alt Hacker Newslots of things. Remember the Cartoon Network PR stunt where they placed DIY LED "signs" of characters from a show around Boston not long after the bombing there? What about the kid in Texas that was accused of bringing a bomb to show his teacher his DIY electronics Arduino project? What about the Mr Robot episode using a RPi?
Also, people putting these regulations in place are not normal people but people that think about how people might cause mayhem. None of the things I mentioned were real threats, but they very easily could have been is the point.
Boston's reaction to the mooninite signs, especially in comparison to how all the other cities reacted to them, was ridiculous, and rightfully ridiculed.
The alarm clock wasn't an arduino project, the student took an alarm clock apart and put the insides into case, specifically so that it would look like a bomb, then brought it to school, and rather than receive detention and that be the end of it, the news went wild with it as a discrimination case.
These were cases of overreaction in the moment.
Maybe that's the real lesson here; these rules for the inaugural block party are not to secure the block from electronic interference, but as part of a system to manage the reactions of panicky, irrational people.