I’ve seen a number of others commenting on this anniversary of the day Boston was shut down by a bomb scare. Here’s one example; you can find others in the Herald or statist blogs.
On this day last year, we had the Boston bomb scare. Harmless devices turned into a pretty good scare in Boston. The good thing is that police and other authorities responded as if the devices were IEDs.
They were up for over a week before police and other authorities responded. Had they been IEDs, we’d have been in serious trouble.
Boston authorities failed to do anything useful to solve the conjectured problem, but did spend piles of cash and reputation on a false positive. According to these articles, those piles were wasted: they’d spend them on a similar false positive today. That is, they’d waste resources acting without getting an expert to evaluate the devices quickly. They’d waste further resources persecuting the vandals responsible as if they were terrorists, prosecuting based on the city’s mistakes instead of the citizens’ crimes.
There’s nothing to complain about in the actions of the officers on the scene. They did hard jobs well. The real bomb hoax was perpetrated by their bosses and commanders back at City Hall.
The good thing is that many people learned not to be scared of the unusual. I hope for more mooninite signs and more blinky vests at the airport. I hope for a society that’s hard to scare. I hope Boston authorities will stop collaborating with terrorists.