The Dallas Morning News | (Video Interview with Ahmad Mohamed) | – –
“Ahmed Mohamed, 14, an Irving MacArthur High student who invents as a hobby, talks about being detained and interrogated after bringing a homemade clock to school Monday that was mistaken for a hoax bomb.”
The Dallas Morning News: “Irving MacArthur student arrested after bringing homemade clock to school”
Please bear in mind that many adults in Texas are the least educated of any state in our once great country. All of the cities around Dallas are in the top 100 of most conservative in America including Irving.
If Texas needs an expert they send for one from Oklahoma, Louisiana or Arkansas.
The reason high school football is so popular in Texas is that Texans root for the high school they dropped out of.
Maybe, CSI Irving was unaware of
clocks without little and big hands.
So, in Texas any non-white kid with a Raspberry Pi, Arduino or Intel Atom kit can be arbitrarily arrested for thinking while non-white?
Since the kid’s fingerprints and mug shot were taken, they are now in the national arrest data base and he will be permanently marked for the rest of his life because there IS NO WAY TO REMOVE fingerprint data from the database. Even suing the US government can not get it removed.
As a result of now having a “record” he may never be able to get security clearance to work on many projects, including for NASA. That is, if he is lucky, he might be able to work for a US company that does no US government work, but his best chances will be to work outside the USA where intelligence is rewarded not punished.
I hope his parents bankrupt the school district and the police force.
When will this paranoid delusional stupidity stop?
BTW – Anyone that doesn’t know what a Raspberry Pi, Arduino or Intel Atom kit is, has a MAJOR technology problem.
Fun Fact – a very accurate missile guidance system can be built using two or three Raspberry Pi modules (US$35 each), free software and a re-engineered GPS chip (that is, the USA height and speed restrictions have been removed) .
“I hope his parents bankrupt the school district and the police force.”
Please stop over reacting, the kid is obviously a tinkerer, but to put a timer in a suitcase and take it to school shows lack of Judgment. There is no reason to target educational institutions, even those wary of Muhammad and his suitcase clock.
@Nap very nicely demonstrates just how technologically ignorant and delusionally paranoid far too many Americans are.
The USA would have a much better future if more kids put together electronic devices and shared them at school. Those “Internet of Things” (the computer in your toaster) will not come from American as long as people like @Nap make being innovative and scientifically curious a crime.
There was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING DANGEROUS about the small device the young man made and to think otherwise shows extreme ignorance.
Right now I have several Embedded system prototypes in my office and in the trunk of my car is a huge box of circuit boards and other electronics stuff waiting to be dropped off at the recycling center – should I be arrested for that because some people are extremely stupid?
The boy did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG and anyone that thinks other wise needs an education.
On the other hand, taking one look at the kid’s homemade clock and concluding that it’s a bomb shows admirable judgement on the part of the local educators.
The first teacher told him not to show it to anybody, the second, annoyed by its beeping, thinks it a hoax and it escalates from there.
BTW – I have traveled all over the world with prototype equipment that often looks far scarier than what the kid made and I have NEVER had the travel security folks freak out and throw me in jail. Probably because I am a white engineering professional rather than a non-white student in racist Texas. If I can get prototype electronics in and out of China with no hassle, then a student should be able to take a electronic prototype to school without everyone freaking out.
Ben Franklin would say that the society that sacrifices ingenuity to security will soon have neither.
Here again you have some interesting factoids that could be highly relevant if they and a little encouragement make their way into the right ears.
Namely, if you have a couple links about how this kid’s options have been cut-short, that would create a harm that someone like ACLU could use to sue and push back at such craziness in the courts.
If there is to be progress along these and similar lines (I’m think of the Stephen Salaita case), it is more likely than not to come through litigation leading to a relevant and substantial judgement.
Whatever we might have to say about there being too many lawyers, they’re the people with the wherewithal to hope to do much nowadays.
Rolling things back through progressive politics? Dream on.
It has been well documented that once information is in the national criminal database that it can not be removed.
This is actually a MAJOR problem with all large databases because there are quite literally no humans involved with data base maintenance. Once the data is entered, the data remains because the systems have been designed to prevent data loss (which is what the systems think manual removal is). Even if a human tries to manually over-ride the system, the system will sense the “data loss” and reconstruct the data the next time the data base integrity is checked.
This is why no matter how much you sue the credit agencies and no matter how hard they try to scrub their data to make it “accurate” after losing a law suit, the bogus data keeps coming back. The robots really have already won.
Note also that even Security clearance checks have been heavily automated (can’t be spending money on human salaries when you can just buy more robots). As a result, by the time a hiring manager gets the report, it will just be an automated result that the young man turned aspiring engineer has no way of reading let alone disputing – he just will not get the job.
Already most large companies use Resumex or its equivalent so there is no human analysis of a job application. The computer quietly rejects 99% of all applicants and the hiring manager only sees the three to five the computer has deemed as “acceptable.” This non-human selection process is supposed to avoid racial, age and other discrimination but in reality it just ensures that the “acceptable” job applicants look and act exactly like the hiring manager.
So the likely situation for the young technology “criminal” (who will never go to trial) is that Resumex and/or the security clearance system will access the national criminal database (or its commercial equivalent – check out Intelius.com) and reject his application without any human intervention. The only way he might get hired is if the hiring manager happens to have actually met him and manually retrieves his application from the HR robot.
I know this all sounds terribly impersonal, but you must remember that the function of the HR department is NOT to find the magic jewel, but to make 99% of the hordes of job seekers quietly go away. It really is a culling process, not a search for greatness.
Looks like President Obama wants to meet Ahmed.
link to nytimes.com
Irving, Texas is just another far right-wing Texass $#!†#0Le in the Top 100 Conservative cities in America.
In February, Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne FALSELY claimed Muslims opened the nation’s first Sharia court in Irving.
And Spyguy is very correct, Irving Police have screwed this young man AND his family with the now permanent record of this “incident.”
There is a local groundswell of support for the Irving P.D. and the Zero Tolerance school district for their IGNORANT OVER-REACTION. The three day suspension issued to the young student will stand.
Of course if you’re a public school official in Texas you have to be looking over your shoulder constantly for a paranoid wingnut backlash over evolution, sex ed, slavery as a cause of the Civil War, heliocentrism, etc.. Giving Ahmed a hard time was probably a case of the school practicing CYA (Cover Yer Ass).
With all due respect – Not a day goes by when some bunch of @$$#@†$ in Texass fail to embarrass our country and everyone in it.
I must say, I have waited for decades for America, and its most bigoted backwaters, to pay a real economic price for its war on intellect. Yet it doesn’t happen. The South benefitted from the first wave of capitalist union-busters shipping jobs to a region that ironically was finally getting modern infrastructure in part due to LBJ’s bargain to get it to accept Civil Rights. Of course the jobs kept moving all the way to the Global South, but the myth that Reagan created Southern prosperity and that moving further Rightward will create more can only be disproven by catastrophe.
My solution hearkens to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, where academics prepare a redoubt to ride out the collapse of a galactic civilization, disguised as a university. Our cities must be made more self-reliant, able to withstand the worst that Republican state governments can do to them. As the Right eliminates all government in rural & suburban America, they will fall into barbarism. The cities must defend themselves while remaining connected to a technological world that is moving on without America. And they must prepare to employ an influx of refugees from Republican political oppression and economic collapse. I believe that the tools to do this exist: solar/wind energy, 3D printing/CNC technology, internet-based trade, and most importantly Self-Directed Education (see Koskata). Our children will have to carry the burden of learning how to keep a secular, technological society going while their rural counterparts are taught about demons and curses.
The rural parts of the USA are already dying due to several factors:
– Walmart and the other big box stores have eliminated most of the economic activity that kept small towns alive.
– Technology has eliminated most of the farm/ranch jobs (try hiring a competent real cowboy these days – it is real hard, as my late wife’s family discovered on their cattle ranch). As noted by CGP Grey, technology, global communications and robots have made most humans unemployable.
link to youtube.com
That is, very few American farm/ranch workers are needed to supply all the food needed by Americans.
– Containerization and global trade means marginal USA farm land can’t compete. As noted by Tom Scott, containers have completely changed global trade.
link to youtube.com
Just drive across the USA on the old US-xxx highways and you will see a huge number of abandoned farms, ranches and towns as the kids of past farmers leave and are not replaced.
The very few white people that remain in the rural areas are angry about the massive changes that are making their old way of life disappear. Rather than just adapt reality, they are striking out at their lack of future.
Note that over 70% of Americans live in multicultural cities. As a result, eventually the cities will completely overpower the rural areas.
To see this in action today, look at the political landscape of California. Most of the population in California is concentrated in the cities, therefor most of the land in California is nearly vacant. A few years ago, using the referendum process to side step the legislature, California minimized the ability to gerrymander the state. As a result, the low population parts of the state, with massive amounts of near vacant land, have almost zero ability to affect any political situation in the state. The cities ALWAYS WIN. This has caused large parts of the state to want to brekl apart the state so the rural parts could have some control back in their lives (this completely ignores the fact that mini Californias without the wealth of the cities would die economically).
the bottom line is the rural areas will eventually be forced to lose all power leading to a better USA. But in the mean time as their future becomes even more scary, the underpopulated, poor states will strike out in anger.
When you consider the sort of reality they have to adapt to the anger is thoroughly understandable.
It speaks volumes for the state of progressive/leftist activism in this country that they are unapproachable by the very same people who might conceivably help them out.