Heh. My roommate (in NYC) at the time was involved-enough in this that one of the actual "devices" appeared in our apartment a few weeks later and surreptitiously remained for many years, fully working in its Lite-brite/LED glory.
It made for an excellent conversation piece for those that knew, and a weird piece of LED art for those that didn't.
Edit: I found pictures! Sorry they were shot on a potatocam (2008 era) but here she is:
I remember this fiasco. We were peak see-something-say-something (or maybe just beyond that) in post-9/11 USA. Absolute paranoia. People who lived in the middle of nowhere were afraid of terrorist attacks, as though high population urban centers wouldn’t be the real targets.
A few decades ago, I was involved in the Neidorf hacking case [1] as an expert witness. One minor item in evidence was something marked "Tomobiki High School Torture Research Club". That's an anime reference.[3] It's an allusion to the Japanese tendency to have organized school clubs for everything, and in that anime, this is the bullies' group. The prosecution
logged the item as an exhibit, as an indication of something bad, but never actually brought it up in court, so it didn't matter.
hah. the best press conference of all time was held by the marketing guys after they were "caught". they refused to answer questions about anything other than their hair, and i remember some witty reporter asking them what theyd do about their hair if they went to jail. caught them off guard, hah.
It was less beautiful if you spent two hours stuffed into a subway car (because at first they kept trains moving toward where the device was, but they were slowed, so we stopped at two packed stations full of people who were going to be late for work.)
This really was peak marketing idiocy. I knew people who worked at Cartoon Network at the time. Jim Samples' disconnect and subsequent resignation reverberated down the ranks and tanked a lot of careers and projects. Who would think that strapping battery operated devices to bridges with duct tape in any post-9/11 city would be a good idea?
There was no information attached to them (one of the things MIT hackers always did was place clear contact information, removal instructions, etc on anything they left somewhere public.)
The devices had large cylinders wrapped in plastic. Sure, they could be batteries. They could also be containers of explosives.
Some of them the character is angry, and giving the finger. Sure fits a "angry at the world" attitude of a bomb-maker.
It doesn't seem to occur to people that bombs can be designed to attract attention, and can be booby-trapped to try and kill bomb disposal teams.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to people that if you are a bomb squad or police commander, you don't have the luxury of saying "oh yeah, that thing strapped to the bridge support for an interstate, phsht, that probably isn't a bomb, that's probably just some weird vidyah game character" because if you're wrong, people die. No. You get people away from it and try to figure out what it is.
Oh, and it turned out there had been a hoax bomb left in a hospital earlier by someone who was acting deranged, and incidents in NY and DC right before all this.
Then a few years later, wouldn't you know...a few miles away, two assholes left a bunch of pressure cookers at the finish line of the marathon, killed a bunch of people and wounded dozens, murdered a campus cop, and then led police on a gunfire-filled chase through multiple towns.
I'll never understand the reactionaries. Did they really believe that there were terrorists out there who'd build bombs and then put a Lite Bright on it? Was it that they were all dumb millennials who never heard of the toy? Anyone who saw that and was over the age of 30 at the time should've started laughing and called the whole panic off. When reporters interviewed cops about it, they should've started giggling, telling the cameraman to "pack it up, these cops are retards".
I'm well aware. How is a bomb squad member supposed to know this, while looking at it stuck to the side of a bridge I-beam, wrapped in layers of black plastic? Bombs are often designed to blow up when disturbed, in hopes of injuring or killing a member of the bomb squad.
I'd like to see you work a bomb squad and see how brave you are when you come across a package with some long cylinders wrapped in black plastic and wires sticking out, and how you feel when some smarmy programmer tells you "HAHA YOU'RE SO STUPID IT WAS JUST BATTERIES" after the fact.
> This has literally nothing to do with anything.
Yeah, it does. It shows that Boston police thinking the city might be a target of bombers wasn't so absurd and paranoid after all, and that appearance (the bombs were in cooking pots) means nothing.
You're right. We should always assume the absolute worst-possible interpretation at all times and whip ourselves into a frenzy over it. Just look at the long list of IEDs with Lite-Brite-style, cartoonish characters on them. You say Mooninite, I say Neon Osama bin Laden.
> I'd like to see you work a bomb squad and see how brave you are when you come across a package with some long cylinders wrapped in black plastic and wires sticking out, and how you feel when some smarmy programmer tells you "HAHA YOU'RE SO STUPID IT WAS JUST BATTERIES" after the fact.
I'd really love to know if you've worked EOD or if you're just a smarmy conservative condemning pranksters. Because I believe we're both truly inexperienced (ie you haven't actually done EOD) and we can only rely on common, rational, sense to debate this amongst ourselves.
> Yeah, it does. It shows that Boston police thinking the city might be a target of bombers wasn't so absurd and paranoid after all
That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. Reasonable suspicion and probable cause and all that don't operate like "we're justified in detaining you if in the future someone else commits the crime we want to accuse you of". No the police, the state, the judiciary, etc have to have proof that you've committed a crime. I mean think about what you're saying: the implication is basically most freedoms should be abridged because it's a complete certainty that in the future, someone, somewhere, will commit some tenuously related crime.
Of course I haven't done EOD. I don't need to be to know that bomb squads treat stuff like it's a bomb until proven otherwise via x-ray or a tech inspecting it, or it is disrupted by water cannon.
> we can only rely on common, rational, sense to debate this amongst ourselves.
"common rational sense", riiiiiight. You implied bomb techs should assume (or know) that cylinders with wires coming out of them wrapped in black plastic attached to critical transportation are just batteries and could not be a pipe full of explosives.
I love when people clutch pearls and say exaggerated things to justify it. What does "battery operated" even mean lolol. Is the phrase supposed to conjure images of IEDs or what? They were battery powered LED signs
In September 2007, several months after the Mooninite Panic, MIT student Star Simpson was arrested at Boston Logan Airport for wearing an electronic LED device and holding Play-Doh.
>Shortly after arriving on the MIT campus, she met a student group called MITERS (the MIT Electronic Research Society).[3]
>In September 2007 while a student at MIT, several months after the Boston Mooninite Panic, Simpson created an electronic fashion sweatshirt featuring a colored, glowing name tag.[4][5] While wearing this sweatshirt during a visit to Boston Logan Airport, Simpson was arrested at gunpoint and charged with the possession of a hoax device, a charge that was dropped by prosecutors a year later.[6][7][8] In an echo of MIT's official later treatment of Aaron Swartz, the MIT media office released a statement condemning and disavowing Simpson's actions before she was even released from questioning.[9][10]
>Simpson studied at MIT between 2006 and 2010. She returned to MIT in 2015 to speak about her experience at an MIT conference on the Freedom to Innovate.[11]
>In 2017, MIT established a "disobedience" award to reward forms of disobedience that benefit society, as demonstrated by Simpson while a student at MIT.[12]
MIT Sophomore Arrested at Logan For Wearing LED Device
>Star A. Simpson ’10, wearing a circuit board that lit up and was connected to a battery, was arrested at gunpoint at Logan International Airport this morning and was charged with disorderly conduct and possession of a hoax device. Simpson was released on $750 bail earlier today; her pre-trial hearing is scheduled for Oct. 29, 2007 at 9 a.m. in East Boston District Court.
>Simpson (a former Tech photographer) was wearing the device, which included green light-emitting diodes arranged in the shape of a star, during yesterday’s MIT Career Fair. Her defense attorney said she was at the airport to pick up her boyfriend who arrived at Logan this morning.
>Simpson approached an information booth in Logan’s Terminal C wearing the light-up device, Assistant Suffolk District Attorney Wayne Margolis said during Simpson’s arraignment today. Margolis also said that Simpson had been wearing the art for at least a few days.
>She “said it was a piece of art,” Margolis said, and “refused to answer any more questions.” Jake Wark, spokesperson for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, said that Simpson only described the LED lights after she was “repeatedly questioned by the MassPort employee.” Simpson then “roamed briefly around the terminal,” Wark said. Margolis said this caused several Logan employees to flee the building. As Simpson left the building, she disconnected the battery powering the device, according to a press release provided by Wark.
>Simpson had five to six ounces of Play-Doh in her hands, State Police Maj. Scott Pare said in a press conference this morning. The Play-Doh could have been mistaken for plastic explosives. [...]
>Simpson had five to six ounces of Play-Doh in her hands, State Police Maj. Scott Pare said in a press conference this morning. The Play-Doh could have been mistaken for plastic explosives.
From the interview, it wasn't even Play-Doh!
STAR: Sure. That was this little hand-sculpted flower I brought to give my friend at the airport. (holds it up to camera, it's a bright pink rose, hardened clay)
XENI: Well did it look like that, or did it look like a wad of C4?
STAR: This is exactly what it was. It wasn't strapped to my chest, it was in my hand looking very much like a flower. It's hard (taps it against desk and against fingernails). It's not play-doh. (taps, audible) It's baked, hard. And this is exactly how it looked on that day, it hasn't changed shape or lost color or anything. They took it from me and kept it from me at the time. It's been about a year since I had this in my possession. But I chose not to show it to people until now.
I remember this incident and how infuriating it was. It's even more infuriating now that I've read the follow-up interview.
Heh. My roommate (in NYC) at the time was involved-enough in this that one of the actual "devices" appeared in our apartment a few weeks later and surreptitiously remained for many years, fully working in its Lite-brite/LED glory.
It made for an excellent conversation piece for those that knew, and a weird piece of LED art for those that didn't.
Edit: I found pictures! Sorry they were shot on a potatocam (2008 era) but here she is:
https://imgur.com/2DcutSE
https://imgur.com/H76RQq6
I remember this fiasco. We were peak see-something-say-something (or maybe just beyond that) in post-9/11 USA. Absolute paranoia. People who lived in the middle of nowhere were afraid of terrorist attacks, as though high population urban centers wouldn’t be the real targets.
See also: Freedumb Fries[0]
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_fries
Yep. The Mario question blocks put up by some teenagers in Ravenna, Ohio, in 2006 was a similar situation. https://www.eurogamer.net/news030406marioprank
A previous submission from a year ago has an interesting comment from someone involved:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37105056
A few decades ago, I was involved in the Neidorf hacking case [1] as an expert witness. One minor item in evidence was something marked "Tomobiki High School Torture Research Club". That's an anime reference.[3] It's an allusion to the Japanese tendency to have organized school clubs for everything, and in that anime, this is the bullies' group. The prosecution logged the item as an exhibit, as an indication of something bad, but never actually brought it up in court, so it didn't matter.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/102868.102869
[2] https://uruseiyatsura.fandom.com/wiki/Tomobiki_High_School
hah. the best press conference of all time was held by the marketing guys after they were "caught". they refused to answer questions about anything other than their hair, and i remember some witty reporter asking them what theyd do about their hair if they went to jail. caught them off guard, hah.
edit - here it is, beautiful
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X2fGzmphx4U
They had amazing hair. I loved all their hair commentary. Best response to a literal media circus.
It was less beautiful if you spent two hours stuffed into a subway car (because at first they kept trains moving toward where the device was, but they were slowed, so we stopped at two packed stations full of people who were going to be late for work.)
At least two versions of the lost ATHF episode “Boston” are floating around out there. One of them was here: https://old.reddit.com/r/adultswim/comments/13nibvz/the_lost...
This really was peak marketing idiocy. I knew people who worked at Cartoon Network at the time. Jim Samples' disconnect and subsequent resignation reverberated down the ranks and tanked a lot of careers and projects. Who would think that strapping battery operated devices to bridges with duct tape in any post-9/11 city would be a good idea?
It's outrageous that anyone resigned or was fired over this other than city employees of Boston for lying about a stupid sign.
It was a LED moonite. It wasn't scary at all.
I will never understand all the apologists.
They were crudely constructed.
There was no information attached to them (one of the things MIT hackers always did was place clear contact information, removal instructions, etc on anything they left somewhere public.)
The devices had large cylinders wrapped in plastic. Sure, they could be batteries. They could also be containers of explosives.
Some of them the character is angry, and giving the finger. Sure fits a "angry at the world" attitude of a bomb-maker.
It doesn't seem to occur to people that bombs can be designed to attract attention, and can be booby-trapped to try and kill bomb disposal teams.
It doesn't seem to have occurred to people that if you are a bomb squad or police commander, you don't have the luxury of saying "oh yeah, that thing strapped to the bridge support for an interstate, phsht, that probably isn't a bomb, that's probably just some weird vidyah game character" because if you're wrong, people die. No. You get people away from it and try to figure out what it is.
Oh, and it turned out there had been a hoax bomb left in a hospital earlier by someone who was acting deranged, and incidents in NY and DC right before all this.
Then a few years later, wouldn't you know...a few miles away, two assholes left a bunch of pressure cookers at the finish line of the marathon, killed a bunch of people and wounded dozens, murdered a campus cop, and then led police on a gunfire-filled chase through multiple towns.
I'll never understand the reactionaries. Did they really believe that there were terrorists out there who'd build bombs and then put a Lite Bright on it? Was it that they were all dumb millennials who never heard of the toy? Anyone who saw that and was over the age of 30 at the time should've started laughing and called the whole panic off. When reporters interviewed cops about it, they should've started giggling, telling the cameraman to "pack it up, these cops are retards".
It really was that bad.
> The devices had large cylinders wrapped in plastic. Sure, they could be batteries.
They were bog standard D batteries:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic#...
> Then a few years later, wouldn't you know.
This has literally nothing to do with anything.
> I will never understand all the apologists.
Well some people are rational and some people aren't so it's only natural that the latter don't understand the former (ie that's usually how it goes)
> They were bog standard D batteries:
I'm well aware. How is a bomb squad member supposed to know this, while looking at it stuck to the side of a bridge I-beam, wrapped in layers of black plastic? Bombs are often designed to blow up when disturbed, in hopes of injuring or killing a member of the bomb squad.
I'd like to see you work a bomb squad and see how brave you are when you come across a package with some long cylinders wrapped in black plastic and wires sticking out, and how you feel when some smarmy programmer tells you "HAHA YOU'RE SO STUPID IT WAS JUST BATTERIES" after the fact.
> This has literally nothing to do with anything.
Yeah, it does. It shows that Boston police thinking the city might be a target of bombers wasn't so absurd and paranoid after all, and that appearance (the bombs were in cooking pots) means nothing.
You're right. We should always assume the absolute worst-possible interpretation at all times and whip ourselves into a frenzy over it. Just look at the long list of IEDs with Lite-Brite-style, cartoonish characters on them. You say Mooninite, I say Neon Osama bin Laden.
> I'd like to see you work a bomb squad and see how brave you are when you come across a package with some long cylinders wrapped in black plastic and wires sticking out, and how you feel when some smarmy programmer tells you "HAHA YOU'RE SO STUPID IT WAS JUST BATTERIES" after the fact.
I'd really love to know if you've worked EOD or if you're just a smarmy conservative condemning pranksters. Because I believe we're both truly inexperienced (ie you haven't actually done EOD) and we can only rely on common, rational, sense to debate this amongst ourselves.
> Yeah, it does. It shows that Boston police thinking the city might be a target of bombers wasn't so absurd and paranoid after all
That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. Reasonable suspicion and probable cause and all that don't operate like "we're justified in detaining you if in the future someone else commits the crime we want to accuse you of". No the police, the state, the judiciary, etc have to have proof that you've committed a crime. I mean think about what you're saying: the implication is basically most freedoms should be abridged because it's a complete certainty that in the future, someone, somewhere, will commit some tenuously related crime.
Of course I haven't done EOD. I don't need to be to know that bomb squads treat stuff like it's a bomb until proven otherwise via x-ray or a tech inspecting it, or it is disrupted by water cannon.
> we can only rely on common, rational, sense to debate this amongst ourselves.
"common rational sense", riiiiiight. You implied bomb techs should assume (or know) that cylinders with wires coming out of them wrapped in black plastic attached to critical transportation are just batteries and could not be a pipe full of explosives.
We're done here.
> battery operated devices
I love when people clutch pearls and say exaggerated things to justify it. What does "battery operated" even mean lolol. Is the phrase supposed to conjure images of IEDs or what? They were battery powered LED signs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic
The very first sentence of the article you linked states that they were mistaken for IEDs.
I'm aware and what we're debating here is whether it was a rational reaction (not whether it happened).
I think in some ways it was - this was a marketing effort, outside of legislation and not consulted with authorities.
A disproportionate response here will discourage other companies from similar guerrilla marketing.
I doubt anyone wants more marketing, and especially unregulated marketing.
I was taking a class around this time that involved programming and Atari 2600. I made a game based around this event.
http://nirmalpatel.com/hacks/atari.html
Never forget haha.
I remember my parents being mildly outraged about this. 18 year old me thought it was fucking hilarious.
At the time I lived next door to the “litebrite” bombers.
It was disconcerting to arrive home to that many news vans in front of my house.
In September 2007, several months after the Mooninite Panic, MIT student Star Simpson was arrested at Boston Logan Airport for wearing an electronic LED device and holding Play-Doh.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Simpson
>Shortly after arriving on the MIT campus, she met a student group called MITERS (the MIT Electronic Research Society).[3]
>In September 2007 while a student at MIT, several months after the Boston Mooninite Panic, Simpson created an electronic fashion sweatshirt featuring a colored, glowing name tag.[4][5] While wearing this sweatshirt during a visit to Boston Logan Airport, Simpson was arrested at gunpoint and charged with the possession of a hoax device, a charge that was dropped by prosecutors a year later.[6][7][8] In an echo of MIT's official later treatment of Aaron Swartz, the MIT media office released a statement condemning and disavowing Simpson's actions before she was even released from questioning.[9][10]
>Simpson studied at MIT between 2006 and 2010. She returned to MIT in 2015 to speak about her experience at an MIT conference on the Freedom to Innovate.[11]
>In 2017, MIT established a "disobedience" award to reward forms of disobedience that benefit society, as demonstrated by Simpson while a student at MIT.[12]
MIT Sophomore Arrested at Logan For Wearing LED Device
https://thetech.com/2007/11/13/simpson-v127-n40
>Star A. Simpson ’10, wearing a circuit board that lit up and was connected to a battery, was arrested at gunpoint at Logan International Airport this morning and was charged with disorderly conduct and possession of a hoax device. Simpson was released on $750 bail earlier today; her pre-trial hearing is scheduled for Oct. 29, 2007 at 9 a.m. in East Boston District Court.
>Simpson (a former Tech photographer) was wearing the device, which included green light-emitting diodes arranged in the shape of a star, during yesterday’s MIT Career Fair. Her defense attorney said she was at the airport to pick up her boyfriend who arrived at Logan this morning.
>Simpson approached an information booth in Logan’s Terminal C wearing the light-up device, Assistant Suffolk District Attorney Wayne Margolis said during Simpson’s arraignment today. Margolis also said that Simpson had been wearing the art for at least a few days.
>She “said it was a piece of art,” Margolis said, and “refused to answer any more questions.” Jake Wark, spokesperson for the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, said that Simpson only described the LED lights after she was “repeatedly questioned by the MassPort employee.” Simpson then “roamed briefly around the terminal,” Wark said. Margolis said this caused several Logan employees to flee the building. As Simpson left the building, she disconnected the battery powering the device, according to a press release provided by Wark.
>Simpson had five to six ounces of Play-Doh in her hands, State Police Maj. Scott Pare said in a press conference this morning. The Play-Doh could have been mistaken for plastic explosives. [...]
Star Simpson Receives Pretrial Probation
https://thetech.com/2008/06/06/simpson-v128-n27
MIT student Star Simpson gets probation in Logan security scare
https://www.bostonherald.com/2008/06/02/mit-student-star-sim...
Boston Airport Bomb Scare Should Scare Scientists
https://www.wired.com/2007/09/boston-airport/
Star Simpson, one year after Boston airport terror-scare: unedited BBtv interview transcript
https://boingboing.net/2008/09/22/star-simpson-one-yea.html
She's also the genius behind Taco Copter:
https://tacocopter.com/
>Simpson had five to six ounces of Play-Doh in her hands, State Police Maj. Scott Pare said in a press conference this morning. The Play-Doh could have been mistaken for plastic explosives.
From the interview, it wasn't even Play-Doh!
STAR: Sure. That was this little hand-sculpted flower I brought to give my friend at the airport. (holds it up to camera, it's a bright pink rose, hardened clay)
XENI: Well did it look like that, or did it look like a wad of C4?
STAR: This is exactly what it was. It wasn't strapped to my chest, it was in my hand looking very much like a flower. It's hard (taps it against desk and against fingernails). It's not play-doh. (taps, audible) It's baked, hard. And this is exactly how it looked on that day, it hasn't changed shape or lost color or anything. They took it from me and kept it from me at the time. It's been about a year since I had this in my possession. But I chose not to show it to people until now.
I remember this incident and how infuriating it was. It's even more infuriating now that I've read the follow-up interview.
My steam icon is still errr from this incident. Never forget.
"Obey the Moon and its mighty wisdom. Ignore it, and be vaporized."