and not to my suprise "Farhad Manjoo" would be writing about it. The more I read the more it confirmed the weakness of this country. You are all right, we should allow people to do whatever they want all, get rid of the police, get rid of the military, lets all hold hands and smell flowers all day.

What do we need security at an airport for, surely no one wants to hi-jack a plane and crash it into buildings. Why would anyone want to do that?

According to the WBZ correspondent, the cops actually were carrying submachine guns: HK MP5s. Which is even worse. This is supposed to be one of the most accurate machine pistols, but it's still a fucking pistol. Which means that they would have been spraying fire all over the place.

But that's OK, right, authoritarians? A little collateral damage is acceptable, as long as they kill the brown girl acting the slightest bit unusual.

Apparently no one is safe in this crazy terrorists fear filled World. This student who was just being creative and wearing her creation is now in danger of losing her freedom because we have become a nation who is so paranoid that one officer stated she is lucky to be in jail and not in the morgue. I do not believe that a real terrorist would wear blinking lights to draw attion to him/herself before setting off a bomb device.

Roosevelt said "all we have to fear is fear itself". When are we going to realize that we cannot live our lives in fear and stop jumping to conclusions about every thing we see or hear.

Speeder, very well said and I couldn't agree more.

I think there are some important facts being ignored here.

1. Star did not go to the airport to fly; she went to pick someone up. She wasn't planning to get on a plane or go through security. So all this about "would you want to sit next to that?!?!" hysteria is inappropriate.

2. She did make some errors; most notably, when someone behind a desk asked her what the blinky thing was, she didn't explain it to them. That's why the police reacted, and since the desk minion doesn't know anything about bombs and could only say hysteria-inducing things like "wires and some kind of putty", the police responded the way they were trained: with overwhelming force.

Now. Do you think it's appropriate that security responds with overwhelming force to every incident? Another headline had a bunch of streets shut down in Charleston today because of a suspicious package. Certainly, a lot of people prefer a better-safe-than-sorry approach to security, and anyone who innocently gets caught in the crossfire is either not actually innocent, or is an acceptable casualty.

I think that better-safe-than-sorry is actually the best way to guarantee that we, as a society, are pretty damn sorry. Once someone who knows a breadboard from a bomb looked at her, why wasn't she immediately released? Got to justify the reaction. And besides, anyone who gets machine guns pointed at them must have been doing something wrong.

Security forces these days are training to respond to any action with overwhelming force. When the world bank met a while back, the heavily armed police officers outnumbered protesters.

So let us not talk about airports or undergrads with LEDs. Let us talk about the change in security tactics and procedures and where it's gonna get us. Everything is indeed different after 9/11 - we accept greater surveillance and security, without question, and blame anyone who sets off a response. In this day and age, they should have known better.

We should all know better.

My major point, all you anonymous trigger happy folk, is that bombs don't look like circutboards with blinky lights on them. My concern is that boston police go apeshit over things with LEDs on them, not things that look like real bombs. My worry is that we're looking for the "terrorist" equivalent of a guy in a roaccon mask carrying a black ball with a cartoon fuse sticking out of it and probably a sack with a big $ on the side. BOMBS AREN'T COVERD IN BLINKING LIGHTS.

and the conservatives who prop up their tiny macho ego's...

Blind -eading-the-blind is the Executive Branch instructions to criminal justice.

Kill a few kids with your macho paranoia, go ahead, you have permission from the 'Decider'...

Do it you pussy cops, come on, too scared to shoot a chick,

No, I don't think so,

I'm betting they just wanted to strip search her while she was still alive, so they could feed on on fear...like all bullies.

Thanks,

The 'us constitution' and 'bill of rights' (formerly capitalized) will be removed from encyclopedias and dictionarys nationwide, as they are a threat to Martial Law.

For whatever reason, this sort of thng enrages me even more than most of the recent incidents where the police make dubious arrests, and while I am not sure exactly what it is, I think it may be a combination of the following things.

1) The inability of the police to simply say, "Oh, I guess that wasn't a bomb."

I get it, post 9/11, people are jumpy (Never mind the fact that the current leadershiptries to make us more jumpy) but people get scared for irrational reasons, so the police are called and the detain the woman. Why is it not possible for the police to simple asses the situation, realize there was no threat, or intent to create a disturbance and let the woman go. Why can't the police realize that sometimes misunderstandings happen? A girl wore a silly jacket, an adult didn't understand that kids sometimes wear circuit boards and cunfusion set in. Why must we always feel the need to "Hold someone responsible" if there is the slightest disturbance.

2)The utter cowardice of the media to report what actually happened. There was no "fake bomb" there was an LED board which someone mistook for a bomb, how can people not understand the difference? nad why won't the media call the authorities on this, instead of being complicit in their spin and portraying this woman as some sort of "performance artist/terrorist." The exact same thing happened with the infamous ATHF incident.

3) The cowardice of organizations who should support the people arrested. Much like TW with the ATHS incident, MIT has completely wussed out, calling Ms Simpson's actions "reckless." A university should uphold the concept of In loco parentis, they should have acted to protect one of their students. MIT's counsel should have met Ms Simpson before she was even arraigned.

4) The bafffling reaction of people who seem to think that she should have been shot. I have seen this all over the internet, people thinking that simply because this woman made a disturbance she deserves to die. What sort of authoritarian world do people want to live in.

5) People seeming to think that anyone who does something that is not within a certain standard must have a "reason" for doing it. People are saying things like, "Why did she have play do in her hand?" Well, why not? Play doh is fun. It smells good and salty and kids like it. And a nineteen year old is still in many ways a kid. They do random silly stuff for no reason ohter than it amusses them. When I was that age I would run around town blowing bubles everywhere. Other kids play with playdoh. Why does it need to be justified?

6) Finally, the line about how "she was compliant and there fore she is lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue." If I was her defense attorney I would have said "the city of Boston is lucky she isn't in the morgue, because if she was instead of being here at arraignment, I would be over in civil court filing a multi million dollar wrongful death suit on behalf of her parents.

Like I said, this whole thing jsut pisses me off.

I'm not really mad at the first person who thought the LED light was a bomb, I'm not even mad at the cops for initially reacting as if there was a real threat (as they were probably called in and told there was simply a "possible bomb." But everything after that, the blame, the spin, the judgement - I simply do not understand.