cross-ownership issues with WFXT-25. (Note also that Patrick Purcell is apparently a former News Corp exec.)

Posted February 6, 2007 9:08 PM by Christopher Davis

Everyone wants to get into the act.

From the Manchester Union Leader (page one!):

PORTSMOUTH – Charlie Lord is a novice geocacher. He spends hours enjoying his new high-tech hobby, which he discovered by accident a few months ago when he stumbled across a small box in a mall parking lot.

He was pretty excited about planting his eighth "cache" on Friday - a mini Altoids box rigged with a magnet for sticking in a good hiding spot, well above snow level, for fellow treasure hunters to locate using a satellite-driven Global Positioning System and coordinates posted by Lord online.

As it happened, Portsmouth police were the first to find Lord's treasure box. And they got excited, too - but not in a good way.

Now Lord, 48, of Rochester, is wanted for questioning by police after his box was confiscated Sunday from an electrical panel outside the Shaw's supermarket at Southgate Plaza.

"I'm so embarrassed," Lord said last night. "I've heard of people who actually make their caches look like something more dangerous than they are. Then I look at mine, a little mint box. No wires. No gimmicks. I never intended to cause any trouble."

Portsmouth police Lt. Rodney McQuate said detectives are waiting for a call from Lord before they decide if charges - including misdemeanor disorderly conduct and causing a false public alarm - will be lodged against him.

Another triumph for the culture of fear. Yep, the terrorists have won, and they have Bushie-boy to thank for their victory.

Posted February 6, 2007 10:05 PM by James D. Macdonald

Geocaching as terrorism‽

[[splutters]]

God help us.

Posted February 6, 2007 10:31 PM by Nancy C

Lisa, your numbers are \way/ off. (It's a good thing you didn't compound with that kind of estimate when you were working as a pharmacist.) A modest number of cops book enough overtime to earn six figures; IIRC, the record-holder was somewhere around $150K, and there was talk about reining him in because he was working 80-100 hours/week (raising the question of how effective he was on his regular shifts). And that's police and fire; most city workers earn a lot less than that (although most at that level wouldn't be involved with a potential bomb).

Note also that transit is run by the state, not the city; I haven't seen any figures about whether some of the $1e6 in reported costs was to cover the added bus drivers -- it's all been described as going to 3 cities.

Posted February 6, 2007 11:16 PM by CHip

I'll admit to not reading everyone on this topic, but my favorite quote, read in this morning's EV Tribune , quoted Argus Hamilton:

The super Bowl in Miami Sunday was declared a national security event by the U. S. government. That means everybody was on high terror alert. As soon as the scoreboard started blinking and flashing, Homeland Security moved in and evacuated Boston

Posted February 6, 2007 11:27 PM by Barbara Nielsen

Re:104 (geocaching as a misdemeanor) Oh, for God's sake.

So, anything that makes anybody nervous is now an act of terrorism? Time to dump Paxil in the water supply.

Posted February 7, 2007 8:03 AM by Aconite

JC@102: I agree that the bomb squad did what they were supposed to do.

Well, blowing up a device you haven't yet identified and then identifying it from the pieces isn't a terribly bright move. Imagine how ugly that situation would have been had the device been a dirty bomb or some other biohazard.

First-responders are supposed to go in suspicious as hell initially, agreed. But blowing up something you haven't identified to see what it is, is not good procedure. And you're not supposed to maintain high suspicion once you have information that indicates it's not needed. Maintaining a heightened suspicion level just in case does not make you safer; it makes you tired and prone to overreaction, which can be just as dangerous as underreaction.

Posted February 7, 2007 8:15 AM by Aconite

Well, blowing up a device you haven't yet identified and then identifying it from the pieces isn't a terribly bright move.

It is, however, standard operating procedure, and has been for decades at least, perhaps centuries.

There are lots of funny BIP stories which I might tell if you're interested. Like the time the Soviet Naval Attache sent a gift-wrapped bottle of Stolichnaya vodka to the American naval attache, only the Marine at the Embassy fluoroscoped the package and saw a cylinder of liquid....

(BIP = Blow In Place, which is what it's called when you blow up a suspected bomb.)

Posted February 7, 2007 8:23 AM by James D. Macdonald

It is, however, standard operating procedure, and has been for decades at least, perhaps centuries.

Which is, unfortunately, what happens when SOP doesn't keep pace with technological advances.

Posted February 7, 2007 8:32 AM by Aconite

Apparently the Boston Globe is lurking on this thread, but posting supporting material in its own space:
Pay exceeds $140,000 for hundreds of troopers

Posted February 7, 2007 8:44 AM by John Houghton

#98 I absolutely think it's sleazy that Boston made Turner pay that much -- what HAS to be a fake number -- and I'm surprised in a way that Turner paid it.

I can't help wonder if there aren't accountants at Turner still on the floor, laughing so hard that it hurts at all the people who paid 2.5 million for advertising during the superbowl and only got 30 seconds of