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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.
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?
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.
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
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*
Since no one mentioned it yet, Casio F91W.
Remember, choosing the wrong brand of watch could land you in Gitmo.
Casio, not even once.
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.
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?
Not only analog watches, digital watches are even easier, set the alarm for a specific time, and connect to the buzzer...
Of course he wasn't arrested because he had a big ridiculouse watch, he was arrested because he made someone look stupid when the bomb squad showed up and couldn't find a bomb... the law for "making an authority figure look bad" isn't written down anywhere, but it is one of the crimes that is guaranteed to get you arrested almost every single time.
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.
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.
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.
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 !
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!
I don't know why you guys expect a constitutional lawyer to do anything other than maintain the status quo
I might expect him to be aware of the Fourth Amendment, along with the standard interpretation prior to the TSA that it's illegal for government agents to just blanket search everyone unless there's a specific identified threat of immediate concern. Before the TSA, when we were searched essentially by private screeners operated by the airlines, we consented to (limited) searches as part of a private commercial transaction -- if we refused to submit, we were just told we couldn't fly. Police or the FBI could only get involved if there were a reasonable suspicion to search further.
Now we have government agents doing invasive searches, and if you don't comply, you can be detained and arrested. That's exactly the kind of thing the Fourth Amendment was passed to avoid.
The interpretation of the Fourth Amendment changed suddenly and radically in the past decade, and I would expect a Constitutional lawayer to know something about it.