The AP has a story about a 19 year old MIT student who wore her career day sweatshirt to the airport. The sweatshirt was apparently a circuit board with wires. CNET has a little more information.
Simpson was wearing a black sweatshirt that had a circuit board with wires, green LED lights and a 9-volt battery attached to it. The back of Simpson’s sweatshirt said “socket to me…Course VI,” a reference to MIT’s electrical engineering and computer science program.Simpson is a second-year student in the electrical engineering and computer science department of MIT’s School of Engineering, according to the MIT Web site.
Security investigated her at gunpoint. Said the airport’s commanding officer, “She’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.” According to Declan McCullaugh, she has been charged under Massachusetts “infernal machine” statute.
[F]or prosecutors to win their case, they must prove that (1) Star transported the LED-sweatshirt (2) “with the intent to cause anxiety, unrest, fear or personal discomfort.” (3) Also, a person must “reasonably” believe that the LED-sweatshirt was (4) a “device for endangering life or doing unusual damage to property, or both, by fire
or explosion.”
I don’t have any problem with airport security stopping this girl to see if she posed a threat. But these charges seem ridiculous to me.
Once again proving the old adage, intelligence has no direct correlation to common sense.
Maybe for kicks on Halloween she’ll take an AK47 replica into a couple of classrooms at MIT
Hilarious, just freakin’ hilarious.
Common sense item #1 – MIT student should avoid nonconformity at the airport.
Common sense item #2 – After determining the nonconformist was not, in fact, a threat, airport security should have offered her some friendly advice and sent her on her way.
Doug, being a non-conformist is one thing…yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is quite another. Look at the picture of the circuit board, if they had “given her some friendly advice” and let her go, and her next stop was a bank, and she got shot, or she robbed the place, guess who would be screaming (and suing) about law enforcement letting her go on her merry way from the airport?
I haven’t seen any pictures. Maybe that would make some stuff clear to me.
Still, from what I’ve read, the infernal device charges seem like a stretch unless there is some evidence that she intended to cause a ruckus.
I’ve seen a supposed picture of the “device”: http://images.salon.com/tech/machinist/blog/2007/09/21/star_simpson/story.jpg
I’m a electronic technician so I know this is just a solderless breadbord with some green L.E.D.s on it connected to a battery. It doesn’t look like a bomb to me. But then neither did the Aqua Teen Hunger Force promotional devices that caused all the trouble earlier this year…
1) It looks *badly* home-made (an engineering student would have to go out of the way to make something that hokey looking)
2) it is attached the to chest of her sweatshirt (reminiscent of the “bomb strapped to the chest” images we see and hear about) and
3) she was also carrying a chunk of Play-Doh in her hands… huh??
Play-Doh: Now *that* is something I would make sure to grab when I rolled out of bed to pick my boyfriend up at the airport!
An MIT student simply can NOT be *that* dumb. Yes, the charges are over-the-top and I hate to see us going the route of rediculous paranoia, but… people obviously seeking attention this way do need to be discouraged.