It now appears that Boston will be dropping charges against the two people who hung the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Mooninite signs around the city. It’s about time. [UPDATE: As Vika points out in the comments, MSNBC jumped the gun. At this point charges against Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens are still pending. Sigh.]
Look, here’s the thing. The initial Boston response makes sense: you find something suspicious, so you shut things down until you have a chance to assess. It’s the follow-on response that was farcical. The police blew up one of the lite-bright-like signs yet couldn’t tell from the debris that it wasn’t a bomb. They couldn’t tell from looking at an intact sign that it wasn’t a bomb.
I’m not sure exactly where they thought the C4 was, or where the detonation electronics were. IEDs just don’t look like these signs.
Breathless news speculation on the part of Fox News and other news organizations fueled hysteria. Turner Broadcasting, the people ultimately responsible for the marketing ploy, didn’t contact the Boston PD for some four hours, likely because their lawyers needed time to stare wide-eyed at the TV and say, “Holy crap, no other city went bat-shit insane over this — what do we do?” But even after Turner did fax in the location of all the signs, Boston officials didn’t respond like they should have. Instead of dismissing the over-reaction with a statement like, “This was a threat we took seriously and we’re glad that the devices turned out merely to be harmless signs,” politicians and police chiefs ratcheted up the rhetoric.
- “This is outrageous activity to get publicity for a failing show.” — Boston Mayor Thomas Menino
- “It’s a foolish prank on the part of Turner Broadcasting. In the environment nowadays … we really have to look at the motivation of the company here and why this happened.” — Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis
- “It’s clear the intent was to get attention by causing fear and unrest that there was a bomb in that location.” — Assistant Attorney General John Grossman
They found the two people responsible for placing the signs, Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, and charged them with one count of placing a hoax device and one count of disorderly conduct. It’s the “hoax” part that drives me crazy. It’s clear to anyone with a lick of sense that these do not look like bombs, they were not intended to look like bombs, and they were not deployed in a manner to indicate that they were bombs. That hasn’t stopped dumber members of the press from saying things like, “Hey [defendant Peter Berdovsky] Borat, you’re not a citizen? That’s too bad. How does five years at Cedar Junction sound, followed by a steerage-class flight back to the Third World hellhole from which you came, to annoy the taxpaying citizens?” Never mind that the case against Berdovsky and Stevens was obviously going to go nowhere from the start. Even the judge wasn’t buying the state’s case. I can’t blame the two for talking about 1970s hairstyles in their post-arraignment press conference, as bad a PR move as it was.
This isn’t the first time Boston has over-reacted to the sight of wires. As the Nielsen Haydens point out, Boston PD arrested a non-violent protester named Joe Previtera for dressing up like the prisoner in the infamous Abu Ghraib picture, complete with wires. Boston PD tried to charge him with making a false bomb threat.
You know, other cities like Seattle and New York City (New York City!) didn’t over-react to the Mooninite signs. Perhaps Boston can use the $1M that Turner Broadcasting is reportedly in negotiation to pay to buy several pallets of common sense. We’ll just need to make sure the pallets don’t have batteries or wires on them.
It pisses me off that Turner seems willing to pay off Boston here. I mean, I don’t own stock, but …
1) That just means that municipalities are likely to overreact like this, knowing that, if it’s nothing but guerilla marketing, they can always get their costs recouped.
2) I’m a government contractor, and I have a very hard time believing they spent $750k in that short of a period of time. Really.
It seems pretty likely to me that Boston’s reaction was largely a matter of trying to project their embarrassment a bit. I guess the logic is that if they don’t ever admit that they were wrong, and if they insist that their initial assessments of the situation were (and continue to be) well-founded, then maybe that decreases the perception that they were idiots. I wonder if they took some inspiration from members of a particular governmental administration.
In hindsight, I think Stephen’s right: it’s easy for those of us familiar with the Mooninites to throw rocks, but if you have people calling in saying there are bombs, you gotta take precautions. It’s the follow-on that’s hard to justify.
Sadly, I was wrong. MSNBC was wrong too. There is no official word yet on the dropping of charges bit.
Sigh.
Bah, stupid Boston. I’ve updated the post to mention that I jumped the gun. I see Turner and Interference are going to pay $2M for the stunt.
*sigh* It makes me sad that Turner is caving on this.
Has anyone seen any information about the nature of the emergency calls that triggered the response? The info I’ve seen says the signs had been in place for weeks, then suddenly one day calls apparently started flooding in. To me, that just doesn’t add up.
Was it a situation where the first call triggered a reacion, which brought media coverage, which in turn created a bunch of “Hey! I found one of those things I saw on TV!” emergency calls? That timeline makes sense to me. If that’s not what happened… if most of the calls started coming in before the media had a chance to describe the devices, it “feels” more likely that there was some kind of organized effort to purposely “misreport” the devices as bombs.
My understanding of the timeline is as follows. An MBTA worker spotted one of the signs from the back, so he could only see wires and circuits and whatnot. He calls it in, the bomb squad arrives, and the media starts covering the event.
Then other people see suspicious packages and start calling in reports. From there everything snowballed, with Fox News breathlessly announcing possible bombs all over Boston.
Okay. That actually makes sense. I can see one person spontaneously reporting a suspicious item (even one that’s been there for weeks), then the media response scaring everyone else into believing they were bombs.
I can’t believe Cartoon Network isn’t helping these guys out since they’re the ones who hired them.