Digital-age detective work can’t crack Brooklyn Bridge caper

&gt; while sparking terror fears in the process<p>That&#x27;s just pathetic. You have to have a pretty addled mind in order to find an obvious prank such as this &quot;terrifying.&quot;<p>But that&#x27;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.

Really? Analyzing cell tower data over a harmless prank? They&#x27;re probably mad that some pranksters conclusively demonstrated that, for all the security theater in NYC, the police can&#x27;t even stop people from planting stuff on a major bridge.

Given just how bad the economy still is, it pains me to see the NYPD wasting potentially tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, trying to find a bunch of kids who replaced a couple of flags. They should be rewarding these kids for finding a glaring security hole (if they find them) in supposedly one of the states heavily guarded monuments before someone with ill-intentions found it and caused havoc...<p>If they&#x27;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.<p>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.

Reminds me of the MIT pranks <a href="http://hacks.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacks.mit.edu&#x2F;</a>

Wouldn&#x27;t it be funny if they <i>are</i> the same flags, and instead the perpetrators bleached them &quot;remotely&quot;?<p>Like with a quad-copter hauling loads of liquid bleach, or a laser with the right wavelength to destroy the dyes.<p>Edit: Ah, never mind, the spotlights are also up on top, not down below as I had thought. It&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m gonna be honest, that&#x27;s an impressive prank. And the faded flag is not just run-of-the-mill vandalism.

Aaaaand it&#x27;s gone from the frontpage. The very symbol of hacking is gone from the Hacker News in less than 5 hours.<p>In regards the topic the flag turned into a symbol of surrendering of ones freedoms to the state.<p>Now let&#x27;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.

This is hilarious and the official reaction only makes it more so.<p>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.

I&#x27;m guessing ride bikes to the bridge and leave cell phones at home? That&#x27;s the only thing I can figure. They had to carry quite a bit of gear.

They should spend the money on fixing the security holes, not finding the perps. If it really was a terror act, the terrorists wouldn&#x27;t care if you found out who they were after the fact, so this isn&#x27;t any kind of deterrence.

Rig up a couple of motion triggered IR camera&#x27;s at critical points not commonly accessed, disguised and tamper proof. Check it once every so often just to make sure it works.<p>Next time some jokester tries a stunt like this go check, find their pic, locate &amp; throw his&#x2F;her dumbass in jail (if so desired).<p>And please stop with this &quot;terrorist&quot; 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.

So I agree that it would be outrageous for to throw these folks in jail for this.<p>But it does seem worth following up on. Not because they did bad, but because it&#x27;s important to learn how they did what they did. And demonstrating to potential terrorists that you&#x27;re capable of finding people who breach security at landmarks seems like a good thing to do.<p>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&#x27;m not sad some of my tax dollars go to protecting the Golden Gate Bridge[1])<p>And, so, I dunno, NYPD hasn&#x27;t thrown &#x27;em in jail yet, and they&#x27;ve only said &quot;It is a matter of concern... I am not particularly happy about the event.&quot; So I guess I think it&#x27;s a bit unfair or unhelpful to judge everyone&#x27;s handling of it quite yet, everything seems sorta fine to me as of now.<p>Also what an awesome prank, I love it.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Protecting-Our-National-Treasure-129481703.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nbcbayarea.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;Protecting-Our-National...</a>

I wish there were more discussion about why they did this rather than how.

That sounds straight up from the TV show &quot;The Leftovers&quot; in which there&#x27;s a nihilist cult that paints things in white!