How to Get Arrested at the Airport Without being Shot!
September 21st, 2007
Just wanted to share a news tidbit with you all… My friend Star Simpson was arrested today at Logan Airport in Boston for wearing an LED sweatshirt she made that was mistaken for a bomb. (This picture above is the inside of the sweatshirt.) I’ll keep you posted on opportunities to support Star and keep your eyes out for an Instructable on “How to get arrested at the airport without getting shot” ; )
Boing Boing Article
NY Times Article
CNN Article
Popularity: 5% [?]
September 21st, 2007 at 8:18 pm
WIll Star be doing her own “How To Get Your Hair Really, Really, Really Fug For When You’re Photographed” or “How To Make Crap Art And Become An Attention Whore in 5 Steps Or Less” or “Using Faux Terrorist Tactics To Go Incognito As An Ersatz Hetero On Special Occasions”?
Seriously, let’s go gangbusters on this…
September 21st, 2007 at 10:05 pm
predictable. you put your life in the hands of idiots with guns. you can’t wear batteries around reactionaries. they want to be the one who takes down the next would be terra-ist, so you’re not very smart. or are you? i’ve asked fat/lazy tsa employees why, if bottled water is such a threat, there are ten confiscated bottles of water sitting on the x-ray machines. that doesn’t seem safe. no answer, just a pat down. this country is at war with itself. fortunately, you didn’t get shot over bad art. you should be able to wear that. i hope for an america that just makes fun of you for wanting to and not putting your life in danger.
September 22nd, 2007 at 8:39 am
Last time I went to the airport I had a little electronic device that flashed lights and I punched codes into. I then hooked it up to a cord connected to the building’s main power grid. It was my freaking cell phone.
The most serious charge seems to be “she wasn’t scared enough to totally change her life around what idiots could possibly misinterpret as a threat.”
September 25th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
To be fair, Mike, this seems like a deliberate provocation. I don’t know her and you do, so maybe I’m off-base here, but if it is a provocation, what’s she proving? That devices resembling bombs will get you in trouble at the airport? There are a lot of excesses in airport security and our culture of fear in general, but I don’t think this is exactly instructive or demonstrative. It actually looks to my eye enough like a bomb to reasonably get you arrested.
And if it’s not deliberately provocative, then what was she thinking?
All told, I obviously don’t support further action against her, but I think she kind of had it (an arrest) coming.
September 25th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Ah, after a bit of further research, I concede that the arrest itself (many guys with machine guns?) was a bit much.
September 25th, 2007 at 2:24 pm
I appreciate all the comments and it’s definitely an interesting topic to debate… I’ll post some new info and articles soon.
September 25th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Regardless of the idiocy of wearing something resembling a bomb into the airport, she should have been arrested again by some facet of the fashion police. Trying to pawn off something so obviously uncreative such as this as art when the intention is clearly to satiate one’s starvation for attention is a crime itself.
September 26th, 2007 at 8:50 am
Alexander,
I’d say a cell phone looks more like a bomb than Star’s ‘artwork’. More than one Palestinian terrorist has found that out the hard way. Cell phones are especially convenient, because the Mossad guy can verify the target’s identity and ask him if he’d like to meet Allah before he presses *# to set off the charge.
September 27th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Yeah just to chime in I don’t think we should be consigning entire swaths of our object lifestyles (batteries, play-doh, wires, clear liquids) to the “THEY’RE A TERRORIST” bin… the whole phenomenon of airport security as defined today just reminds me of “wreckers” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrecking_(Soviet_crime)
“NAMELESS TERRORS LURK UNDER EVERY STONE AND BEHIND EVERY TREE SO JUST TRUST US AND LET US SEARCH YOUR EVERY CAVITY AND VIOLATE YOUR PRIVACY IN ACCORDANCE WITH OUR SLIGHTEST WHIMSY”
Ugh.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:55 am
No, we shouldn’t. That said, we’re talking about Homeland Security workers, not engineers, so we can hardly expect them to be able to visually differentiate between a breadboard and a bomb. As such, I think they acted pretty reasonably in arresting her. While it’s obviously a slippery slope, I think that Soviet intrusions represent the end of that slope, not our present location on it. I’ve never had a single issue going through any airport security line, and it’s certainly not because I spend undue hours trying to figure out what I can and can’t get on planes. It’s common sense: Don’t bring flashing electronic devices with wires to airports.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Is she still in jail, or something? Your post makes it seem that way…I’d think that she’d be released as soon as they found out it wasn’t a bomb.
But, still? What was she thinking?
October 12th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
While I disagree with some of what you say, Alexander, my main point is about the emphasis on suspicion/fear/intimidation as tools (or at least as byproducts) – sure, I’ve never been beaten or cavity searched in an airport, but I find them to be beyond tedious to the point of humiliating and offensive. And they don’t have to be that way.