Hoax

Boston: please! We've fucked this up once before.

Hoax:

deception: an act intended to trick people into believing something is real when it is not

A college kid wearing a "battery-powered rectangular device [that] had nine flashing lights" which she wanted to show off to her boyfriend when she picks him up from the airport is not in possession of a "hoax device" by virtue of the fact that she did not mean to trick people into believing the device was a bomb. If someone working the information booth at Logan has an overly active imagination and trigger-happy security forces respond, that's not a "reminder of the terrorism threat confronting the civil aviation system."

The major problem with this incident, however, is that now that WBZ [Drudge], BoingBoing and a slew of other sites have either published her e-mail or made it extremely easy to find that information, she'll be receiving tons of friendly, supportive and constructive commentary from people like this:

MIT is a prestiges school for very smart people. But book smart or science smart doesn’t make you infallible. In fact the ego that sometimes comes with smart brains can make it so the smart ones make really big misjudgements. More smarts the bigger the mistake. Such is the case with the idiot who felt pretending to be a suicide bomber in a airport (with children) was a good idea.