That "they" in your sentence is misapplied. It's not like there's some Great Cambridge Hive Mind at work. Someone was an idiot, they embarrassed the state government, and got overruled by their boss. Then someone else wrote up a press release to make it sound as unembarrassing as possible.
That's "politicking" I guess. But it's the kind of politics we want, where governments do the Right Thing because people ask them to.
> It's not like there's some Great Cambridge Hive Mind at work.
This is a common motif in internet outrage, and it's not surprising to see it every day on HN which is startup focused.
Massachusetts' government is not 1 giant perfectly-in-sync machine. Nor is Apple. Nor is Microsoft. Nor is Google. They're enormous and have tons of inertia.
It is perfectly consistent for one part of such a large organization to make a routine action as part of policy, only to find that somewhere (often higher up) in the organization, priorities no longer reflect the policy in place. This means the action was an error for the organization.
It doesn't mean people are lying. It doesn't mean people are acting in bad faith at all. It means that tens of thousands of people acting toward the same goals don't manage to act with perfect information.
Stings are routine, like reflexes they don't require communicating with the head of the system. Anyway The Division has since learned that this device is already being evaluated for certification by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This is not something I would really expect law enforcement agencies to be up-to-date on.
I suppose it just seems odd that someone would think to themselves "lets plan out how to ticket someone and then issue a cease and desist" without doing due diligence to ensure that they even need to do any of it.
Have you ever worked for an organization as large as the State of Massachusetts? That might be a useful bit of experience upon which to base your opinion.
It sounds like someone higher up just put the smack down on someone who might be on the take. Boston is trying to be as progressive as they can despite the puritan roots they're stuck with.
Just sounds like a politicking to me.