Actually, my problem is different and concerns itself with the complete mediocrity of what passes for critical thinking in the US which you demonstrate to a "t."
Your problem starts with your reverence for the expertise of the security forces, state troopers in this case, at the airport even though these guys clearly did not have much training on the subject, but because they have a badge and a gun you revere them. I don't want to deride them. They have a job to do and work hard and it sucks dealing with the public.
But let me clue you in on a little secret. There are genuine experts on the subject of bombs and explosives here in the US. But they have advanced degrees (I mean PhD leve l for the most part) in chemistry and physics and work at laboratories where they deal with high explosives, its formulation, its behaviour all day every day.
The result of this intellectual mediocrity is that you deride a girl who built something that doens't look like a bomb because it wasn't intended to be one, and think she must be dumb to think she could dupe the really smart guys who stand security by building something that was not a bomb and not meant to look like a bomb when they know that it was meant to look like a bomb even though they don't know it doesn't look like a bomb. That one might reach a different set of conclusions from the fact that smart people go to MIT and tend not to become state troopers seems to be rejected by you completely out of hand.
Let me give you a clue. There are some things you have to go to some place like MIT to understand because some things are really hard and you need to be really smart to understand. Despite your smarminess, some of those things are vital to our national security, much more important to our national security than the posturing around here about 9/11 being an excuse for shooting American girls on sight before questions are asked because you never know when the craze of becoming jihadists will hit teenage American girls, even though there is no evidence that it has.
And I don't believe that this goof-ball should go to prison because she didn't yet know how really dumb our security folks an their enablers like you can be.
Not everyone at MIT is a super-smart high-energy physicist. Go here and look at these cartoons drawn by MIT students and hosted on MIT servers. MIT has its share of "useful idiots".