A few of you have asked me about the "terrorist scare" in Boston Wednesday, and i've been holding off on making any commentary about it until i knew more. Specifically, i was waiting for more information about the possibility that there
was any kind of bomb or intentional hoax. For one thing, i was waiting to see if there would be any confirmation of
this comment, made in the
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b0st0n community by someone who claims to work for the BPD, that an actual bomb was found Wednesday -- more on this later.
Basically, the story goes like this: during the morning commute, an MBTA employee called 911 to report a "suspicious device" planted on a steel beam on one of the city's bridges. A bomb squad was called out and traffic was snarled during the commute as police found what was described as, basically, a scary-looking
"package" (yes, this word still appears in media accounts) with circuits and wires and batteries.
Around 1 PM, the police received four more calls regarding suspicious devices in different parts of the city. In two of these locations, they found boards which essentially look like rigged-up lite-brite boards made to depict the cartoon character Ignignot from the Cartoon Network's show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." Ignignokt is a two-dimensional villain from the moon, and in this picture he is seen flipping off the viewer.
The devices, it turns out, were planted all over Boston -- indeed, all over 10 US cities -- as part of a "guerrila marketing" campaign for the ATHF movie, due out in March. They were not bombs, nor were they meant as any sort of hoax. The ads had been in place for over two weeks.
Regarding the other two locations though, there was, it turns out,
by total coincidence, an actual bomb scare:
Six minutes later at 1:02 p.m. Boston Police received a call from New England Medical Center Security that they had uncovered a pipe bomb in their building in a desk drawer. Shortly thereafter Hospital Security reported that a suspect had been seen leaving the area of the pipe bomb in an agitated state stating “God is warning you that today is going to be a sad Day”. The suspect was reported to have fled the hospital. Boston Police continue to investigate this incident. No further details at this time.
At 1:08 p.m. the Boston Police Bomb Squad arrived and confirmed the existence of an item which appeared to be a pipe bomb inside the hospital.
The media were reporting Wednesday that the police also suspected, at that time, that the calls may have been co-ordinated. Nothing more is being said about this now, so i guess it turned out not to be the case.
psychoandy posted a link to pictures of the ad devices in
b0st0n here. I recommend studying these pictures closely, because they shed a bit of light on this situation. You can see that what have been widely described in the media as "suspicious packages" are flat boards rigged up with some lights, transistors, and batteries. There's one exposed wire connecting the batteries to the lights. Now, i'm not an explosives expert, nor am i even well-versed in amateur electronics. But i know that bombs are more than devices with circuits and wires... they also have, well, explosives. And unless there is some secret form of microscopic explosive available, explosives take up
space. A few seconds of reflection, and not even i, someone totally in the dark about these things, would mistake the ad devices for bombs. (I suppose the exposed electronics
could be a fire hazard, but that's for someone else to say.)
The fact that there was an actual bomb scare going on makes the police response to these light boards a bit more understandable. But in my opinion there is a strong element of over-reaction and misplaced anger at the people behind the ad stunt. That over-reaction includes
the arrest of Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, the artists who made and planted the ads.
Berdovsky and Stevens spoke to the media yesterday, and
insisted on talking only about hairstyles of the 1970's. (Some believe that this hair talk was actually in reference to another Cartoon Network show, but i have no further info on that.) I have a lot to say about that but it will have to wait for another blog entry... for now just watch and ponder the meaning of it.
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