Terror Quotes

"MIT coed with fake bomb 'art' arrested

By GLEN JOHNSON
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

BOSTON -- Troopers arrested an MIT student at gunpoint Friday after she walked into Logan International Airport wearing a computer circuit board and wiring on her sweatshirt. Authorities call it a fake bomb; she called it art."

It appears that someone at the Associated Press also calls it a fake bomb. The scare quotes imply that the headline writer agrees with the authorities, and doubts that the breadboard and LED setup that Star Simpson was wearing was intended for what she claims it was; namely a way to stand out from the crowd during career day. With any high-profile case, such as this one, the Court of Public Opinion is going to render a verdict; likely before the criminal justice system gets around to it. But the media shouldn't be acting as a witness for the prosecution. The use of scare quotes is completely inappropriate here, in no small part because the words fake bomb are left unquoted. If you've seen a picture of the item in question, it doesn't really look much like an explosive device, although I can understand how it might be mistaken for one. Personally, I find calling it a fake bomb much more of a stretch than calling it artistic. Mainly because, especially in the context of a hoax, a fake is designed to fool people into thinking that it is something that it isn't. I have serious doubts that someone smart enough to get into MIT couldn't come up with a more immediately convincing simulacrum of an explosive device. (Good Morning America seemed to agree. Their crawl this morning stated that Simpson was wearing a "fake explosives belt under her clothing," which pointed to a much more deliberate act of hoaxing.)

At the bottom of it all appears to be an unwillingness on the part of the authorities to simply lay it on the line and say that they're adopting a stance that tolerates numerous false positives, even flimsy ones, rather than risk any false negatives. It's a trade-off, and it's not necessarily an illegitimate trade-off at that. But false positives create an impression of incompetence that the authorities are keen to avoid - mainly because it undermines their authority. So what we end up with are dubious claims of hoaxes and muttered implications of bad faith on the part of the people detained. It's disingenuous, and unnecessary. And the tendency of the media establishment to subtly go along with them doesn't serve the interests of the public. And encouraging the public to prejudge events through leading headlines doesn't help matters.

Grandstanding

A lot has been made of a University of Florida student who police stunned with a Taser when he started grandstanding at a John Kerry town hall meeting. The 64 million dollar question has been: "Were Andrew Meyer's free speech rights trampled by jackbooted government goons?"

I've come to the conclusion that maybe a different question should be front and center: "Why is it that free speech issues only come up when someone's perceived as being critical of someone in government?" Had Meyer been pestering Bruce Boxleitner at Comicon or something, this would have "simply" been an issue of the police over-reacting. And it should still be that here.

And why not call a spade a spade? Six police officers and a stun gun is a little much to deal with one college student - especially one as scrawny as Meyer. Unless he was packing some Underdog Super Energy Pills somewhere, they shouldn't have needed a whole squad of people to handle him. Treat this as you would any other over-the-top police response to a minor incident. If you're of the opinion that this method wouldn't put a stop to such episodes, then that's a problem all it's own. A sanction that doesn't have any demonstrable deterrent power is basically a waste of everyone's time.

Part of the issue is the pervasive opinion that "the government" acts secretly, and in bad faith. So no-one is ever "officially" arrested or hassled for saying things that the government doesn't like. Instead, they're charged with trespassing, disturbing the peace, or unlawful use of a cucumber. They may or may not be beaten up or zapped during apprehension, depending on the zeal of the chosen goon squad, just who they were dumb enough to make angry at them and how good an example they'll make. So the response is always to the perceived attack on criticism. But maybe a more WYSIWYG approach to these sorts of events will do a better job of limiting their occurrence.

The Generation Trap

A Washington couple had two vehicles that they own seized by the local Regional Drug Task Force, after their then 24 year-old son was arrested four times in as many months with drugs and money in his possession. The couple appealed the forfeiture of their cars, to the county Superior Court, and lost, and then went on to the Washington State Court of Appeals, where they lost again. News stories are normally designed to be brief, and the Seattle Times piece was no exception. Not feeling that I understood enough about what was being decided to have an intelligent understanding of the case, I hopped over to the court's website, and looked up the actual opinion.

The lawyer for the parents, in typical fashion, makes the loss out to be a government-demanded erosion of the privacy rights of children. "[... I]f you have a son or daughter that you suspect may be involved in drugs, you better start snooping around and following them around. If you let them drive your car, you may very well lose your car." In practice, as is usually the case, the situation is not quite that dire, but it does put people in an uncomfortable position, as they can't afford to give their loved ones the benefit of the doubt, once their suspicions are aroused. While they are not obligated to jump to the conclusion that their children are guilty right off the bat, they are (in effect) required to conduct "an inquiry a reasonable person would have conducted under the circumstances," which doesn't leave much room for parental sentiment. I expect that it's difficult for many parents to reach a point of reasonable certainty one way or another, completely unclouded by a desire to have their children be innocent of wrongdoing.

Size Matters

When you see the wind turbines, off in the distance, gently spinning in the wind, you realize: Wow. Those things are big.

When you're next to a tractor-trailer, hauling fan blades, and you see, up close, how massive they really are, you realize: Damn. Those things are humongous.

Ask the Voters

Yesterday, "Senator Barack Obama" asked the members of LinkedIn.com a question: "How can the next president better help small business and entrepreneurs thrive?" (I put the Senator's name in quotes because you know and I know, that more than likely, it was one of Senator Obama's aides, rather than the Senator himself, who posed the question, and that it will aides and campaign staffers who read the answers - if anyone reads them at all.)

The question has generated a lot of buzz. For a while, there were more than 100 new answers every hour, and as of now, more than 1,400 people have weighed in. Many of them, it seems, are free-marketeers - reducing the taxes that small businesses have to pay, relaxing or eliminating regulations, and exempting them from family leave and other employee-support programs were common responses. There are other ideas, just enough to make you wonder why you don't see more of them.

Senator Obama's campaign seems to be the only one with a real presence on LinkedIn. There are a couple of other current presidential candidates who have public profiles I was able to find (Dennis Kucinich and Mike Huckabee), but most are absent, keeping their profiles private, or otherwise can't be located. But, this being politics, the other candidates are certainly watching this, and if Senator Obama is able to use LinkedIn to build a network of potential voters (and perhaps more importantly, potential donors), other campaigns will move to establish a presence there. But I would be surprised if at least one of the leading Republican candidates doesn't show up in the next several weeks to few months. As noted, many of the people who answered the Senator's question seemed to be right-leaning in their politics (one even called for an end to abortions in his answer), so I'd expect that the GOP would see LinkedIn's membership as trending more their way, and would want to make contact.