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The day after

National Guard watching Red Line entrances

National Guard watching Red Line entrances. Photo by Gedalia Pasternak.

The heart of Copley Square remains shut down. Boston Common resembles a military encampment. Cafe tables along Newbury Street remain uncleaned as police comb the area for possible evidence.

Kirty Lee took the Green Line into work today:

Held it together until I rode through Copley station pitch black. Haunting.

A.P. Blake reports:

Security at Tip ONeil Fed Bldg includes guys with M16s looking through binoculars.

Everyone going into Harvard station was searched.

Bostonians rushed to help: Mass. General reports more people are walking in to donate blood than it can accomodate; the hospital is asking people who want to give to set up an appointment, at 617-726-8177.

Some people carried on as if nothing had happened. Kit Kat reports:

Sob Story Guy on the Needham Heights train. Not the best day to bed for money dude!

Polaris reports:

I just got off at South Station. So many police, National Guard. Intimidating & sombering.

Dan Podheiser reports:

Armored military/guards all over Cleveland Circle this morning. They were all smiling and cheerful, though.

Davina Chojnowski reports:

On the Red Line from Ashmont to Harvard Sq., no extra police presence that I could see but everyone looks spooked and sad.

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Comments

Were the National Guard searching riders at the Church Street Harvard T entrance too? I saw a tweet that they were at Central inbound. All all three entrances? Or just the one the bad guys use? Were they on the sidewalk on South Huntington searching passersby who were waiting to board the E?

What's the protocol if these searches uncover a bomb in the confines of the Charlie gates at Central? To ask the guy to hold off on detonating his device?

Or is this all a show of force that intelligent people know adds nothing to security yet spits on the Constitution?

And I am eagerly awaiting the replies that this is way too soon to be discussing this.

Well, times of crisis are the perfect time for such a discussion.

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Do you have an issue with the complete security screening the TSA does for all airplane passengers and baggage?

Random security screenings for other forms of mass transport are just that, random, and something could be missed. But there is far too much out there for complete searching such as airlines use. The idea behind random security screenings is the same process used in QA. You can't check everything, but you can do a sample set. The statistics bear out that even as low a sample set of 10% gives you almost a 99% certainty of success.

Yes, there is likely some degree of doing it for the sake of reassurance too. But random sampling does work.

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However there are numerous ways onto the T where riders are guaranteed not to be searched. See my example boarding the E line stops on the sidewalk.

And while these searches may reduce the chance of a bomb going off on a T train, they do nothing to reduce the chances of a bomb going off in the fare area or right outside the station entrance during rush hour. So what are they really accomplishing?

Let the National Guard stand there with their machine guns and make people "feel" good and safe. But don't harass riders in the process.

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It's not so much enhanced security, but why on the T? The devices were left by a pedestrian - yet no pedestrians will be searched today. A car/truck bomb in any one of our land or underwater tunnels would cause massive damage, or even in a parking garage of a major building; Yet no cars or trucks will be searched today. There's no evidence the perpetrator(s) used the T in any way, yet it's only T riders that will be searched.

The T does make a convenient target, but so do a lot of other city venues. And unless you search 100% of the people at 100% of the entry points, there's minimal effect aside from the impression that you have security...

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Because in 2006 a feckless judge in NY ruled that subway bag checkpoints did not violate the Fourth Amendment because governments have a "special need" to protect transit systems in the wake of the London and Madrid attacks.

On the other hand there are no court rulings to justify suspicionless searches of pedestrians' belongings or of the insides of drivers' cars. Not that the NYPD cares.

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Car accidents cause far more deaths and injuries than terrorism. We need to stop discouraging people from taking the T.

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Actually an awful lot of people DO have problems with the "complete security screenings" they do at airports. And security experts will tell you that much of the screening they do there is "security theater", meant to look good but not actually producing any improvements in safety.

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The statistics bear out that even as low a sample set of 10% gives you almost a 99% certainty of success.

Yeah, that theory worked brilliantly on Monday, didn't it? Twelve years of anti-terrorism training and whatnot, and whoever did this just waltzed right in.

Security theater is just that - theater. Baaah baaah, sheeple.

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Who got searched on Monday?

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There were bomb-sniffing dogs at the finish line before the race. So either the dogs missed the bombs or the bombs were left once the elite runners had come through and the sidewalks beside the finish line were open.

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The statistics bear out that even as low a sample set of 10% gives you almost a 99% certainty of success.

Searching 1 out of 10 people gives you a 10% chance of finding a bomber if one is in the population being sampled.

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The idea of 99% accuracy from a small sample relates to accurately estimates of a proporion. Suppose that you survey a small but random, unbiased sample, and see that 55% of respondents favor Candidate X and 45% favor Candidate Y. You can be 99% sure that your survey results are accurate within a small margin of error. A small sample will not help you find ALL the people who will vote for Candidate X, but will provide a reasonably accurate estimate of the proportion who support Candidate X.

So you are correct - security screenings for 10% of a population are not sufficient to find all risks.

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This whole comment is flawed.

If I were, for example, manufacturing cars and I was aware that some very low number of them might explode during use, would 10% be an acceptable number to check? No. In fact, I wouldn't be manufacturing any cars at all until that problem was fixed.

If there's an actual concern out there that someone has a bomb, everyone would be checked. Or they'd tell everyone to stay home. On the other hand, something might happen. They might catch someone acting suspicious, there might be an event and they might catch someone trying to exit the T. They might just hassle people with dark skin and beards. It's a lot of mights and maybes, but it is, the day after a bombing with not a lot of hard evidence on the who/why, something.

Your statistics aren't completely wrong, however, they argue the wrong point. If 100% of bombings have been conducted by young and middle aged men, there's good statistical logic to not search women, or children, or the elderly, or couples. Since that's just profiling, however, we instead get stuck with what we find at the airport, which is a 100% search of everyone, very poorly done.

So it is, in fact, security theater, much like the cop cars idling in Dorchester are on any other day. However, should something happen, or should someone suspicious show up, it's sometimes better to have people on hand than a phone call away.

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I should know this, but fortunately I have professional statisticians where I work...does a sample set of 10 percent account for extreme outliers? Or is that based on all of the universe falling within a normal distribution? People like the bomber (we hope) are at the absolute end of that distribution, way past what I normally think of when contemplating the usual 1, 2, or 3 standard deviations from the mean. Does a sample set of 10 percent in such an anomalous case still give you a 99 percent certainty of success?

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Does a sample set of 10 percent in such an anomalous case still give you a 99 percent certainty of success?

"99% confidence" is a magic number in statistics, as are 90 and 95% confidence. In general terms, the more confident you want to be, the more samples you need. Also consider that we're looking for the "needle in a haystack" here and that means you need to sample a huge amount to find that one occurrence. It's hard to say for sure (i.e., with 100% confidence) that the number of samples is adequate without knowing what the real proportion of explosives in backpacks is, assuming that's all they are looking for.

However, looking at real numbers in confidence intervals and hypothesis tests around binomial distributions (go look it up), sampling 10% is could give you a "high" confidence. How much is "high"? I don't know. But it's not "10% chance" as one person wrote. It's definitely better than that. At the same time, 99% confidence seems a bit high to me. It's really impossible to give a % value without a lot more time to look into it (which I don't have right now).

Other things of note: only sampling, say, T riders or only Mass-Pike drivers is a form of statistical bias and can make a projection more complicated. Also consider that the bomber or those associated with the bomber are less likely to be in crowded places or take public transport right now, if they are smart (which may be a bad assumption).

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Lost in this discussion is that nowhere near 10% of riders are being searched. Say each search takes 10 seconds, whether it's a physical search or ETD swab. So in an hour a team of T cops or TSA workers can search a few hundred riders. Multiply that by a dozen stations, with today's show of force, and congratulations, you have searched 1% of the riders during a rush hour.

Of course we know that within a few days the searches will go back to one entrance at one station.

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You have no right to use of the MBTA. They can impose any (legal) restriction they want, including bag searches as a semi-public/private organization.

Yes this is 100% security theater. But psychologically after something like what just happened, it can be comforting and reassuring to Boston citizens. It actually helps people return to some normalcy.

Now, if were wasting money on it years from now... well, lets talk after they wipe the blood off Boylston Street and people have time to breath.

Not the time dude. Some people are still searching for friends or family to make sure they're ok. Others are fighting for their lives in the hospitals.

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(The T is a government entity and is not a private organization.)

So when is the right time? Will the pain of the victims and their families be any less in a week? A month? Six months?

Don't confuse criticism of the government's reaction to a crime with lack of empathy and compassion for the victims.

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Totally agree with this:

Don't confuse criticism of the government's reaction to a crime with lack of empathy and compassion for the victims.

But if you want to demonstrate some of that empathy and compassion, I'd say let things lie for a day or two (in both senses of that verb). I'm definitely against security theater but people complaining on a blog is not going to change what the authorities are currently doing and may just cause some folks who are genuinely freaked out at the moment the additional stress that someone is using this public tragedy with some very private pain, as a platform for their tub thumping. God knows that's how I feel about some of the racist tweets that have been circulating.

Maybe we can start a separate posting about this theme and let people who want to discuss it reasonably do so, and warn those who are not in the mood to hear it, to not click on it/follow the thread. I don't know. But there's got to be some sort of balance between propriety and reasoned criticism - and it seems to be based on timing.

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Fair enough.

But if someone is freaked out by rational discussions of reactions to a tragedy, would they not also be equally freaked out by Adam posting photos of guys in military fatigues blocking the gates at Harvard station?

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Is it reassuring? We've got a comment quoted above describing the presence of armed national guardsmen as "intimidating" and "sombering".

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The MBTA only does security checks at stations with ample space around the fare gates to accommodate their screening equipment. Anyone looking to cause trouble would enter the MBTA system at a smaller, less trafficked stop like B-Chiswick Road, C-Brandon Hall, or E-Mission Park.

Of course, those looking to cause trouble have repeatedly proven themselves to be incredibly stupid and many have been foiled in the act, so perhaps this is all speculation.

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And Saul makes a good point about a bomber, one which has been raised with regard to airport security checkpoints too. Why wouldn't a bomber simply detonate his weapon amidst the crowds of people backed up at the security checkpoints?

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(I'm too lazy to make yet another internet login, I have an entire old-school Rolodex full of them.)

I do appreciate increased security in areas that are crowded and likely to be targeted. I'm originally from New York, and I do appreciate the National Guard presence, the increased police presence, and the presence of bomb-sniffing dogs in major transit hubs and public gathering. I really do like seeing people on the ground, and I generally support things like reasonable airport security.

However, I worked at a Green Line stop that had occasional random bag searches, and they felt wildly ineffective. The Green Line is mostly an above-ground system, and showing up on random days, at only a few select underground stations, to swab the purses and backpacks of a handful of people during rush hour isn't effective, because it's so infrequent it is not likely to catch or deter anyone. I've seen them set up camp at stations where most of the riders are getting off the train, not on it- and they're only swabbing the bags of those entering the system.

I think the MBTA could focus their police services more effectively than their current system of bag searches and swabbing, and I think most MBTA riders agree.

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I don't know what the factual basis is for your perjoratively saying that searching of backpacks by the T spits on our Constitution. The constitutionality of laws is decided by courts; and Federal Courts have ruled that bag searches of people entering subway stations do not violate the 4th or 14th Amendments.
In New York a district court ruling that bag searches were legal was upheld UNANIMOUSLY by an appellate court.
I guess that there must be, in your mind, some judges of a secret court which has overruled all other courts.

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I fully realize that a NY court deemed warrantless searches on subways as constitutional.

That does not mean that they are effective at deterring anything and are not a gross waste of money.

Or that they spit in the spirit of the Fourth Amendment.

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I wasn't expecting to see a police presence at my "backwater" Orange Line stop in JP this morning, but I admit I was pretty surprised that there was nothing at Ruggles, which is a big station with commuter rail and buses as well as the subway.

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It's also worth asking what's so special about the T.

"Well, Saul, look at Madrid and London, terrorists have bombed trains."

Well, they have also bombed cafes and supermarkets and theaters and hotels and schools. So wouldn't it be prudent to have checkpoints outside all these venues too?

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Mass transit involves a ton of people in confined spaces (for maximum impact) and it also runs underneath a number of Boston landmarks and major streets. A bomb going off on the GL in the central subway would just be devastating due to the proximity to the surface and various foundations.

You are partially right though. It's not ONLY confined to mass transit, but mass transit is a major target. A cafe bomb (we could even consider yesterday's bombs as this type) will likely cause much less carnage than if the same bomb had been exploded on the T. Again, this isn't about eliminating threat/carnage. It's about reducing them.

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>> runs underneath a number of Boston landmarks and major streets

Ah, so that explains the checkpoint I saw on the Pike near Mass Ave where drivers had to open their trunks for cops to have a look inside. Makes sense now.

As well as all the National Guard checkpoints in the city's numerous underground parking garages.

[/sarcasm]

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These days, every time I attend a large event, I think about the possibility of an attack. I'm not paranoid. I still go, but I would feel safer if there was more security. Not for show. Real, honest-to-goodness-minor-delay-in-my-day security.

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>> Real, honest-to-goodness-minor-delay-in-my-day security

Like what? How could the BPD have prevented yesterday's attack?

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..that it's unreasonable to think that an increase in security measures at high profile events and large gatherings could lessen the chances of an incident? I don't understand the line of thinking that says, "You can't stop all attacks, so why try?"

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And there were bomb-sniffing dogs by the finish line. What more do you want?

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And there were bomb-sniffing dogs by the finish line. What more do you want?

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What do I want? I want the bomb sniffing dogs there ALL DAY. I want there to not be trash cans at the finish line, near or under the stadium seating. Those just seem like a start to me. We need to change our thinking - all of us.

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Okay, so where's the perimeter of your trashcan-free zone? The entire 26.2 miles? Would a bomb that went off in Newton or Brookline or Wellesley be any less devastating?

And I have a newsflash: while a trashcan makes a bomb easier to hide, removing trashcans doesn't exactly guarantee your safety.

How about the police set up a seven-foot-tall bulletproof partition between the runners and spectators along the entire route?

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...that we shoudln't do anything to protect ourselves? I'm assuming you believe in some level of precaution. If so, then we're really talking about where to draw the line. If you feel the secrity measure were tight enough, fine. But some of us would have liked to have seen more security in place. No need to belittle another person's point of view.

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Then tell us, what security measures would have averted the bombings?

I only belittle someone's statements when they say "more security needed!" without giving any specifics.

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That they were hidden in trash cans? The FBI said the explosive devices were hidden in backpacks...it would probably be less conspicuous if those backpacks were just dropped rather than put in trash cans.

W/regards to 7ft tall bulletproof partitions (I know you were being sarcastic), I'd guess if those things were in place, the blast would have been much worse...at least the first one. If you watch the explosion, it looks like almost no injuries among the runners and the blast was dispersed somewhat. If there was a bulletproof partition I'd guess that the casualties on the sidewalk side of the partition would have been much, much worse.

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Nothing at Porter Square which I found surprising.

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There wasn't much more than usual in terms of police presence at Forest Hills. I saw 2 MBTA CS employees with day-glo orange vests on and 3 MBTA Police Officers hanging around inside the station. No bag checking, no one being searched.

Compared to Harvard, it's somewhat curious, considering that the Orange line goes through the city just like the other lines...

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I don't if this is place to ask, but I thought I heard a bomb was in a trash can? Which puzzled me because trash cans were removed nearly everywhere after 9/11 and then for big events?

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No trash can, he said. He added bomb-sniffing dogs went along Boylston Street twice before the race, the second time about an hour before the first runners were due, and they found nothing. But then he added that doesn't prove anything because of the open nature of the event, with people coming and going.

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That's really charming. Apparently the lives of us mere mortals don't matter? Who decided that the elite runners were more worthy of police protection than the rest of us?

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the BAA.

As well as the City of Boston, the Town of Hopkinton, and every other community along the marathon route, by originally agreeing to this nonsense of "one race for the elites, another race for Joe Q Public".

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Can't hold your vile snark for 48 hours the tragedy? Sickening. Were you there? I witnessed first hand police protecting EVERYONE.
Will the anon's and logged in regulars who daily spew hatred for Boston and the citizens of Boston PLEASE out of respect for the victims, their families and everyone who is impacted by this horrifying incident PLEASE just give us a few days to collect ourselves and begin to heal.

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PLEASE would you drop the hysterical DRAMA.

Police clearly were NOT protecting everyone, as they stopped the bomb patrols after the elite runners passed.

We're angry that the victims weren't protected. So PLEASE cut your hysterical crap.

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Get out of moms basement you fucking loser. No one said they packed up and went home.

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Davis was asked when they did bomb sweeps and he said they sent the dogs away after the elite marathoners finished.

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Let's say that one dog can cover 1000 feet, or a fifth of a mile. 26.2 miles, both sides of the street, so about 100 dogs. But each dog can only work a limited number of hours, say three. So more like 200 dogs. Because the spectators in Newton and Wellesley shouldn't be treated as second-class citizens to those at the finish line, right?

If only the police had deployed 200 bomb-sniffing dogs for the entirety of the race, this would not have happened, right?

Oh, and by the way, what happens if the dog does find the bomb, and suppose the perpetrator is watching from a distance what's going on, his remote detonator in hand? Do you really think the crush of humanity that is the midway point at the finish line could be safely evacuated?

Next time why not try thinking before writing how the cops packed up the dogs and left, leaving the non-elites vulnerable.

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If only T GM Scott could convince the feds that broken-down trains and signals were a terrorism threat because a blast in a stalled train would be more lethal than a moving one, we would have a world-class subway system within a year.

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National Guard in full force at Kendall this afternoon. Managed to cover all 4 entrances.

They checked everyone, so not the traditional "random" bag search. And just a cursory look into a bag, no real search at all. More of a "who looks nervous having to be searched" rather than actually looking for anything.

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You know how you pay about an extra $10 round-trip when you fly to cover the 9/11 security fee?

I wonder how all these riders who are grateful that their bags are being searched would feel if T fares doubled to pay for the searches.

After all, freedom isn't free, right?

If the Guard were out at all three BU Green Line stops a block apart, then I'd be impressed.

And what about the buses? After all the 2005 London bombings included a bomb on a bus. Was the Guard out on the sidewalks searching bus riders as they boarded?

What a sad abyss of paranoia into which this country has fallen.

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So still no searching at Broadway (just an extra T cop). Searching inbound only at Kendall. So no real rhyme or reason for today's searches. Any other T stop activity this morning?

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Listening to WBUR this AM, I heard something like this.
The searches weren't really intended to find anything, they were doing it just to make people feel safe.

If someone heard differently, please let me know as I was half-listening. If I have time, I'll go thru their website to see if I can find what I think I heard.

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