That's just pathetic. You have to have a pretty addled mind in order to find an obvious prank such as this "terrifying."
But that's what our society is now, everything is measured by the lowest-common-denominator, and fear is a commodity sold to you every evening on the news.
That was my read as well. That 'people' were afraid it was a terrorist attack because the lights on a landmark went dark. On the other hand, why didn't people just assume it was a black-out, or technical issues?
Yeah, my first thought would have been "Dumbasses should change the lights during the day, not the night". "Terrorists must be terrorizing us by breaking our lightbulbs" would have never occurred to me; it is far more plausible that somebody was working on them.
I considered that, and I think it might excuse "Boston mooninite" sorts of paranoia, but seeing lights turn off on a landmark and jumping to the "terrorists" conclusion? Nearly 13 years later? This wasn't a low-flying plane or an odd device with blinking lights, this was just some lightbulbs going out.
But was it a prank? That's the question that has everyone nervous. Because if not, it was art. Given the context of modern politics, officials don't want it to be art. Imagine this happened on 4 or 5 different land marks on the same day. Officials would be shitting themselves.
You know at this point I would be shocked and surprised if they don't invoke "terror fears" one every single incident. Someone forgets a bag in the park -- "terror fear". Someone runs a red light -- "terror fears". Defacing of a lamp post "terror fears". It is as if they don't get paid or if they don't mention it.
If they don't say it's terrorism, how are they going to justify the 30-year maximum-security prison sentence they hand out to whatever group of kids carried out this totally harmless prank?
People have always been able to do sinister and deadly things. The reason that they do not happen more often is largely not because of people stopping them, but is rather because not many people are really that nuts.
The ability of pranksters to switch flags on a bridge does not make your world more risky. A heavy handed state triggering paranoid reactions from the mentally ill may well do.
Really? Analyzing cell tower data over a harmless prank? They're probably mad that some pranksters conclusively demonstrated that, for all the security theater in NYC, the police can't even stop people from planting stuff on a major bridge.
Not probably, definitely. It was a tiny thing, but makes the entire country look foolish by calling into question the effectiveness of billions of dollars spent and a large part of world privacy stripped away. In that way, the white flags are an existential threat to a certain element, and something our grandchildren may be reading about in history class.
If that's the motivation then this is the worst possible response. A ridiculous overreaction with a significant risk that after all this DNA/surveillance/facial recognition/manpower hubbub they don't catch them.
This simple act has embarrassed an entire industry, including countless highly-paid public officials; the very same people who determine how much resource is dedicated to soothing their bruised egos.
So imagine the police response is this: "Silly prank, we could certainly identify them if we tried, but it's not worth taxpayer money."
All it takes is one person to then point out that if security had been good enough to catch actual terrorists, the suspects would have been caught before or during the act. Then not only is a chunk of the post-9/11 security apparatus exposed for the security theater it is, but the cops look lazy and stupid too.
I understand the easy logic of "oh, but what if they were terrorists", but at the same time, it makes no sense. If you want to blow up a bridge, you don't put explosives at the top of the pillars. You drive an explosives-laden truck to the base, you get out and you leave in a second car. There's nothing anyone can do unless you wait too long to detonate your explosives.
The point is, you cannot prevent all terrorism on home soil through police enforcement. You can choke certain points like airports by doing person-by-person inspections, but you can't do much for land-based transportation infrastructure with millions of autonomous attack vectors. Terrorism is best prevented through political actions.
At least the current response indicates that the NYPD understands the rough operational equivalence in being able to catch terrorists vs being able to catch people who switch out flags on bridges. IOW, they recognize this as a problem (even though it's unsolvable, hence the reason for security theater rather than actual measures that would prevent terrorism).
The majority of people are probably indifferent to this. But for some reason those people who wouldn't mind NYPD not wasting money on this investigation are less vocal or less influential or something compared to the pro-security-state advocates whose position is "OMG could have been terrorists!" The latter may be mostly bureaucrats in power (perhaps the reason for the overriding influence of this paradigm) worried about it for job security reasons, but the motive doesn't matter.
It's highly symbolic from a police perspective. We may see it as some kids who watched too many documentaries playing a harmless prank. But let me rephrase that to put that in the frame of mind of the investigators. "Unknown individuals infiltrated a heavily guarded and highly visible piece of crucial infrastructure undetected. Once present, they defaced the public property by removing two American flags, and replacing them with white flags, a typical signal of surrender. The suspects remain at large."
It's about the symbolism, not the act. If NYC, for all its counterterrorism efforts, can't catch these pranksters, it makes the public safety officials look impotent in the face of real threats.
> it makes the public safety officials look impotent in the face of real threats.
They largely are. It's incredibly difficult to stop crimes before they're committed, and prior to any terrorist mania it was generally considered to be outside the scope of police work. Mainly because it requires a security apparatus, and authority, that is in direct conflict with an open democratic society.
Exactly. I'm saying pointing out government impotence was the purpose of the protest, the payload message it was meant to transmit. That should be clear from the symbolic choices of removing the flags, etc. So naturally the powers that be are responding with anger due to that message, mostly because the protestors didn't show just tell, they showed that message, through the government's inability to prevent or apprehend them.
This is the nerf-ball version of challenge to government authority, so instead of Tahrir you get a few kids changing a flag, and instead of a repressive government crackdown, you get increased police investigation. But the mechanisms are the same.
States, whether they be national or local governments, don't react well to open challenges to their authority, and they use every tool at their disposal to prosecute anyone that commits a crime that openly challenges the authority of the government.
Your comment suggests that there is an expectation that police should have the ability to catch these guys. I find that ridiculous. Have you all really become that paranoid that a harmless prank needs to find justice because 'what if it was a terrorist'.
Listen folks, you can't stop terrorism. A determined attacker will just find an easier target. You can't guard everything all the time.
No, but you can put everyone under the constant threat of imprisonment for nebulous reasons, or no reason at all, and there is some glitch in human reasoning that conflates the two.
> Unknown individuals infiltrated a heavily guarded and highly visible piece of crucial infrastructure undetected.
100,000s of people do that every single day. It is a bridge. That is what bridges do. They carry largely unknown people across a highly visible structure.
I think you are blowing this out of proportion. Or maybe I shouldn't use the word blowing.
Not me. That quote is that of a hypothetical law enforcement officer's view. It doesn't represent my personal opinions. It's an attempt to place ourselves in their shoes to understand their thinking.
Given just how bad the economy still is, it pains me to see the NYPD wasting potentially tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, trying to find a bunch of kids who replaced a couple of flags. They should be rewarding these kids for finding a glaring security hole (if they find them) in supposedly one of the states heavily guarded monuments before someone with ill-intentions found it and caused havoc...
If they're calling this an act of terrorism, are they going to throw these kids into a jail cell for 20 years for a harmless prank? Whatever happened to being able to have a good old prank. Kind of reminds me of the MIT pranks: completely harmless.
How about they spend the money securing the bridge instead of combing through cell-phone towers and involving innocent civilians in a draconian dragnet operation? This kind of behaviour from the NYPD is just going to encourage more pranks like this.
Wouldn't it be funny if they are the same flags, and instead the perpetrators bleached them "remotely"?
Like with a quad-copter hauling loads of liquid bleach, or a laser with the right wavelength to destroy the dyes.
Edit: Ah, never mind, the spotlights are also up on top, not down below as I had thought. It'd take quite a lot of robo-dexterity to cover them up so quickly, so if a person is already up there they might as well just swap the flag too.
Or some nearby industrial plant belched a cloud of toxic bleaching gas that drifted by and as a side effect reacted with the cheap chinese dyes in the flags.
- The bike+pedestrian path is suspended over the roadway.
- There are some suspension cables leading from the suspended pedestrian path, and trusses leading to the other cables.
- The cables are pretty thick and have railing-like cables, likely for maintenance.
- There is only a small metal door preventing people from running all the way up the cables. The railing-like cables look useful for climbing over the door.
It's possible that with the right skills, nothing is necessary but the new flag and tins, a plan, and a little luck.
They should spend the money on fixing the security holes, not finding the perps. If it really was a terror act, the terrorists wouldn't care if you found out who they were after the fact, so this isn't any kind of deterrence.
Rig up a couple of motion triggered IR camera's at critical points not commonly accessed, disguised and tamper proof. Check it once every so often just to make sure it works.
Next time some jokester tries a stunt like this go check, find their pic, locate & throw his/her dumbass in jail (if so desired).
And please stop with this "terrorist" scare mongering!
We as a society (or the media portrayal) are becoming a bunch of paranoid jerks parroting this nonsense and wasting taxpayer funds when the NY cops have many more important issues to deal with.
>And please stop with this "terrorist" scare mongering! We as a society (or the media portrayal) are becoming a bunch of paranoid jerks parroting this nonsense and wasting taxpayer funds when the NY cops have many more important issues to deal with.
Yeah, I heard we're nearly at the point now where we're going to go around putting hidden motion-triggered cameras literally everywhere.
So I agree that it would be outrageous for to throw these folks in jail for this.
But it does seem worth following up on. Not because they did bad, but because it's important to learn how they did what they did. And demonstrating to potential terrorists that you're capable of finding people who breach security at landmarks seems like a good thing to do.
The Brooklyn Bridge would be a reasonable terrorist target. We collectively spend a lot of money to try to make it secure, just like we do with basically all large buildings. And that feels reasonable to me, and I imagine to a lot of other people. (e.g., I'm not sad some of my tax dollars go to protecting the Golden Gate Bridge[1])
And, so, I dunno, NYPD hasn't thrown 'em in jail yet, and they've only said "It is a matter of concern... I am not particularly happy about the event." So I guess I think it's a bit unfair or unhelpful to judge everyone's handling of it quite yet, everything seems sorta fine to me as of now.
This is that discussion. Let's hear your thoughts.
Mine is that the pranksters want to expose the fear-mindset in general for what it is, and relatedly show that the freedoms we've given up in the name of security was a bad idea, and finally that security is an illusion because you can't secure all places at all times unless you want to live in something that resembles a prison.
That's just pathetic. You have to have a pretty addled mind in order to find an obvious prank such as this "terrifying."
But that's what our society is now, everything is measured by the lowest-common-denominator, and fear is a commodity sold to you every evening on the news.