An Army of Pop Geeks

Joshua Glenn has the best comment yet on the Mooninite menace:

I once interviewed a homeland security consulant who claimed that ordinary citizens armed with wi-fi laptops, smart cellphones, and the like would be far more effective at responding to terrorist attacks than any governmental organization. Tonight I have seen the proof of that argument….

What were the devices? The answer to that burning question was available earlier today on blogs and social networking sites like Flickr, thanks to the sharp eyes of pop-culture-savvy young Bostonians. Todd Vanderlin, for example, spotted the devices and recognized right away what they were: a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Adult Swim TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force."

Advantage: distributed intelligence. Though to be fair, this doesn't really prove that ordinary citizens are better than government at responding to a terrorist attack. It just shows they're better at responding to what is transparently not a terrorist attack.

Meanwhile, many reporters and officials continue to refer to the ads as a "hoax." The only hoax here is the pretense that anyone intended these things to be mistaken for bombs.

Bonus link: Orson Welles' classic War of the Worlds broadcast.

Bonus link #2: Yet another wave of suspicious devices.