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Originally Posted by Kevin
She had two handfuls of playdough. I'm assuming to simulate plastique.
There were wires coming out of the laptop.
It's a federal crime (a misdemeanor) to even joke to airline personnel about having a bomb. The possession of a device made to appear to be a bomb? That can possibly be a felony.
Now you tell me -- was what she constructed -- a circuit board with wires coming out of it going into two fistfuls of playdough made to resemble a circuit board or a bomb? Consider the venue.
Did the cops overreact? It's hard to say. In a post-9/11 world, I'm not certain overreaction is possible. If the device was constructed to give the appearance of a bomb, that's a crime. Maybe just a misdemeanor, but it's a crime.
Here's the law I think she's charged under:
-- the act prohibited of course has to do with bomb making/possession, etc.
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That's the sweatshirt.
You see that and the first thing you think is bomb? Where are the explosives?
Also, let's pretend it was a bomb. Why would someone walk around with something exposed like that? Don't they keep them wrapped up? She wore this all over Boston, in the streets, in the airport (prior to her asking a question at the help desk) and wasn't a danger and then, bam, all of a sudden she is.
she also didn't pass through any security zones and someone with a sub machine gun accosted her; I'm not sure if you've ever fired a rapid automatic to understand how it lacks precision, but I can vouch that it would be bad news in an airport full of crowds. Plus, it's also really weird that they have silencers on those sub machine guns - because you know, when you're spraying bullets into a crowd you don't want them to hear what's coming.
I'm adding something I saw someone else write on another board:
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Boston has a long dishonorable history of overreacting to unfamiliar objects, then claiming they were "hoax devices," which are illegal under Massachusetts law. This is nonsense. A hoax bomb is something that a reasonable person could believe was a bomb, and which its owner claims is a real bomb in order to scare or coerce people in its vicinity.
Boston police pulled this same stunt with Joe Previtera, a nonviolent protester, in 2006. He was doing a silent imitation of the famous photo of the hooded guy standing on a box from Abu Ghraib. The police arrested him -- as far as anyone can tell, because they disliked his politics -- and claimed that the speaker wires hanging from his wrists constituted a "hoax device."
They did it again in January and February of this year -- after their maxed-out overreaction to lite-brite Mooninite images left the rest of the country snickering at them. The best quote on that one was from Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, on the obviously suspicious nature of the Mooninites: “[The device] had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires.”
(Just a month after the Great Mooninite Scare, the Boston Bomb Squad managed to come up with an encore: they blew up a traffic measuring device that had been put in place by the Boston Transportation Department.)
Judging from their record, charging someone with possession of a hoax device is Boston's way of announcing that they've once again mistaken some harmless bit of electronic gear for a bomb.
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-Rudey