What Ever Happened To ...

This is a "Smiling Star", which is available here. Don't wear one of these in Boston, particularly at the airport. (See Note 1.) In fact, don't wear anything in the least bit out of the ordinary, particularly if your reflexes or hearing aren't all that good.




It's occured to me to wonder whatever happened to Star Simpson, the nineteen year-old MIT engineering student who was arrested for carrying an experimenter's board embedded with LEDs into Logan Airport. So, I went a-googling, and I found this:

On Sept. 21, Star Simpson, 19, while holding putty in her hands, walked into Logan's C Terminal wearing a circuit board covered in lights and was quickly surrounded by police armed with submachine guns. Though it was quickly determined Simpson posed no legitimate threat, the incident awakened sensitivities to the possibility of terrorism in the airport from which two of the planes hi-jacked on Sept. 11, 2001 departed.

Simpson's attorney, Thomas Dwyer Jr., said he and Simpson, who claimed the device was a work of art, will challenge the charge against her because he said the Massachusetts statute regarding hoax devices is ambiguous and violated her civil rights.

Simpson asks charge to be dropped

Which, I suppose, is a good defense when charged with violating a law that makes no sense. These are the same guys, of course, who charged someone with a bomb hoax when they put cartoon characters in lights at various locations in Boston. I wrote this about the device that Simpson was wearing the day after she was arrested:

I don't know if that jacket ... is a work of art. It is clearly, though, an experimenter's circuit board, usually called a "breadboard", with nine T-1 size LEDs and a battery just barely big enough to power them. (The Associated Press, incidentally, mislabeled it as a "computer circuit board"). The LEDs are arranged in a star shape, like as in "Star" Simpson, get it? A breadboard is a device electrical engineering students and hobbyists use to test out circuit designs. I'm not an ordinance expert, but that circuit doesn't look like anything I'd build to ignite explosives.

Is Anyone Else Tired Of This?

So, to recap, the city of Boston has charged one group of people with menacing a city with a cartoon character, and an engineering student with menacing Logan Airport with a bunch of blinky lights.

Glad to see no one's lost his sense of proportion here.

If I were a taxpayer in that part of the country, I'd be royally pissed that someone was wasting my money this way. Thankfully, I live in a relatively sane place:

In the Seattle area, authorities thought the devices were "obviously not suspicious." I mean, didn't anyone in the police department have a kid who watches ATHF [Aqua Teen Hunger Force, who sponsored the campaign]?

...

My new hero, King County sheriff's Sgt. John Urquhart, summed it up best when he said, "In this day and age, whenever anything remotely suspicious shows up, people get concerned -- and that's good." But he goes on to say, "However, people don't need to be concerned about this."

Adult Swim Too Edgy? The Panic Over Mooninite Terrorists in Boston

I feel a lot safer here than I would in Boston.

Note 1: I am in no way associated with the vendor of that Smiling Star LED, nor are they in any way responsible for this article. I just "borrowed" the picture and they got an unsolicited plug in return. I've never owned, or even seen, one of these things.