Digital-age detective work can’t crack Brooklyn Bridge caper
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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.
Report to Oblast 37N. We have made you an appointment with the Education Corps.
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.
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.
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.
Go talk to some ordinary people sometime and behold how easily swayed they are by cable news soundbites and shit they heard from whatever trusted idiot in their social circle they happen to take seriously for no reason at all. Be sure to have some drugs at the ready for after you're done - you'll need them.
No, it isn't just bureaucrats claiming they could have blown up the bridge. If it were, the FBI wouldn't be gearing up for a nationwide manhunt to track these people down.
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.
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.
I just hope the pranksters don't end up in jail.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Corporate terrorism? It would never happen...
In regards the topic the flag turned into a symbol of surrendering of ones freedoms to the state.
Now let's spend hundreds of thousands to catch them, put them to the jail and budget for consultants who will help closing such threats in future.
Neither the article nor the thread sheds much light on the story, so it doesn't seem surprising that this post didn't reach the top tier.
If the NYPD want to discourage more pranks from occurring, this kind of overly dramatic sulking is not really the way to go about it.
Here's a street view link that should give you an idea:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.705226,-73.995817,3a,90y,130...
- 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.
From what i can see looks like a very easy climb.
Video of the walkway and cables, if I'm not mistaken.
Even with permits and DOT assistance, the SWAT team came out after them and halted traffic on the bridge.
If this all ends with someone trying to paint a smiley face on the Statue of Liberty, then I would not be in the least bit surprised.
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.
Yeah, I heard we're nearly at the point now where we're going to go around putting hidden motion-triggered cameras literally everywhere.
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.
Also what an awesome prank, I love it.
[1] http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Protecting-Our-National...
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.
In short, they say: "America: you're pwned, like this bridge, and, like the cops here, you don't even know how it happened".