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January 31, 2007
Boston Hoax
This stunt showed a level of idiocy it is just hard to imagine!!!
Message of Wednesday afternoon deleted. Responsible parties were idiots to engage in this scheme and deserve to pay but given the things had been up for weeks, the overreaction was definitely part of the problem too.
Update Thursday: It is pretty clear there was some major overreaction to this on the part of the Boston authorities. For me, it also hurt that I got most of my news during the day from radio and so didn't see pictures of the devices, which would lead one to be much less worried. Still, hearing that suddenly unknown electronic devices are found attached to many bridges around the city is very scary. This may very well be a case of one cop seeing this and getting scared by it, calling it in, superiors deciding they must react and closing off the area and calling in the bomb squad, and just escalating and developing a momentum it is hard to then stop. Still, in today's security climate, a bad reaction to this is just not that surprising and they really did need to inform authorities about this scheme in advance, and, immediately upon hearing about them causing issues yesterday do everything in their power to instantly let authorities know this was a marketing campaign. If these things were not done, heads certainly deserve to roll and lawsuits to be filed.
Posted by aarondf at January 31, 2007 04:59 PM
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