MemeMachineGo!

12-year-old schoolboy researches a term paper on a local bridge on-line and his school gets a visit from the FBI .

This fall, Dorsey Boyle, a middle-school teacher at Boys’ Latin, the venerable Lake Avenue private school, assigned his classes a series of research papers. The first, on some famous individual. Seventh-grader John McLean picked Abner Doubleday, the baseball legend. The second, on some famous structure. McLean picked the [Chesapeake] Bay Bridge.

“He went to the Internet to research as much as he could,” Bruce McLean, John’s dad, was saying last week. He laughed a little ruefully. “He wanted to know how it was built and financed, how much concrete and steel went into it. But he was having trouble getting information. So Mr. Boyle told him a couple of Web sites where he could ask questions.”

One was a Bay Bridge Web site. The other, the Maryland Transportation Authority’s.

[…] When the Boys’ Latin middle school headmaster, Rick Brocato, went to school the previous morning, he had an unexpected visitor: Jim Drotar of the FBI’s Joint Terrorist Task Force.

“We need verification,” Drotar said. “About someone who claims he’s a student here. It’s about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.”

(Via Post-Atomic )