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.

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.

To all the people shouting "fucking pigs" or "I hate cops":

There are good cops. There are bad cops. But this has absolutely nothing to do with individual cops. They were doing their job the way they were trained to, using the tools they were provided by their superiors.

The problem is not the cops. The problem is the training and procedures we accept as standard, reasonable security responses. Attacking the individuals as pigs guarantees that reasonable people will dismiss your opinion.

You cannot fix a systemic problem by blaming the individuals working within the system.

"There was no "fake bomb" there was an LED board which someone mistook for a bomb"

An LED board was all that could be seen; the officers had no way of knowing what it might be attached to underneath her jacket. The officers may have been a bit overzealous in their response, but they were absolutely correct to respond.

This morning I happened to be dropping off my husband, who works in Terminal C of the airport and so I was "lucky" enough to see this circus first hand. Walking into a scene where the police (machine guns pointed) were screaming at this little girl like she just killed a bus full of elderly people or something was awful to watch and literally one of the most terrifying things to ever be part of...until we realized that we were not, indeed, standing next to a bomb laden terrorist. I cant help but think that the response to this was not the greatest- yeah walking into an airport with an electronic device strapped to your shirt is reckless and irresponsible, but the hoodie she was wearing was clearly not a bomb- it was a tiny little rectangle with blinking lights in the shape of a star. Had I seen this girl walking down the street, I would not have looked twice- the police response to it was insane and utterly terrifying.

I was on an airplane that had to emergency land at Boston Logan airport because one of the two engines exploded and was on fire. A real explosion, with a real threat to life. After we disembarked the Delta Airlines flight (that was emergency diverted to Logan) we were met by...no one. No police, no emergency personnel, no representatives of Boston Logan Airport, no firefighters......nobody. Delta misreported the incident in the media as a routine technical problem, and the media reported it as such. I had to call the media myself to let them know what had really happened. I also called the NTSB and informed them of the truth about the incident. A real threat to human life goes unreported, a false threat gets national attention.

News.

The words "fake bomb" implies a device that has been intentionally designed to look like a bomb. Simply because something can be mistaken for a bomb, does not mean it was a fake bomb. By posting a headline saying a woman was arrested at Logan for wearing a fake bomb, implies a woman walked into the airport wearing something she knowingly thought could be percieved as a bomb, ie there was an intent, either to terrorize, make a point etc etc.

But in this case she was wearing something that was mistaken for a bomb. Not the same thing. I understand that from the point of view of security the intial reaction (detain and asses) would be identical. But once it becomes clear that the device was not intedned to be a bomb or fake bomb, to continue to report it as such substantially clouds the veracity of the report.

Yes, it is a semantic difference, but semantics cloud our perceptions, and the media's complicity makes people much less likely to question the particulars of the case.