Video of a Yippie-esque press conference with Sean Stevens, left, and Peter Berdovsky, the two guys arrested in Boston for threatening the public with unauthorized Lite Brites. (Stevens looks a lot like a young Steve Jobs!)
In the clip above, the two gentlemen responsible for the placement of the lightboxes have some fun with the media frenzy, discussing various hairstyles of the 60s and 70s. The press accuses of them of not taking it seriously but, in a sense, they’re taking it just as seriously as they ought to.
Reader comment:
Dion says:
The link goes to the relevant statute that defines the crime that Stevens and Berdovsky have been charged with (other than “disorderly conduct.”) [MGL Chapter 266, Section 102: Stevens and Berdovsky Charged with Intent to Represent an “Infernal Machine”]
Most interesting is that the statute defines the crime in terms of a specific intent: “the intent to cause anxiety, unrest, fear or personal discomfort to any person or group of persons.”
This specific intent will be hard to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, in my opinion.
Most interesting is subsection d: “The court shall, after a conviction, conduct a hearing to ascertain the extent of costs incurred, damages and financial loss suffered by local, county or state public safety agencies and the amount of property damage caused as a result of the violation of this section.”
No doubt, for our local securocrats, the monetary issue, along with some face saving, has become the nut of the issue.
For the rest of us, the event is clearly about how far we’ve gone down the path, as Brian Massumi put it, of becoming “an everyday society of fear.”
Ross E. Lockhart says:
