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Man Arrested At Oakland Airport For Ornate Watch
First time accepted submitter mbeckman writes "A man was arrested at Oakland airport for having bomb-making materials. The materials? An ornate watch and extra insoles in his boots. Despite the bomb squad determining that there was no bomb, The Alameda county sheriffs department claimed that he was carrying 'potentially dangerous materials and appeared to have made alterations to his boots, which were Unusually large and stuffed with layers of insoles.' The man told Transportation Security Administration officers that he's an artist and the watch is art."
Take that Freedom and creativity!
Well done Timothy. I submitted this story earlier and the submission by mbeckman appears to be copied from my submission.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Yes, well, obviously he was trying to make some sort of statement of some kind, maybe having to do with "art", and maybe not.
But seriously, I think he planned this for exactly what happened.
Moron.
Dear Moron, no need to sign your posts.
01-31-2007 Never Forget
Remember kids, just don't say, look, or do anything weird and nothing will happen to you.
I'll reserve judgement until I see the boots and the watch.
From the article, it seems as if the TSA did the safe thing and called the bomb squad, which I guess is the right thing to do. I don't expect the guy at the checkpoint to be able to decide if the "modified" watch is dangerous or not, and so they called in the experts (who decided that there were no explosives).
What bothers me is that he was then arrested: "McGann was taken to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin where he was charged with possessing materials to make an explosive device" (emphasis mine). Isn't that too broad a charge? I'm sure every household has material that could conceivably be used to make an explosive device. Is everyone a threat now (in an actual enforceable sense, not in a we-assume-everyone-is-guilty sense)?
With all the bullshit pictures on the linked site, one would think there would be an image of the fucking watch... so I watched the video where bubbly mc blonde flaps along for a min and nothing.
can someone show the god damned watch already? how ornate is a watch before the bullshit squad get your face on the news?
I find your willingness to speculate about the motivations of a complete stranger based on no information adorable.
I was traveling from LAX to New Orleans to shoot Bit Momma's House 2 (you remember that, don't you?) After some bad experiences checking baggage, I carried on my supplies, including my tracking kit.
Now, my tracking kit was a small Pelican case filled with watch batteries, short wires, and LEDs. After it went through the X-Ray machine, the TSA agent looked at the screen, looked at me, looked at the screen, then picked up the box. He carefully unlatched it, and held it out *as far as he could* as he opened it, turning his head away and looking through the corners of his eyes.
Needless to say, I was insulted.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I bet everyone has bomb making materials in their garage and under their sink.
Genius is more like it. The next step is to auction the watch off while the publicity is still hot.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
You don't need a spool of wire.
Any wire will do, including your phone charger, or the spare cat 5 wire you always carry in your computer bag,
earbuds for your phone, the phone itself, etc.
ANY wire constitutes bomb making equipment.
The fact that he was a short dude and wanted to be taller and used multiple insoles to achieve that is also
somehow a crime.
We still have to entertain the possibility that he got exactly what he was looking for, notoriety and fame.
Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?
Really, who does that?
Fools and idiot attention seekers. Any terrorist would be much more clever. The charges leveled are
probably simply to hold him on till they dig through his life. When released, he will probably try to sell
his watches to other fools based on his new found fame.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It's interesting to draw a comparison between this guy making his own watch as an "art project" and Woz's Nixie tube watch which he says he has worn on flights. Did the TSA just let Woz through because he was Woz?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this be true of *any* watch?
So not only did he get hassled for wearing a watch that was unusual enough that the TSA noticed it, but he was arrested and charged...
Next time I travel I'll have to make sure my watch is boring enough it doesn't get noticed so I'm not charged with "possessing materials to make an explosive device."
obXKCD: https://xkcd.com/651/
faced with a budget surplus and a terrorism deficit, the Oakland Airport TSA spring into action and arrest the most suspicious thing they can come up with after 3 red bulls and a half dozen cruellers: a 50 year old white man with a nice watch and a pair of comfy shoes.
freedom has been preserved once more thanks to the watchful eye of a handful of overweight highschool drop-outs in cheap polyester slacks and clip-on ties....but for how long?
tune in for an exciting conclusion to next weeks "Security theatre." Will the man in the comfy shoes buy a new, even more dastardly ornate watch with his lawsuit payout? What devious new orthopaedics will our nemesis equip himself with next? All this and more will be revealed in, "episode 25: I elected obama twice, this shits not funny anymore"
Good people go to bed earlier.
Ssshhh! Don't tell anyone!
I imagine this https://www.adafruit.com/products/950 would give TSA agents pause, especially if its modified even further (blinky lights, toggles etc).
Good-bye
Those aren't bomb materials. Those are, at best, timer-making materials and a place to conceal something.
Yeah, sure, if the guy's got ammonium nitrate and kerosene in his carry-on, those would be bomb-making materials. Go ahead and arrest him for that.
But if you're going to start arresting people for stuff that can be part of a bomb without actually being dangerous, you should start by taking away everyone's cell phone. Not only do they all have timer functions now, but they can, and have, been used as remote triggers.
and in retaliation they charge the guy with a real crime. He should set up a donation site so we can donate to his legal fund so he can stir up moire shit. Now for those will will spout the If you got nothing to hide... Well he had nothing to hide yet the authorities still railroaded him.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Anybody who's read or watched 1960s spy stories knows how to make a detonation timer with an ordinary watch or analog clock. You scrape the paint of one of the hands and position a bare wire on the face so it completes the circuit at the desired time. So the argument the cops are making that the watch was capable of triggering a bomb means exactly nothing. Anything capable of marking the passage of time can be adapted to trigger a bomb. You could rig a trigger with an hour glass if you wanted to.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Since no one mentioned it yet, Casio F91W.
Remember, choosing the wrong brand of watch could land you in Gitmo.
Casio, not even once.
... we can't have safe things. Morons.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
The only fools are the people who support the TSA and their actions. When the free thinkers are all on lockdown, there will be nobody to stand up for your right to express your opinion on issues like this.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'd head straight to Ebay with it.
Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security? Really, who does that? Fools and idiot attention seekers.
How far have we fallen that slashdot readers are asking that?
Who does that? Nerds. Nerds do that. Incredible nerds like Steve Wozniak for example.
People wear things I find to be ridiculous all the time that everyone has no problem labeling as fashion statements. But if it's wires and fuses, it can't be a statement of the types of things you enjoy, it has to be an idiot attention seeker?
Personally, I find it much more easy to label people idiots when they think every exposed wire and fuse is a bomb.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Babies' diapers can be used to build bombs. Babies should be banned from planes.
Especially if they are crying.
Why can't the TSA do something about that? Litte bald-headed Machiavellis, all of them, I tell you . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?
Really, who does that?"
steampunk?
mabey he is, but the TSA and local PD does itself no favors giving every dolt looking for free publicity, all the free publicity they want.
The "filfthy speech movement", made a career out of taunting the government into enforcing useless legislation to get the populace behind them, as did howard stern, and the legacy of the shock jock. The irony is, that, authorities, like a monkey with its hand on a grape nut in a trap, could let go and free itself anytime they want, but they never learn.
The FBI campaign against so called "radicals" on california university campuses made heros and legends out of the mundane, and wasted FBI resources, destroyed the credbility of the federal governement, and ultimately let the real communists get the bomb, and let the mafia grow uncontrolled, by diverting resources towards harmless protestors who didn't not result in putting away serious threats to the nation.
Mabey a few more idiots need to make fortunes before they catch on. All they are doing is degrading the reputation of the TSA, not catching any real terrorists(who take the efforts), and just repeating historical failures.
The crime is that he cant sue the Cops that arrested them directly. If cops had to pay for their crimes they would be less like assholes and more like civilized people.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Who builds a watch with wires and "fuses" hanging out of it and then walks thru airport security?
Really, who does that?
You're right, but only in this very refined case. About 10 years ago I built a noise cancelling system out of a microphone, some electronics and I was young so it all looked very home made. It worked well, almost as well as the Bose QuietComfort series headphones. Flying was a real treat with my custom contraption on. Yet now I suddenly can't take it through airport security for fear of me not actually getting to my destination.
There are documented cases of artists, students, professionals, teachers, vendors with tech equipment, and likely more all having major problems with airport security for the same reason, they dared to build something.
This guy may be a fool and an attention seeker, but many others aren't.
But to arrest him after the bomb squad said, "No danger"? What's the point? If the bomb squad had been worried about it, Ok, there's justification. This is just the cops being assholes because they can. Cops are not there to teach us lessons, or punish bad fashion sense. Either the guy was dangerous, had illegal materials, or indicated that he had intent to cause harm, or the cops were wrong to arrest him. I can find quite a few things wrong with just about every person I meet: if I were a cop, should I be able to arrest them for that?
I hear that there's a vast conspiracy to load up every airplane that flies with a highly flammable and explosive material, that sometimes this material even makes up the bulk of the weight of the aircraft in flight. It's everywhere on the plane and people doesn't even realize it, even stored in vast quantities inside the wings of most commercial airliners. The rumor I heard, and I know this sounds a bit outlandish, is that it's even pumped into the engines, where it's actually very common for it to cause small explosions that most people don't even realize or think about.
The thought of it scared me so much that I decided that I would only drive places in my car instead.
Gee let me wear this contraption that will garner all sorts of attention. I can understand someones desire to express his art but to do it in an airport with TSA screeners who are basically highschool push outs is just fucking stupid.
I disagree with you. It is true that he could expect to be searched and tested for explosives for wearing a strange watch. But I still would not expect him to be detained after a further inspection had found no explosives on him.
Also, is he an idiot for wearing thick-soled shoes to the airport as well?
He's doing a valuable service to us -- pointing out how ridiculous things got. A charge of "having wires that may be used to make a bomb" (in a McGyver episode) is now enough to be detained and taken out of the airport into police custody?
He's doing a valuable service to us -- pointing out how ridiculous things got.
Kind of like Rosa Parks did, but I suppose she was also just looking for attention.
If he was standing in line would it be a queuecumber?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
He was probably wearing some "steampunk" watch and boots, the poor idiot.
I'd bet there was no statement planned.
No sig for the moment.
In a time of actual invasion or insurrection, the President can do a lot of things he can't otherwise do. Our founding founders knew this.
The closest we've come in the last 30 years on a national scale were the events involving the 9/11 hijackers before 9/11 and the unknown but thought to be very real and very high threat in the days after.
On a local scale, there have been some domestic "attacks on the United States" that would warrant Lincoln-esque restrictions on civil liberties in a very small geographic area - city blocks perhaps - for maybe a few hours at most. Had I been in downtown Oklahoma City in the hours before the Federal Building was bombed AND had the feds had specific, credible intelligence, I would forgive them if they denied me my right to be in that part of downtown during that time frame. But I'd demand they explain themselves later or I'd sue them for violating their oath of office, namely, to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
In a free country, you are allowed to troll the police and waste their time if you don't otherwise break the law.
You ARE allowed to walk down the street in a suspicious manner.
You are NOT allowed to actually do anything that a reasonable person would reasonably consider a threat.
You ARE allowed to have a watch full of gears on a plane.
You are NOT allowed to have a bomb on a plane.
Besides, we all carry the most important thing needed to build or use a bomb known to man around with us every time we fly.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
America used to be the greatest nation of tinkerers and inventors in the world. Now we're a nation of consumers. The ability and inclination to create things is now considered prima facia evidence of anti-social tendencies.
There's recently been an Internet-driven renaissance of inventing things -- the maker movement. But there's something sinister about the movement. It's *international*. Consider the Arduino. It was developed in the *commune* of Ivrea Italy, and the design is the property of *nobody*. The Trilateral Commission is probably behind it, assisted by the socialist Obama administration.
People who know more than you are scary. People who know more than you *cooperating* with each other is scarier still.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Deep announcer voice:
When he writes letters to his mother, the post office encrypts the messages for him.
When he plans a bombing, the building blows itself up out of respect.
When he is finally arrested, his guards treat him to the hospitality you can find only in the tropics.
He is, the most interesting terrorist in the world.
Different voice:
"I don't always wear a watch, but when I do, I prefer Casio."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I don't like the situation the way it is, and I'm sure that there could be more sanity around the whole issue, but I also think that what they do is not completely without merit and I do kinda understand where they're coming from. The TSA shouldn't engage in assholery with people who they are responsible for protecting. Most sane people wouldn't arrest someone because they're wearing the jewelry of their choice. But then TSA agents on a power jag think it's perfectly fine to engage in such stupidity in support of security theater.
There. FTFY.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Walking through with a watch on your wrist is neither sneaking nor "hiding in an unusual place"
It did reach its "out of the closet" phase with the Bush II regime - and has been normalized into permanence under the Obama intelligence-state.
FYI, there is a HUGE GAP between "out of the closet" phase and the "normalized phase".
What Bush II did was bad enough, but if Obama didn't give TSA a big boost things wouldn't be as bad as it is, right now.
I am neither pro Bush nor pro Obama. For me, TSA is anti-people thing and no matter which president is for TSA, that president is anti-America.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Three words. Reading Comprehension Fail. I'm an idiot.
21st Century Renaissance Man
Three words. Reading Comprehension Fail. I'm an idiot
21st Century Renaissance Man
The 'shoe bomber' didn't have a BOMB in his shoe, the whole story was made up by our Jewish 'masters' to give them even more excuses to take naked photographs of us using their TSA scanners.
Strange. I just checked my copies of IJC Monthly (part of what I get for my dues in the International Jewish Conspiracy) for the time around when that guys was arrested and there's no mention of us making that up. I'll bring it up at the next meeting as we're plotting our next "Drinking Christian baby blood" party.
Bigoted Scumbag!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
He could be in hot water if the US attorney decides to prosecute him for hoaxing under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. You know the security theater that makes travel so miserable is not benign. Poke the Homeland Security rattlesnake wrong and feel the fangs. Make a bad joke, or deliberately carry crap to stimulate negative attention, and you may get a lot more than you bargained for.. We see stories all the time about people going through hell even when they made some innocent mistake.
The people doing this work are under trained and under qualified. They have a lot of power in a limited space. There is stress. And a statistically small, but measurable, threat. Personally I think airport security should be handled much differently. But until they put me in charge of the world the airport gauntlet is pathetic a fact of life. Frankly, with Mr Insole I sense a little mental illness. Hopefully somebody will make the right call. Hopefully the bureaucracy will cut this guy a break. But if the authorities detect that he is a wise ass they might throw the book at him.
My formula for passing through the looking glass? I keep my wise mouth shut. I wear good quality sweats. No belt. In a quiet corner before I get in the security line I empty all my pockets. Including top pockets. Everything goes in my backpack.( Even receipts trigger backscatter.) I feel for coins. Everything. Usually the scan goes smoothly and I avoid being frisked or wanded so I can quickly snag my backpack off the belt. Then I take another quiet moment to reassemble my belongings. As I do so I often ponder the irony that 30,000 people a year die in cars in the US alone. So that if this was really about saving lives we would have declared 'war' on Toyota and Ford long ago. It is a Franz Kafka world and that's a fact. Maybe one day I'll be offered a political choice in this matter. But to date no major party offers to ratchet this crap back. Not even a little. Sigh.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
The watch was covered in wires, fuses, switches, etc, and his boots were quite large as if to convey there is something inside them. Come on now. Do you really believe he was just innocently passing through security, completely oblivious to the suspicion that was going to be levied against him when anyone in the airport looked at him? Really?
It's a publicity stunt. Whether or not I think that should be enough to arrest a man (I don't), it should have been obvious to him from the start that it was going to be extremely suspect the moment he was seen by security. He might as well have just walked into the airport with fake sticks of TNT strapped to his chest given the fear that currently rules over airports.
Now he can profit from his new-found fame once he gets out of custody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War 625,000 total casualties
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War 110,000 or 150,000 or 600,000+ depending on the source
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_war ~13,500
The lowest estimates still place Iraq + Afghanistan casualties at 125,000. Not a "day in the park." ..Or are we only counting Americans?
Upper estimates exceed Civil War casualties.
The fancy watch was a art project that resembled the Boston bomb scare more than a timepiece. I've not seen any pictures, but it was described as having "switches and resistors" and other electronic components. He had a watch that looked like a bomb timing device and did not look like a watch, and had extra space in his modified footwear sufficient to hold a bomb. I'm not clear on the complaints of whether the problem asserted is the execution of the rules (as was the Boston Bomb scare), or the rules themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare if you don't know what Boston bomb scare I'm referring to.
Learn to love Alaska
Did you ever see a place with a picture of the watch in question? I saw a quote that it looked like a detonator, and he's still in custody for possessing "bomb making materials" but I haven't seen the device itself.
Learn to love Alaska
The one thing everyone who clicked on the article wanted: Pictures of the watch in question. the thing not in the article: Pictures of the watch.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
I don't know why you guys expect a constitutional lawyer to do anything other than maintain the status quo apart from a few minor changes or large changes over a very long time (a lot more than four years). He's not really a socialist you know. People just call him that as a meaningless insult when they really want to yell "nigger" instead.
The police near me would have recently filled all available cells with people travelling by train to a Science Fiction convention if it was standard procedure to arrest anyone that was wearing weird stuff. I'm sure he wanted to attract some attention by his costume but I doubt he wanted it from the TSA.
IF there truly are any "moderate" muslims (the politically-correct people keep telling us these moderates are the vast majority) then they should have wrapped-up and solved the whole "extremist" thing long ago...
Are you really that brainwashed or are you just a bigoted asshole?
Muslims are not a monolithic group. There are many sects and subgroups. Just like Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Sikhs, etc. there are Muslims of all stripes. Including those that are just as bigoted as you. Why don't you go and make all the various sects of whatever bullshit religion (and they all are) you subscribe to play nice? Here in the US we probably have them all beat, as some have observed:
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Probably more "fool" then attention seeker, but it should be a wake-up call that anyone who wants to travel should know better than to wear a piece of art around lest you tick off security check points.
You suggest 300+ million Americans should self-censor in order to placate the TSA.
I suggest that XY,000 TSA agents learn how to do their jobs better.
One of these suggestions chills free speech, the other does not.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If I tried to board a plane with a suitcase full of batteries, wires, and switches, I better have a damn good reason for doing so. A damn good reason.
Really? What's wrong with that? All those things are legal, and none of them particularly dangerous.
The point is people wearing weird shit shouldn't be enough of an excuse to lock them up after the bomb squad has been and gone. One person's normal can be another person's weird shit, and an odd watch plus big boots is probably a lot less weird than some of the stuff I've seen teenage girls wearing in airports.
Look at the timing of my post. It's two minutes after yours. I certainly took more than two minutes to start replying; realise I had to check all the articles again to be sure I hadn't missed something; find the best quote I could that might explain your viewpoint and then reply. In other words, your post wasn't already up when I wrote mine.
Anyway; thanks very much for admitting to being wrong. Realising we are wrong is one of the greatest things and is exactly how knowledge advances. Sorry if my post upset you but I really feel that the TSA had managed to mislead you with their usual insinuation against innocent people and that that was bad. Remember innocent until proven guilty. The TSA has the right to put out facts but not the right to put out accusations. They did the opposite.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Oh, really? And you know what a "bomb timing device looks like?" Methinks not.
Get a few clues, eh? Resistors and switches, oddly enough, are part of rather a lot of electrical gadgets, like, say, cell phones and radios and computers. You're about as close to reality as the Boston cops who thought a Lite-Brite display was a bomb timer, because, well, all the bombs on TV have giant LED countdown timers.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
As regards globalization and the redistribution of American wealth, Obama is mostly a sucker, and a chump. Mittens, on the other hand, is an active player, pushing hard to enrich all the rest of the world at America's and Europe's expense.
You've got it wrong here -- Mitt is working hard to enrich himself. Any other beneficiaries of his actions, such as China's economy, are purely accidental. If Romney thought he could get as rich as quickly by creating jobs in the US, you can rest assured that he'd do just that. But for now, the US is still relatively close to (if not at) the top of the global economic pile, so any arbitrage to be made from outsourcing will negatively affect the US.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Yes, if after they inspected it, determined that there was nothing harmful about it, as happened here.
We must have read different articles. In the article I read, they inspected it, determined that there was nothing wrong with it, then charged the guy with possessing materials to make an explosive device and locked him up anyway. Basically it's saving face. Just like in the Boston lite brite scare. The authorities don't want to look like over-reacting idiots, so it becomes even more important to them to charge the person with something. The people behind the Boston lite brite ads were brought up on bomb hoax charges and copped a plea jut to make it go away and the authorities get to pretend that they're not idiots, just the victims of tricksters. The same sort of thing will happen in this case. They have nothing on the guy, but they'll tell him if he pleads guilty to some ominous-sounding charge, he can walk with time served. He'll have to choose between taking the plea or spending the next decade in and out of jail and court dealing with this. If he takes the plea, then it's over quickly, if he doesn't, then he's going to have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars he probably doesn't have, and travel repeatedly to somewhere he doesn't live and he'll risk prison time if the prosecution can charm the jury, although he may also have a chance at a big payoff suing the city, sheriff, TSA, etc. eventually.